HN Moderation Debate
Discussions revolve around Hacker News' moderation practices, including complaints of heavy censorship, shadow banning, and bias, defenses of its necessity, and frequent references to a New Yorker article on the topic.
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Why is HN so heavily moderated? Have you looked at what unmoderated communities devolve into?
There is a multi-thousand word article about HN in the New Yorker...so seems like covered territory: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Dang leads HN: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
This article might be a good starting point if you want to know more: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Unfortunately, HN is a highly censored and moderated platform that uses tools such as shadow banning posts, banning users, power downvoting posts, etc to control what content is displayed. Moderators then apply their arbitrary and subjective rules to defend their actions with no community transparency.For example, I posted a highly relevant article and was shadow banned because a moderator felt it was “too similar” to a previous post. This means it did not appear in the new section and was hi
I haven't seen anyone in this thread calling for 0 moderation on HN, that feels like a straw man
HN has always been more heavily moderated than reddit, perhaps you just didn't notice.
Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 might give some idea of what the moderators are thinking?
This comment got my account aggressively throttled for ~24h: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38728278#38730194There is definitely messed-up biased moderating on HN. That you don’t personally suffer it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
People will downvote and claim constructive comments are non-constructuve.People will even get the moderator to remove your comments and the moderator may make claims that your comments are "off-topic" if too many downmodders attach to your comment.The moderator will even alter text you post without notice. HN is not a serious discussion forum, but a marketing exercise for a VC fund.