[JoshTriplett]

Fair enough, I can see from the thread how that interpretation could arise. I would definitely interpret "moderation policy" to be policy implemented by moderators. In this case, I was responding to the statement that "flagging is not moderation", and I thought it was useful to distinguish that flagging semantically is a kind of moderation (done by users rather than by moderators).

[layer8]

For me the difference is that moderation by moderators is (usually) guided by some content policy, and one can disagree about the biases of the specific content policy, or disagree about applying a content policy based on topics and themes at all (as opposed to based on mere style and civility). With user actions, there is no predefined content policy, it’s just how the set of users who happen to read the specific thread or comment happen to feel.

Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading. But I also think that active moderation and crowd-sourced ranking mechanics are two different things.

[JoshTriplett]

> Personally, I’d prefer no up-/downvoting and flagging at all (or flagging only to alert moderators), and purely chronological threading.

I think that's a very different kind of forum, and it needs different tools to be usable, and it more quickly fails into unusability.

[layer8]

It’s how old-style forums work, and I’m still on a couple of them. It functions quite well with the right moderation.

[JoshTriplett]

It can work, but I think it's harder to scale to something the size of HN without losing some of the important properties HN has.

For example, I think it's useful that on balance the top few comments and their discussion are likely to be interesting, and the last few comments are unlikely to be interesting.