[vanviegen]

On HN everybody sees the same ordering. Therefore you get to read opinions that are not specifically selected to make you feel just the perfect amount of outrage/self-righteousness.

Some of that you may experience as 'dubious political stuff' and 'patently incorrect takes'.

Edit, just to be clear: I'm not saying HN should be unmoderated.

[MichaelZuo]

Yeah this is a critical difference, most of the issues are sidestepped because everyone knows nobody can force a custom frontpage tailored for a specific reader.

So there’s no reason to try a lot of the tricks and schemes that scoundrels might have elsewhere, even if those same scoundrels also have HN accounts.

[intended]

The front page is managed extensively on HN, so is this an argument for stronger moderation?

[everdrive]

I think there's an important distinction between strict moderation and curation, but in general yes I'd agree.

[actualwitch]

Only when certain people don't decide to band together and hide posts from everyone's feed by abusing "flag" function. Coincidentally those posts often fit neatly in the categories you outlined.

[ryandrake]

Abuse of the flagging system is probably one of the worst problems currently facing HN. It looks like mods might be trying to do something about it, as I've occasionally seen improperly-flagged posts get resuscitated, but it appears to take manual action by moderators, and by the time they get to it, the damage is done: The article was censored off the front page.

[actualwitch]

Even with addition of tomhow, they are clearly stretched too thin to make any meaningful impact. Their official answer to this issue by the way is to point out that you can message them on email to elicit this manual action, which if you ask me is a fucking joke and clearly shows the mammoth age stack in which this site is written and lack of resources allocated to its support is having a massive impact on their ability to keep up with massive traffic. But then again, this site only exists to funnel attention to yc's startups, and it is something that you need to keep in mind while trying to answer any questions about its current state.

[shevy-java]

It seems really so small compared to reddit.

I think I never downvoted anyone on hackernews yet - it just does not seem important.

On reddit on the other hand, I just had to downvote wrong opinions. This works to some extent, until moderators interfere and ban you. That part made me stop use reddit actually, in particular since someone made a complaint and I got banned for some days. I objected and the moderators of course did not respond. I can not allow random moderators to just chime in arbitrarily and flag "this comment you made is a threat", when it clearly was not. But you can not really argue with reddit moderators.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

You can’t get banned just for downvoting. Nobody can see someone else’s voting history. You buried the lead, you were banned for your comments not for your voting activity.

[afavour]

I don’t know why this is being downvoted, I’ve witnessed it many times myself.

It’s true that HN has a good level of discussion but one of the methods used to get that is to remove conversation on controversial topics. So I’m skeptical this is a model that could fit all of society’s needs, to say the least.

[vanviegen]

The comment consists of criticism on flagging behavior. Though it might have a point, it seems only vaguely related to its parent comment about non-personalized ordering.

[actualwitch]

In downvoting it, they are proving me right. For posterity, there is a mastodon account [0] collecting flagged posts in an easily digestible form, it really does paint a certain picture if you ask me.

[0] https://mastodon.social/@hn_flagged

[afavour]

The DOGE topics are a perfect example. HN users are uniquely placed to provide useful perspectives on DOGE but it gets flagged very regularly.