[rhaksw]

> Robin89, can you please fix the text? know that was just a mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.

How can he/we verify it's wrong? The down-weighting you describe is not visible to users. Even OP won't know.

You can say that down-weighting happens, but we're asking to see where down-weighting happens.

[bnralt]

Additionally, just because it’s possible that this could happen doesn’t really give us an idea of how likely it is. Is it one of those theoretically possible, but it never actually happens events? there’s a huge difference between it impacting half of the stories that fall off that quickly, and it impacting 1 in 10,000 stories that fall off that quickly.

[rhaksw]

Communities would get a good sense for the frequency if forums would simply disclose content moderation to the submitting users. Offending users would learn what's not allowed and share that with the community.

But today's forums frequently do not disclose moderation to submitting users, and that is why we are now seeing major court cases over 230, government-led censorship, etc.

[dang]

I don't know anything about other forums, but for the reasons why on HN we don't publish a full moderation log, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 as well as the past explanations linked from there.

You can, however, always get a question answered. That's basically our implicit contract with the community.

[rhaksw]

Full moderation logs are different than showing submitters how their posts have been moderated.

On HN, my understanding is that you (moderators) can penalize stories without the submitter's knowledge. But if HN instead disclosed that penalty to the story's submitter, that would help this community communicate better.

As for how it works elsewhere, if a YouTube channel removes your comment, you won't know [1]. Same thing on Reddit, Facebook, and X. So while HN is relatively small, the practice of withholding content moderation decisions from submitters/commenters is widespread.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e6BIkKBZpg

[dang]

I'm sorry, but I think that would have the effect of making what is already a difficult job impossible. Even if most submitters saw that information and went "oh! well I guess that's that then," the number who would instantly fire off emails of protest would overwhelm our capacity to answer them.

Every submitter thinks their story deserves to make HN's front page, if not #1. Actually, that's not entirely true—the cleverest and most tasteful submitters are often the most humble. We have to go out of our way to try to find what they post because they're the last people who would ever send an email demanding attention.

But I can tell you from experience (81,556 emails and counting) that there are far more people who think their blog post ought to be #1 on HN than I could ever answer, and I can tell you what happens if one tries: many come back with a list of objections that is 3x longer than the entire conversation so far. The problem grows the more you feed it.

I want people to be able to get answers to their questions. No one would love it more than me if we could find some automated way of reducing that load while still answering people's questions. But so far every suggestion of how to do this sets off so many alarms in my body that I wonder if I'll sleep that night.

I'm afraid that might come across dismissive and I apologize if it does. It's just that the status quo already involves so much pressure that if I try to explain, I come across as a deranged beach ball that's been pinned deep underwater for 10 years.

[rhaksw]

Your comment isn't dismissive, but I do think users have a right to know where they've been moderated.

[kortilla]

Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story.

I’ve seen it happen when I’ve flagged stories so either there is a vast conspiracy of moderators that receive pages when I flag things so they can downrank… or maybe dang isn’t lying about something that should be super obvious as a community self policing mechanism.

[dang]

I appreciate the accuracy in your comment but do please edit out swipes like "Wtf are you talking about"—those spread bad feeling, and when we're talking about the community itself it's even more important not to do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[rhaksw]

> Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story.

It's discussed in the link, and elsewhere [1]. Some mod actions on HN are transparent, some are not. You should not assume that, just because you see marks of some form of moderation, that you can see them all.

Undisclosed content moderation is like directly modifying your production database. It's faster, but always more troublesome. Nobody else knows what changed or why, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312

[tptacek]

If you want a site with a public mod log, there's Lobsters. If you want a site with a mod log that's cryptographically auditable by users, I'm sure blockchainia has something on offer. You're not going to get either of those things here, for reasons the community has dug into in the past and you can surface with the search bar.

[rhaksw]

I support transparent-to-the-author content moderation, and I suspect that is in the future for today's major platforms, whether they want it or not.

[tptacek]

Sure, that could happen. And if it does, it will happen by way of people leaving sites like this one for sites moderated differently. I think we're all OK with letting the market decide.

[rhaksw]

I would prefer if the market decides, but there are a few non-trivial court cases coming up that may influence what happens.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...

[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...

[3] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...