[SkyMarshal]

The current moderation system isn't scaling. This post is a good example to illustrate the problem.

At first glance it appears to be a flamebait title, and hence a mod who sees it may feel it's a no-brainer - correct it and move on.

However, there's a nuance to it - that is exactly how Linus Torvalds expresses himself, and the original title ("Linus to Nvidia: Fuck You!", or something close to that) captured his sentiment accurately, so maybe it's not flamebait after all.

Or maybe it is flamebait even despite that, since Linus's SOP is to sometimes start flamewars to make a point, break through the red tape, or otherwise just make a command decision and move on.

Clearly plenty of room for moderation error, a nd that's just one submission. What's a mod to do?

So on the one hand, there has been a spate of godawfully-titled submissions in recent months:

1. "X things you should ... whatever" type titles (clearly banned in the HN posting guidelines)

2. Too short and uninformative (like a word or three).

3. Sensationalism, flamebait, miscategorized comparison results, etc.

4. more I'm sure...

But on the other hand, the mod system has problems as well:

1. Nobody even knows what the mod system is

2. Nobody knows who the mods are.

3. There's no way to give feedback on moderations, for the ones that were incorrectly modded.

4. Too many false positives (posts that shouldn't be modded but are, resulting comments like saurik's above, and entire threads complaining this problem).

5. Too many false negatives that slip through anyway.

And of course, not part of the mod system, but too many submitters just don't know how to descriptively, accurately, concretely title submissions anyway, increasing the volume a seemingly too-small group of mods has to deal with.

HN isn't the first social media site to have problems like this, but most others have a full-time dev team working on solving them, and they evolve certain solutions like Slashdot's meta-moderation or Reddit's user-run/modded subreddits.

So I don't think the mod system in its current form can scale with those problems, but on a more meta level I'm not sure that PG can scale as the developer of the mod system, given that YC takes 110% of his time.

Just trying to identify the problem before attempting to solve it, any thoughts?

[functional-tree]

It's been like this for a long time. It's by far the least transparent moderation in a community I've ever seen. For a long time I thought of HN as a generally smart, reasonable community (less so these days with the masses here) but the completely opaque moderation has always seemed extraordinarily, unnecessarily restrictive and elitist. It's unlikely to change at this point. The minority who care don't matter enough.

Personally I'd love to see another smaller, more refocused community spin off where better, more open and reasoned tech/startup discussions can take place. Keep it invite-only perhaps.

[unimpressive]

> Keep it invite-only perhaps.

Well I probably count as the masses. But one model might be a sort of web of trust. You start off with a few people who are ultimately trusted. And then as your web grows you can track who let who into the site. People who consistently let in poor members get their invite privileges revoked or are kicked. Have a reputation threshold before you can invite people.

[batista]

For one, they don't even seem bothered enough to correct the "cache expired" continuation crap on the site, much less to build a new moderation system.

Second, if "poor members" get invited in large numbers, then the system you propose will fail, because they get to dictate what is good or not (by upvoting it), which will in term make them appear good (because they like/submit the 'good stuff').

[vacri]

It's certainly the only web community I've been a part of where the moderation system is constantly being complained about over the long term.

[DanBC]

Wait, what? Really?

Moderation has been a feature of complaint across every web forum (and many non-web forums) I've ever been a part of.

See, for example, the comments here (and even there) about StackExchange; 4chan; suicidegirls (NSFW) "spring cleaning"; the HUGE amount of meta / drama on Wikipedia (ANI alone is gigabytes of guff stretching over years about moderating that community. The holy books of millennia old religions are smaller than ANI. International trade argrements are smaller than ANI.)

But this meta bike-shedding has also been a feature of older systems. It's frequently created flame wars on Usenet - leading to various trolling groups sporging Usenet feeds. It's a feature of mailing lists.

I don't know what the average[1] age of HN is, but here's a result from a Usenet search for results before 1990 - before a lot of HN would have been born.

(https://groups.google.com/groups/search?safe=off&q=moder...)

(Also, Google, please give me a shorter URL option to cut n paste. Don't make me have to learn what your URLs are doing; don't expect me to use a nasty URL shortener (which are blocked on many boards)).

Here's a mildly interesting message discussing some of the problems of moderating Usenet:

(https://groups.google.com/group/mod.comp-soc/msg/ee189feb225...)

[vacri]

I'm not part of the 4chan nor suicidegirls communities, and the meta in wikipedia is not forum-style moderation. The places I've been that have moderation issues don't have people wondering why they've been hit. I'm not saying that other forums don't have issues, but that there is a constant sussurus about the problems of moderation here that I don't have in other places. No insight and no accountability = bad moderation practices.

Case in point: my parent comment is currently downmodded. Thanks to that downmodder for marking against my personal experience. But I have no way to find out why I've been affected, only that some random person somewhere in the world doesn't like what I said for some unknown reason, and my words are literally diminished in the eyes of others because I have (at least) one single dissenter.

Since I started here, I've noticed that people on HN have been complaining about the moderation more consistently than on any other web community I've been involved with, with the exception of Wikipedia (as you point out, but it's not the same flavour of moderation I mean)

[saurik]

I had down voted you (and thereby might be the person whom you are referring to who did so) as you are making an anecdotal statement that is sufficiently far-fetched as to be ludicrous. Now, in your follow-up, you seem to be lumping me (the person who downmodded you) into the category of "moderators", which is technically fine but then useless: I am another member of this site, just like you; the mechanisms here are then no different than they are on almost any other system that ha peer moderation. If you are using Slashdot, reddit, Digg, DISQUS... virtually any modern forum solution, there is a downvote feature, and it works virtually the same way. Yet, now your new comment (which I also "downmodded") seems to be ignorant of this mechanisms on all of these sites, disregards the list of sites procided by DanBC, and continues to not list any other sites thaw here moderation was not a common topic; you seriously just look like you've never used any other websites at this point.

[vacri]

No different from other peer moderation? And you downmod me? Using your first example, Slashdot, there is exactly the thing I am talking about: a reason for the mod. You seem to be more ignorant of the topic than you accuse me of being.

Similarly, you say I disregard a list of sites when I mention three of the four in my response about my personal experience being part of web communities (and seriously, 'as good as 4chan' is hardly an argument for content quality, particularly on a site where the users pride themselves on intellect and quality).

[DanBC]

Okay, I make a clear distinction between community up / down voting, and owner moderation. I should have been clearer.

Don't worry about the down votes. They are frustrating, but anyone on HN knows that you occasionally get a random down vote. By themselves they're usually meaningless. Yes, people should really either engage in the debate and not down vote, or not engage, and down vote, and explain if needed. (Personally, reasons for down voting should be restricted to "this comment does not belong here; it adds nothing to the discussion".)

I think there's general agreement about voting on HN - up vote things that are well written, even if you disagree. Don't down vote just because you disagree. Down vote things that add nothing to the discussion. Flag spam or other blatantly harmful stuff.

But all of that is separate from the issue of trusted people within HN locking threads, deleting threads, deleting posts, changing titles, banning users, etc.

> No insight and no accountability = bad moderation practices.

I honestly truly disagree with this. Strongly.

It's really simple to say "Here are a list of rules. Don't break them or we mod your posts". But when Bob starts skirting the rules there can be huge flamewars. Bob says he clearly wasn't breaking any rules, mods say he was, other people jump in saying that he wasn't and the mod is dumb and has made a bunch of similar stupid decisions, then other people jump in and say that maybe Bob was a bit close but he does so much good that we can make an exception for him, then other people leap in and say it's a stupid rule anyway. Meanwhile, this thread is getting so much attention that the real stuff of the forum is being ignored. New users are not interested in that stuff. The thread creates an unpleasant atmosphere which is noticed by other people. Now whenever Bob replies to someone who's a mod there's suspicion that Bob is just flame-baiting.

Anyway, I'm doing what I hate, so I apologies to everyone on HN. I'm setting my noprocrast settings for 48 hours. This is my lost post on this thread!

[vacri]

Yeah, my mistake. The word 'moderation' to me means more the forum-style stuff (given also the terms up/downmod), what moderation in the OP meant was what I consider 'editing', probably due to growing up with a publisher for a mother.

[Devilboy]

Not sure if serious...

[willvarfar]

An approach I think would work is self-organising rather than moderated: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...

[SkyMarshal]

> It's unlikely to change at this point.

I wonder about that. Is it b/c PG is the only the HN source committer, but without enough time to evolve the site fast enough to keep up?

Or is it something else?

[DanBC]

> But on the other hand, the mod system has problems as well:

> 1. Nobody even knows what the mod system is

That is not a problem. This is excellent feature of a moderation system. Meta is death - really. I'm never going to make another meta post after this one. (Unless it's t help a new user.)

> 2. Nobody knows who the mods are.

Again, that's not a problem. It avoids turning moderating into character battles. A mod who makes a mistake anonymously has no investment of face-saving; they can easily undo the error.

> 3. There's no way to give feedback on moderations, for the ones that were incorrectly modded.

There is an email address clearly listed in the guidelines.

I really don't think the problems are as big as people are making out. Sure, some things are frustrating. Taking this video and post as an example: Don't link to the small part of the video where Linus tells nvidia to go fuck themselves, link to the entire video (and to the start of that video) and then give it a better title. Trying to attach blame to mods because someone made a weird sub-optimal choice when submitting a link is un-good.

[kristiandupont]

It's an hour-long video. The fuck you-bit is a story in itself, and a different one than the entire talk. I think it's perfectly reasonable to submit that and because of the original title, I clicked the link. With the current title, I wouldn't have.

[sciurus]

"Meta is death - really."

Metafilter solves this with http://metatalk.metafilter.com. Perhaps HN needs a dedicated place for meta discussion as well.

[Maxious]

"We'll handle technology over `here, we'll do social issues there. We'll have separate mailing lists with separate discussion groups, or we'll have one track here and one track there. This doesn't work. It's never been stated more clearly than in the pair of documents called 'LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction.' I can do no better than to point you to those documents."

www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

[sciurus]

Swap "doesn't work" for "usually doesn't work" and I'll agree. The level of moderation is key.

[andyjohnson0]

Two suggestions:

1. If a post is renamed then the original title(s) should be available to view somehow. Maybe via a moderation summary link.

2. The downvoting mechanism should require the downvoter to post their reasons.