I completely understand that it's an eternal issue. That does not automatically mean that it does not merit a yet another discussion. Downvote hell is real. Targeted censorship by (possibly coordinated) flagging is real (I presume so). I would love to read HN users' opinion on Bill Gates driving the world into a nightmarish dystopia, but can't do so, because some of the users think, that it's conspiracy bullshit (even if backed up by facts to some degree)? Might very well be so, but the fact, that we can't have such a discussion at all, has far-reaching implications, given the status of HN in the eye of the Internet crowd. It would be different, if all politics related subjects were outlawed here, but that is not the case. Rather, only some subjects are selectively and very opaquely (for the majority of users, who don't even get to see, that such a subject has been brought into their attention) dismissed as flamebait/propaganda/conspiracy/whatever. Why is that necessary?
On the question of political topics on HN, I've written about this at length in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... If you take a look at those and still have a question I haven't addressed there, I'd be interested to know what it is. Just be sure you've familiarized yourself with past explanations, because if the idea is something like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why that won't work.
I honestly visited the links and read some of your comments. I still fail to see why downvoting and flagging are necessary. Am I overlloking something?
Those links were in response to different issues you raised. The answer to this question is that downvoting and flagging are vital mechanisms for preventing HN from becoming completely overrun with much lower-quality threads. There is a ton of dreck on the internet, including here, and there needs to be countervailing mechanisms to address it. Upvotes alone can't cut it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
Basically, they are the immune system of the forum, and we need those white blood cells. There's a downside, to be sure—HN certainly gets bad downvotes and flags. But there are mechanisms to address those, like corrective upvotes (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and vouching (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and as a last resort you can always email hn@ycombinator.com. Meanwhile the downside of having no immune system at all would be much worse.
It is an endless tussle of how people want to be moderated. I definitely see the value of flagging given many if not all forums, commenting blocks and social media sites have that. It seems highly suspect to cast doubt on the value of it. Adding a low friction way to say "why" would give a way to add priority.
Second, downvotes are community driven and very useful where the participants use it to bring up quality content. Of course it can be used unfairly as well.
Could not agree more, HN is taking the "we know best, so we ask that you blindly listen to us" highbrow approach. I lost 20% of my karma because I took a non-popular stance within a single thread lol. My stance was backed up by references/facts/data, but none of that mattered.
In a comment above, I mentioned the possible solution (to the issue discussed in above thread) that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions. I feel like HN could squash 90% of these concerns with that simple feature.
The question is whether it would squash 90% of those concerns or blow them up 900x. I don't know the answer to that, but I fear the latter. Everything we do as moderators is defensible—it's our core principle not to do things that we can't defend to the community, with confidence that the majority would support it. But that doesn't mean that everything we do explains itself, and therefore that a moderation log would be a good thing. On the contrary: it's all prone to misinterpretation, accusations of sinister manipulation, secret communist or nazi sympathies—I mean, you name it, we get accused of it. The bottom of that barrel is large, and at any moment there are hundreds if not thousands of readers raring to go there. Posting explanations as I've been doing in this thread is by far the highest-energy-expending thing that we have to do. We don't have the capacity to do significantly more—that's a recipe for burnout.
Moreover, the litigious sort of users who would post most of the meta complaints are also the least likely to ever be satisfied by the explanations. Why would it be a good idea to give them more material to work with and a single place to go get it? If, on the other hand, the goal is to keep the majority of the community satisfied—well, the majority of the community is already satisfied: the clear majority, and clearly so. If that weren't the case, believe me, we'd know it, and we'd already have adjusted. That's how we keep the community satisfied in the first place.
This doesn't mean we don't want to be transparent. But we take an ad hoc approach to that by answering questions as they come up. There's no specific question you can't get an answer to.
I understand being a moderator isn't easy. Definitely agree this conversation is mentally draining...I'm doing it because I care about what the underlying topic represents.
> Why would it be a good idea to give them more material to work with and a single place to go get it?
It's one thing to not make it easier to acquire, it's another thing entirely when it isn't possible to acquire.
> There's no specific question you can't get an answer to.
Until HN decides they don't want to answer it. Or until they play the "lost in my inbox" game, like used in this thread multiple times.
It is possible to acquire in any specific case simply by asking.
> Until HN decides they don't want to answer it.
Sure, there's always a risk that the people operating the site will ruin it.
> Or until they play the "lost in my inbox" game, like used in this thread multiple times.
A swipe like that deserves no response, but in case anybody actually thinks we might do that: I have 44 emails waiting for replies right now (edit: 45, while writing this. edit: 47). I spend hours every day answering HN emails, but haven't had a chance to do much today because I've been busy providing explanations to the commenters in this thread, as well as trying to do the normal workflow of HN moderation, which itself has been set behind by several hours. If I'm lucky, I'll spend my evening working through those emails. It's a point of conscience to try to give everyone who writes to us a meaningful reply, it's not a game, and I don't lie to the community—that would be not only wrong but stupid.
