Posted by FerkiHN 15 hours ago
Thank you to the Hacker News moderators
In all that time, I’ve never seen spam, scams, or toxic flame wars. That’s honestly incredible for any online community, especially one as active and long-lived as HN. The moderation feels invisible, yet it’s always there, keeping the platform clean, focused, and full of meaningful discussion.
It's rare to find a place on the internet that still values substance over noise. Hacker News is one of the last quiet corners where people can just share ideas, build cool things, and have thoughtful conversations. That’s only possible because someone’s watching the door.
So to all the mods and admins behind the scenes: thank you. You’re doing a legendary job, and many of us deeply appreciate it — even if we don’t always say it.
This community effort lets the official HN mods be more hands off and only step in for the more difficult situations. Having once been the subject of intervention, I found them fair and transparent.
The opinions are with very few exceptions 1 dimensional and arid.
As to toxic flame wars, everyone knows those are the most entertaining part of the internet; It's just less fun when people are stupid and bad at it. Well moderated flame wars are the intellectual baseline for everything else.
The moderation here is based on plain censorship, meaning the elimination of topics or contributions without justification. Anything the slightest bit controversial or arousing is simply turned off.
And the tool applying censorship is a cudgel: it's ridiculous to waste time writing a comment only to find the post has been flagged between the time you entered the submission and when you hit post. Idiocy.
For a site pandering to smart people, there amazingly little knowledge here. The structure of the site is not built for knowledge. One thing never leads to another except by the effect Brownian motion. It's not designed for knowledge and the trivial repetitions are endless. A substantial number of posts are just re-posts.
Half the posts overall are lazy attention scams, which amount to nothing more than dry links to paywall MSM that rightfully should be flagged but aren't.
If there's one thing that stands out about this tech bro RSS feed of a site: it's how corporate and uncreative this joint is. Oh, but it's a trivial mental outpost for capital, so of course...
But thank you moderators!
Please stop conflating the two
Yes, I know about the showdead option.