Archive Archive
In reading about Bolt laying off 33% of staff after offering them personal loans to early exercise their options I found this other Thread where Hacker News is being a transparent about some moderation practices when called out by the the founder of Bolt . Basically the guy isn't good at using Hacker News and his post got flagged for being cringe. but dang also has some interesting stuff to say in here, emphasis mine:
I don't know why users flagged it. (Edit: generally, though, if you want to figure this out, the best place to look is in the comments. The top comment in the Bolt thread is complaining about non-transparent, enterprise-style pricing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16871886, which is a classic HN complaint. The same complaints had appeared in their earlier thread, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215604 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215578. We actually downweighted both of those complaints. That's standard HN moderation when indignant comments are stuck at the top of a thread.)
HN is moderated much more actively, and much more editorially than I think most people consider, it's not "just" a faceless algorithm driven by roam:Rationalismists , probably.
A moderator with SQL and table knowledge can get you pretty far, perhaps:
Edit: I just thought of another way to investigate this, which I overlooked earlier: I looked at everything else that those users had flagged. That was easy enough, because none of them has flagged more than a few dozen submissions over the years. There were no other cases of people flagging Stripe-related submissions, except for this one, which was a pro-Stripe story:
Now look, you can say what you want about the quality and biases of commentators on Hacker News but you gotta appreciate a forum that is lead by a moderator who isn't afraid to be transparent when they're called out. I steer clear of most of the threads on any given day, and there are topics which are interesting to me but which I absolute will not touch because the comments will be toxic and wrong-headed. HN is especially roam:Infohazardous when they step out of their lane of Parenthetical Functional Programming weenieism, systemd slapfights, and VC startups but I keep coming back because I so often find Blogs I don't come across in my feed reader, and the comments on them usually aren't as bad as peoples' initial reaction are, at least compared to most other semimoderated or algorithmically moderated spaces. I can work within and account for these biases rather than fully debting myself to unaccountable systems like Reddit's one-size-fits-all laissez faire ranking algorithms and 16 year olds applying a rules sidebar.