In fact, we already have. It was my decision that PG should out me as moderator, and that was mainly so I'll be able to answer users' questions.

I think your points are mostly correct and entirely understandable. Qua user, I feel pretty similarly, so I don't anticipate much trouble seeing eye to eye about this in the long run. I'm optimistic that we can eventually please both the bulk and the core of the community—though that will still be far from everybody.

Also, there's no one on the team arguing for secrecy. The question is not whether to be more transparent, but how.

A few points from the moderation side.

You should know that what appears to be HN's "secrecy" has in reality mostly been extremely limited bandwidth. For most of HN's existence, PG ran it at the same time as he was building YC plus having two kids. That made for an awful lot of dropped packets. One might argue that he should have handed HN off sooner, and one would in my opinion be completely wrong about that. So without HN's "secrecy" there would have been no HN.

Second, it's been true for a long time that you can get answers by emailing info@yc. (We're going to change that to hn@yc, but that's not up yet; I'll add it to my profile when it is.) I'll be taking over the HN-related emails from Tara, who has been valiant but will soon be relieved.

I intend to be a lot more responsive in the threads, partly because we know that community concerns around transparency need addressing, so we'll make a priority of it, but also for two non-obvious reasons: (1) I've written software for navigating and moderating HN very quickly, and (2) I type faster than PG.

Beyond that, there are a lot of questions about how to get this right. Many of the factors aren't obvious. I have more to say about this, but this comment is long enough, plus I'm tired and my brain hurts, and we'll have lots of opportunities to discuss it further.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-do...

Here's an example that I've observed a few times... And I'd love to know what is actually going on in these cases...

I often submit articles with a slightly tweaked title. Eventually, a mod (you, I guess!) gets a'fixing and the title is fixed to be exactly the one on swombat.com (the rationale for that is slightly dubious seeing as I'm both the writer and the submitter in some of those cases, but let's pass on that!). What I've noticed several times is that at the same time as the title being fixed, the article suddenly dropped 10 or sometimes many more places...

It's easy to interpret that as "moderator didn't like my article!"... But what is it really?

Also, I'm going to be the head moderator for a while, but not the only moderator. I'll answer the questions, but not necessarily do everything.

What we can do is have a way for title changes to show up for users who want to know about them.

Some flexibility in that regard would improve my HN experience.

1. People sharing direct links to their HN submission, asking their friends to upvote. I believe the HN algorithm auto-flags such posts.

Most people don't know about this, so they assume the worst (PG killed it because he didn't like the article/author). Those who do know about this now get around by telling people "Go to /newest and look for my submission".

Most times people just want their friends to upvote the submission, but sometimes people are genuinely seeking comments on their submission.

I don't know the solution but the current way of dealing with this is too heavy-handed and causes a broken user experience.

[EDIT: What if you merely reduced the weight of votes from direct link visits, instead of flagging the post?]

2. Users can themselves flag stories off the homepage! Again, it appears that most people don't know about this. So, even a story which got to the homepage in a legit way, sometimes gets flagged off because enough people think it's lame. This has happened a number of times for controversial topics like sexism in tech.

Once again, outsiders assume it's because HN mods are horrible people.

Finally, I think PG's inclination has always been to fix HN's problems with software, but what it needs is more human solutions, not more code.

Do things that don't scale ;)

I am irrationally attached to the old handle.

Hi, though!

The silent majority want HN to be the best it can be - and we are quite willing to help, as long as it's not that much effort :-)

Of course, that presumes that the moderators care what the community thinks and are willing to change their behavior accordingly. I do presume that's the case.

In the end, the mods will need to decide how to handle shit and while input from mere mortals is a good thing, it is not required for them to do their jobs. We already have very democratic tools here and lots of power: more so than inmost other societies. If you really disagree with something, by all means speak up. But mods are not elected officials representing your interests. They are not here to enact the will of the people. They are here to maintain civility and ensure that the rules are followed.

Not on HN. This place can beat a dead horse so bad that it'd get up and run off. I don't think HN mods should be transparent at all. But hey, let them try it out... I assure you we'll have 2 or 3 front-page articles every week about some mod-action and the threads will get so pedantic/specious that the mods will have to take action on those threads too... which will lead to another story... which will lead to more mod-action.... ∞

It was a great way, as a lurker, to get an understanding of the rules via watching others fail to follow them.

This is a different beast here, as no one is paying to be a member, but I wonder if there isn't something to learn from how that page operated.

It's also useful to have a notice such as, "This user's commenting privileges were suspended for 100 hours for this comment." By making the punishment public, the commenter is (hopefully) shamed into behaving better in the future. And like you said, it may even prevent others from behaving similarly.

With displayed score you end up with digg/reddit where people just post short memes and try to get a high score displayed in the easiest way imaginable.

Nope. That doesn't show you the difference between a barely-passable comment and an excellent one.

I learned a lot during my early HN days, when comment scores were visible, simply by looking at what sort of comments tended to score 5 points vs 1 point, or 15 points vs 5 points, or 40 points vs 15 points. Here on HN, "just post short memes" tends to be met with negative signals; thoughtful, helpful, and accurate responses are met with positive signals. I found it helped to be able to see that, and I think many newer HN commenters have the same misconception as you do because they haven't had that same training.

These days, it's very different. Topic are being parsed and filtered by robotic moderator that cannot possibly let something even remotely option-based slip through. Comment that are relevant, but with subtle jokes are deleted. I remember when Joel and Jeff were actively answering questions to have the critical mass. Now that answers and questions would be closed or moderated. e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-...

However, the chatrooms are an excellent place to have those opinion-based off-topic discussions. I find I've spent far more time idling away the hours in JS chat and learned far more.

This is part of what shapes its community, of course. There's probably at least some reasoning behind why it works that way, but it seems to me that the lack of memory distorts the importance of the front page.

Every submission has a big 'flag' button on it. I don't know exactly what that does when clicked, but I assume it tends to make submissions drop further into obscurity.

Some topics that get a lot of exposure (the NSA and bitcoin come to mind) are likely to get heavily flagged when they appear, which probably doesn't look much different to moderation.

> The point is, without any transparency, we don't know.

But either way we are told to use flagging functionality, so we should continue doing it. Just because you or I, think that an article should be flagged and therefore taken off the site, doesn't mean it should. We cast our vote and move on. I'm curious as to what your expectations are of the people on the site when more transparency is involved? That to me is the glaring question - how do we create an environment where the behavior of the community is consistently following the rules?

My increasing frustration with HN has nothing to do with the technology or the moderation, but more so about the other 20% of the people whose contribution adds zero value (whether that be they are upvoting terrible comments, submitting unrelated material, or not following guidelines). I believe you and I are in the same boat - we are extremely passionate about seeing HN succeed. Our environment dictates that if we continue to follow the guidelines and promoting the same values, the community will thrive. If everyone does this, then the community succeeds, regardless of whether moderation exists. Perhaps we should be focusing more on educating bad actors on why they shouldn't act out of line, rather than question the good actors (mods) intentions?

Their description of the moderation log: "All moderator actions on this site are visible to everyone and the identities of those moderators are made public. While the individual actions of a moderator may cause debate, there should be no question about who the moderator was or whether they had an ulterior motive for those actions."

[1] https://lobste.rs/moderations

I wish I had more to say than "+1," but I wanted to give more than just an upvote. "you tend to assume the worst" really resonates with me.

This comment went from +3 to (currently) -1. Interesting.

Could you give some concrete examples? Articles can get dropped off the front page when many people click the flag link (i.e. it's not always driven by the moderators). Also, I believe submissions with a high comments to up vote ratio are weighted down (the rationale being that it usually signals a controversial topic prone to flame wars). There have been cases of questionable hell banning, but this can usually be resolved by contacting the mods privately AFAIK.

I would hope sites that are just link aggregators are given less weight while sites (like medium) that are prone to having interesting content but get over submitted have an adaptive factor.

I subscribe to Ken's blog and even sent the link to Daniel:

  Wow. This was some seriously good research and nailed some of the penalty
  numbers exactly. I mean, he did basically have the ranking formula and only
  had to solve for the variables, but it's still much better than anything 
  else I've seen.

It's not the staff's fault that people jump to assume An Act Of Malicious Moderation if a story drops.

Many people on HN run on a logic system, many seem to be emotional.

So when someone post some cute puppy that has cancer logical people might flag it. Many puppies die of cancer everyday, we don't hate said puppy but we just like to look at the bigger picture ie curing cancer and perhaps not eating animals if we love them so much.

But emotive people don't get it and I can see it quickly turning into a why do people on HN hate puppies so much conversation.

Plus logical people don't want to look like assholes.

Meh, but who knows maybe it'd create constructive conversation.

It's not 100% the same as what runs Hacker News, but it's very close.

When submitters change titles for clarity, and moderators revert it to an obscure original title that no longer has context, HN loses value.