[DiscourseFan]

The other week I saw a submission titled “The Myth of Meritocracy,” linked to a Wikipedia article of the same name, start doing phenomenally well very quickly, before getting flagged and removed. I reposted it and it didn’t get as many votes, but it stayed up.

Something a bit nefarious might be going on on the moderation side. If there is an effort to control our discussions, I hope the community will come together to put an end to it.

[dredmorbius]

Front-page space is limited and a precious resource. There are 10,950 slots in a regular year, 10,980 in a leap year, and ~400k submissions, such that if you're batting average about 2.7% of your submissions stand a chance of making the front page.[1]

Resubmissions are permitted for that reason, and going through the New submissions and flagging and voting appropriately does help keep front-page quality higher.

________________________________

Notes:

1. See "A Year on Hacker New" by Emilien Sanchez of Whaly.io (2022) <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>.

[23B1]

My general sense of HN is that it is pretty well moderated even if a bit opaquely. It's a niche audience who is gonna have their preferences that will bleed through, but also it's not designed to enable provocative or controversial discussions just because those tend to hit runaway condition pretty quickly. I myself have been hit a few times with the hammer but on the whole its been a pretty consistently good community even if a little monoculture-y.

[DiscourseFan]

That’s odd, considering the qoute in Dang’s profile:

“ Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression.”

You’d think the moderation would be fine with controversy.

[dang]

The question is how to deal with conflicts. Internet threads where people vent at each other is the opposite of what Milner means by "bearing the tensions".

[DiscourseFan]

Fair enough. The whole thing seemed too suspiciously Hegelian for my tastes.

Do you get a notification everytime your handle is mentioned or did you just happen upon the thread?

[dang]

Just happened.

(Btw if the post you mentioned upthread was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42605251, it got flagged by users. I don't think any moderators saw it. Same for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42604924.)