Ask YC (dang and kogir): How about some transparency?

Does HN have any set community guidelines written out?

rapid feedback is important for the user just like it is for the developer

Is it possible that it sometimes doesn't have anything to do with moderation at all?

Every submission has a big 'flag' button on it. I don't know exactly what that does when clicked, but I assume it tends to make submissions drop further into obscurity.

Some topics that get a lot of exposure (the NSA and bitcoin come to mind) are likely to get heavily flagged when they appear, which probably doesn't look much different to moderation.

I don't think the problem lies in transparency. The problem is scaling the community. How to keep the signal high? Naturally, people are trying to organise things by adding rules when you simply cannot relay on "level of trust". Sadly, there is a hidden cost with every regulation. For example, I stopped actively participating in StackOverflow. I pine the days when SO was a lot smaller community with high signal to noise ratio, but, more importantly, it had that human feel.

These days, it's very different. Topic are being parsed and filtered by robotic moderator that cannot possibly let something even remotely option-based slip through. Comment that are relevant, but with subtle jokes are deleted. I remember when Joel and Jeff were actively answering questions to have the critical mass. Now that answers and questions would be closed or moderated. e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-...

I think a bigger issue is that the front page is too important. It's always going to be the page with the most views, but compared to most other aggregation sites, Hacker News has very little memory and makes access to the archives difficult.

This is part of what shapes its community, of course. There's probably at least some reasoning behind why it works that way, but it seems to me that the lack of memory distorts the importance of the front page.

I don't want more transparency. It just gives people something concrete to argue over, and you can't please the haters, so don't waste your time trying.

Posts drop off the front page because of a variety of reasons, from flagging by users to being hit with the penalty for having a poor upvote / comment ratio.

It's not the staff's fault that people jump to assume An Act Of Malicious Moderation if a story drops.

Yup, I agree 100%. The lack of transparency is incredibly frustrating, for all of the reasons mentioned above.

I wish I had more to say than "+1," but I wanted to give more than just an upvote. "you tend to assume the worst" really resonates with me.

This comment went from +3 to (currently) -1. Interesting.

Right! Let me try to set you at ease, at least a little. Yes, we will make an effort to make moderation more transparent.

In fact, we already have. It was my decision that PG should out me as moderator, and that was mainly so I'll be able to answer users' questions.

I think your points are mostly correct and entirely understandable. Qua user, I feel pretty similarly, so I don't anticipate much trouble seeing eye to eye about this in the long run. I'm optimistic that we can eventually please both the bulk and the core of the community—though that will still be far from everybody.

Also, there's no one on the team arguing for secrecy. The question is not whether to be more transparent, but how.

A few points from the moderation side.

You should know that what appears to be HN's "secrecy" has in reality mostly been extremely limited bandwidth. For most of HN's existence, PG ran it at the same time as he was building YC plus having two kids. That made for an awful lot of dropped packets. One might argue that he should have handed HN off sooner, and one would in my opinion be completely wrong about that. So without HN's "secrecy" there would have been no HN.

Second, it's been true for a long time that you can get answers by emailing info@yc. (We're going to change that to hn@yc, but that's not up yet; I'll add it to my profile when it is.) I'll be taking over the HN-related emails from Tara, who has been valiant but will soon be relieved.

I intend to be a lot more responsive in the threads, partly because we know that community concerns around transparency need addressing, so we'll make a priority of it, but also for two non-obvious reasons: (1) I've written software for navigating and moderating HN very quickly, and (2) I type faster than PG.

Beyond that, there are a lot of questions about how to get this right. Many of the factors aren't obvious. I have more to say about this, but this comment is long enough, plus I'm tired and my brain hurts, and we'll have lots of opportunities to discuss it further.

> Secondly, I (and I believe a number of others), whilst appreciating all the efforts that you guys are making to keep HN a great place to be, frequently feel baffled, hurt or just insulted by the way that moderation is applied.

Could you give some concrete examples? Articles can get dropped off the front page when many people click the flag link (i.e. it's not always driven by the moderators). Also, I believe submissions with a high comments to up vote ratio are weighted down (the rationale being that it usually signals a controversial topic prone to flame wars). There have been cases of questionable hell banning, but this can usually be resolved by contacting the mods privately AFAIK.

Might be worth a try to publish all the stuff affecting ranking, like site/domain-specific penalties, (hell)bans etc.

  Wow. This was some seriously good research and nailed some of the penalty
  numbers exactly. I mean, he did basically have the ranking formula and only
  had to solve for the variables, but it's still much better than anything 
  else I've seen.

I always loved the SomethingAwful "Leper Colony" page. It was a list of who was put on probation, banned, or permabanned, and a link to what they did to do this. It had a quick explanation of why it happened.

It was a great way, as a lurker, to get an understanding of the rules via watching others fail to follow them.

This is a different beast here, as no one is paying to be a member, but I wonder if there isn't something to learn from how that page operated.

It might be interesting to expose the algorithm more (not saying the entire thing, but if auto penalties are applied which ones).

I'd like to see a moderation log like on Lobste.rs [1]. They list all the actions their moderators take and why. This includes renaming posts, deleting posts, and banning users.

Their description of the moderation log: "All moderator actions on this site are visible to everyone and the identities of those moderators are made public. While the individual actions of a moderator may cause debate, there should be no question about who the moderator was or whether they had an ulterior motive for those actions."

[1] https://lobste.rs/moderations

One of the best ways to increase transparency would be to make the source for HN available. There's already an official GitHub repo for issues -- why not have the source there too?

On this I defer to Daniel, and will help implement whatever he thinks is best.