Posted by dang 4/2/2025
Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator
Tom Howard is going public as HN moderator today. He has been doing HN moderation work for years and knows the site and its practices inside-out, so the only new thing you'll see is mod comments from Tom showing up in the threads the way mine do. I'm not going anywhere, so you'll have two of us to put up with going forward :)
I've known Tom since he was sctb's and my batchmate back in YC W09. Many of you know him as the kind and thoughtful community member tomhoward (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhoward). He's still kind and thoughtful, but he's going to post as tomhow from now on (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomhow), the same way I switched to dang when I went through this rite of passage years ago.
Below is a bit from Tom about himself. Please join me in welcoming him to this new status which he was crazy enough to say yes to!
---
YC and HN have been a huge part of my life for nearly two decades. I read pg's essay How to Start a Startup in 2005 after my friend (and later, co-founder) Fenn found it on Slashdot, and it opened our eyes as to how to go about building products and companies. I first signed up in late 2007, and since then HN has been the place I come to find interesting news and discussions.
Hacker News gave me a window into the big wide world of technology and startups, that had previously seemed so remote and opaque from where I lived (and still live) in Australia. We were lucky enough to be accepted into the W09 batch of YC, and since then HN has been a place where we could share announcements about the startup, but also where I could share the challenges and struggles I experienced in the startup journey and other aspects of life, particularly to do with health and wellbeing.
From the discussions that have happened about these topics I've ended up making enduring friendships with people all over the world, and have been able to learn many things that have improved my life in profound ways. I love HN's ethos - of being a place people come to engage their curiosity. That's what it's always been for me and what I hope I can help it to be for everyone!
--Tom
Thanks.
Me thinks the OP is really trying to dive this point home for some reason ...
/s
Could you or Dang please explain, why this post with 118 points and 121 comments in 3 hours, about news of the day highly relevant to anybody in Tech, only shows up on page 18?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253
Just trying to understand the algo...
Those of us who complain about this highly targeted flagging just want to avoid censorship. I can't see how we need to reflect on this.
That's what's happening here.
EcommerceFlow mentioned opinions that are "very normal nationally." I don't want to assume the worst so I'm trying not to read in to that.
I see some unflagged center-right political opinions sometimes. It is stuff that a mainstream democrat would probably disagree with but find, like, not odious or offensive. Therefore I think they are just getting flagged because any political opinions here have a chance of getting flagged. This is how the website is supposed to work, if we as a community decided that mainstream political opinions were ok, the site would become a place to argue about what exactly is considered mainstream.
However, it would be disconcerting if stating biological facts led to censorship on a forum that focusses on science and technology.
The definition of "hate" has been stretched a lot over the last few years, and if that restricts discussion of facts and ideas, then it is harmful.
Even without considering trans people, it's factually untrue that "XX = woman, XY = man, and those are the only possibilities." And yet, people who stopped at high school biology will argue until they're blue in the teeth that anyone with a more nuanced take is anti-science.
There's a great deal of misunderstanding around this topic. Having open-minded, interesting and reflective discussion about topics like this should however lead to greater understanding. But that is not possible if it gets flagged and censored.
But until then, we should be free to state facts.
> The old adage “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it” was once a touchstone of liberal society. Having been involved for most of my adult life in areas of social debate, it was a phrase I once commonly heard. Not any more.
> Instead, public discourse is marked by efforts to find offence, destroy the character of opponents or ensure reason is smothered by emotional manipulation.
> -- John Deighan https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/banning-those-w...
For example, if you irrelevantly post "My software is on sale now for 10% off and here is the link!" on every story, everything in it is factual, but it's spam regardless.
I'm sure your specific facts that you want to post are in service of a particular social or political viewpoint you are trying to push, one that the people flagging find either off-topic or odious. And, given that you refuse to elaborate on what specific facts you think are banned, reveals that you think you only can convince people by being vague about what specifically you mean.
Not because I'm insincere about my views, or because I believe they are harmful - but because the activists pushing the ideological views I oppose have been demonstrably violent and destructive.
I don't think there is a guideline that bans posts from "pushing an agenda" (which would be very subjective)
"Agendas" are often ideological battlegrounds. I flag comments, even those I agree with, that I recognize from experience are going to lead to the same tired, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Lately, I've also been maintaining a personal uBlock Origin filter list to hide certain prolific rule breakers. I would love if HN had an equivalent built-in "killfile"[0] functionality for auto-hiding submissions and comments. (This has been suggested to the admins, and was seemingly received favorably, but I'm sure it's a matter of resources.)
Comments that are "pushing an agenda" are noticeable because they Just. Will. Not. Deviate. From. The. Party. Line. Ever. They will never acknowledge an opposing viewpoint's point, no matter how valid. It's not a good faith conversation, and it deserves to be both downvoted and flagged. When one side (or both!) is like talking to a brick wall, this is often what's going on.
Posts are harder. If user X posts articles pushing a viewpoint, that's harder to prove that they're intending to do that. Or it would be, except that user X will also usually be active in the discussion about the article, and their comments will fit the above pattern. If you see that, then you can say that the post was probably pushing an agenda as well.
I don’t think anyone really can be convinced to deviate from a strongly held political belief in a handful of posts. At this point I think most people with any interest in politics have already seen every path through 4 or so posts around their opinions.
Standard talking point, standard counterpoint, standard objection that the the counterpoint is not back by data, request for citations, citation, argument that the math was wrong, and by now the thread is a week old and we’ve forgotten about it.
So, I wouldn’t say it is an issue of people being bad faith or overly obstinate. It’s just a bad format. Old phpBB boards and those sorts of sites were better for this sort of stuff, despite being mediocre, because at least you could remember who was who.
I hate seeing that. It's a bad-faith argument. It's the sign of someone who's just there to argue, not to have a curious conversation. That is, it's a sign of someone who isn't within the spirit of the site guidelines.
No, I don't think this is just my personal bias against that style of posting. It's fake and juvenile, and it has no place on HN.
Another way you can tell: When they're replying to 20 comments with the same 2 or 3 talking points. That's someone who's there to do battle, not to have a conversation. They aren't really replying to the 20 comments, either - they're just spraying the same canned responses all over the place. That's not a conversation; that's a tape recorder in transmit-only mode.
However, the bar for creating new accounts is low, so bad actors could create lots of accounts cheaply and use them for flagging. That's why I think flagging needs to be a privilege that requires a high user "trust level" - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559629
HN gets tons and tons of threads that are critical of LLMs, so it's possible that the ones you're seeing get flagged are just below median quality and/or overly repetitive of previous discussions.
Maybe we just care more and notice it about that subject now. Maybe it's always been this way. But while you often leave long comments that go into how these systems work and the struggles with trying to adjust them or understand of it's even necessary (good stuff), I would be fascinated to see a blog post or something where you really give us a talking to about the state of the community and anything y'all have been trying on your end.
Just a thought, obviously, you have a whole job moderating already! Have a good day!
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
It has nothing to do with being on the side of "the opposition" or "the man," it's because those sorts of posts inevitably lead to the same, repetitive, off-topic debates and flame wars.
Flagging should be used as a cudgel against posts that break the rules. There are plenty of places on the internet to debate politics and gender; HN is not one of them.
Which is attested to by Dan repeatedly manually unflagging these posts afterwards, which is an explicit approval that these posts follow guidelines.
That's a difficult argument to make, especially without examples because at the end of the day, everything is related/relevant to everything somehow. HN's on-topicness remit is not really 'extremely relevant to techies'.
Anyway, which nation? I think we also aren’t allowed to push Communist party talking points here, despite that party being highly supported in some countries (not that I’d want to, just saying, nationally popular doesn’t mean much).
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Maybe time will tell if it was actually OT.
When that time comes, if it comes, then you'd be within the guidelines to post it.
Preemptively posting it just in case it later becomes some new phenomenon is not ideal.
Also I’d expect there to be some annoying edge cases if they tried to ban that sort of discussion. I mean, Kilmer is not a tech person. But tech people die sometimes too. Arguably discussing their life as people is outside the scope of the site. Maybe we shouldn’t have had a conversation about how great a guy Mr. Moolenaar was and just discussed the technical aspects of his life’s work. But, come on, that’d not really be a human way of responding to somebody’s death, right?
If we’re going to have these sort of lightly rule breaking threads, then I don’t think it is necessary to ask the mods to adjudicate exactly who’s technical enough to warrant one. It’s a fuzzy spectrum anyway, we have tech people, tech policy people, STEM outreach people, tech YouTube influencers, celebrities that played beloved nerd characters.
One thing I'd really like to see is less tactical flagging of content.
Hopefully with your additional help, people who suppress content they disagree with will be kept in check.
Open discourse is something that used to be sacrasanct in scientific and engineering circles. Over the last decade or so, free speech has been on the decline, and discussion is now very polarised along political lines.
For example, it's nearly impossible to discuss technical progress made by Elon Musk's companies without brigading by leftwing commenters, and I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away. This is self-serving behaviour by bad actors and should be addressed in order that HN is a politically-neutral forum for discussion, and not a leftwing echo chamber.
If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the guidelines, we'll restore them.
We want HN to be a place where people can discuss contentious topics. This is a major reason why I've moved into an expanded role here. I think HN has been, and can continue to be, one of the better places on the internet for discussing contentious topics.
The thing to remember is the guiding principle of HN is curiosity. This place is not meant to be for ideological battle, or for trying to win arguments. It's for conversations where we can learn from each other about things we're curious about.
I've always liked to learn about the opposing side of whatever position I hold. That's why I've found HN to be so valuable, and I want it to be a place people to come to for that reason for many years into the future.
I'll do that reasonably frequently on both posts and comments, though I'm not sure how effective that is.
One sec, let's look at the endpoint ... First page (30 entries) for each shows, at this writing:
- 13 dead of 30 vouched, submissions.
- 26 dead of 30 vouched, comments.
The endpoints for the uninitiated:
Posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE&kind=comment
(The URLs are only visible to the owner of the UID, and I presume, moderators as well.)
Trust in forum users can be measured by various metrics - The Discourse forum software is a good example of how to do this: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-t...
This is 'drink verification can' but for messageboards.
A hard thing for people to accept, something that I think is an unstated part of the HN ethos but nevertheless real, is that it's almost always better to have no thread at all than a shitty one. Important topics will inevitably get an airing in one thread or another.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478913>
This is not for every flag, by a long shot, and occurs (checking my history) perhaps a few times a month.
Note that the follow-up to the above link also earned another dang cite. Few justifications are original...
The practice seems ... not too disruptive, and at least modestly effective. It also gives me a track record of who's turned up before.
Linking quips both keeps my own voice out of the discussion, and mutes the impact on the page itself.
That is true and I used to say it but the receipts people evade it with non-public receipts (which can maybe later somehow be audited). So I'm switching to dunking on the thing for its martinetism and pointless bureaucracy. It feels more self-indulgently righteous to boot!
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around. Anything negative about Musk also gets quickly flagged and buried. I guess we can agree that Musk is currently a lightning rod, and brigades on both sides are acting to hide (positive and negative) coverage of his actions.
All of which are subjective judgements on the content, which will naturally be reflective of a voter's political biases