Yet at the same time I think dang has the ability to move any post up or down/re-prioritizing or re-ranking based on his intellect, instead of a natural, organic ranking. It becomes a forced therapy session by dang. We also cannot know if this happens, since those moves would be invisible to everyone else on the site (except to other admins/moderators). I do not think it’s far fetched to think he has this power, seeing as karma scores are conveniently hidden for all posts (except for the author of each individual post).
I’m a little disturbed that dang seems to ‘steer’ conversations based on his own interests. There’s a bunch of smart people here and I don’t understand why he goes past his role as administrator to interject into certain threads. It’s ‘bad hosting’ in my eyes.
With my questions I’m trying to understand what the rules of the game are, to see whether I like them or not and whether I want to keep playing (engaging on HN).
We're not in every thread moving things up and down, but HN is a curated site, and that involves judgment and interpretation. For example, if there's an offtopic comment, especially a generic one [1] sitting at the top of a thread collecting upvotes as they tend to do, it's a standard moderation move to downweight it.
The idea of HN is intellectual curiosity. Sadly, upvotes alone don't optimize for that; the voting system optimizes for indignation and repetition. Countervailing mechanisms, such as software and moderation, are needed. We use software to do what we know how to automate and humans to do what we don't know how to automate—though I wish we did, because most of the human intervention at this level is tedious.
