More to the point, I was going to vouch the comment (which removes the flagged status) till I got to the edits. It’s not possible to vouch it in its current state, because at best I’d be making a mistake, and at worst I’d lose my vouch privileges. So you’re literally making it impossible to salvage your comment when you go off on rants about censorship.
There are thoughtful ways to comment about the moderation. If you take the time to phrase things in a substantive non-emotional way, and ask yourself "what am I trying to communicate?" you often end up with something that won’t be flagged. But the combination of user flags and manual mod review with the vouch system adding even more variability means that it’s a tossup whether any given decision will be reversed (or even can be reversed, since e.g. this one can’t be). It’s best to think of it like a casino and not worry on the days the cards don’t favor you.
Amusingly, the change to rank flagged comments above downvoted comments in an effort to push them to places less-seen has catapulted this subthread to the second top comment of the whole submission, which I haven’t seen before. HN never fails to surprise.
Your [2] is interesting in this regard. Mastodon is pretty much the modern tech ecosystem's answer to this whole scenario, and you already don't find that satisfactory. I don't disagree with your reasons, but: your objection is not really technical, but about what people do with delegated moderation authority.
You counter by saying each individual should completely control what they see, but here's the dirty truth: almost no one actually wants to do that. Even if they say they do, that's a lot of effort. Even you propose something similar with "Different teams can expose their own sets of labels". Most people are just going to block a bunch of labels with no further analysis, which puts you pretty close to where we are now. In practice, delegated moderation will be rampant, and it will definitely make mistakes.
So this is the detailed version of what I said in my first comment: if you get the world of protocols you say you want, and then make comments people don't like, then you won't get visible downvotes, you'll just be blocked. That really doesn't sound like it solves the problem you're raising. For my part I really don't think it's solvable at all, moderation is just going to be very difficult forever.
Interesting. It wasn't flagged when I commented. So it got flagged, vouched, and flagged again?
I hadn't heard of/seen that ordering change. Also interesting. Though I can't agree with your last line, HN is very predictable sometimes. For instance, any thread about dark matter is reliably a mess. :D
Bingo. It was necessary for the mods or the users to re-flag it, because it’s unsalvageable in its current form.
You likely won’t hear of such ordering changes. I spend a long time watching carefully to notice them. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who finds it fascinating.
HN is so predictable as to be deterministic in certain ways, but then the complexity of the social software ends up being delightfully surprising in many more.
Well, yes. How else would you deal with people who abuse the vouch system? And there’s no way to distinguish between someone egregiously abusing the vouch system vs someone whose idea of what should be vouched differs enormously from what the mods want to see.
Here’s how I’ve come to feel about it: the mods run the site. The site has to be run. It can’t be left to the community, because the community makes bad decisions, where "bad" means "drives intellectually curious people away from the site". Therefore, the way to get a lot of HN privileges is to create a lot of content that the mods want to see. The converse is also true; do things they don’t like, and you’ll swiftly find your privileges revoked.
In many ways, it’s a proof by contradiction: it proves that centralized moderation is a strong asset, which contradicts Reddit’s philosophy of "if you don’t like it, you can go elsewhere." There’s nowhere else to go. And — fortunately or unfortunately — that’s a feature which keeps this community unified, for almost two decades.
It's a good point; I have to say that, whatever other gripes I may sometimes have about it, HN is probably the most well moderated community I'm a part of.
> How else would you deal with people who abuse the vouch system?
So I think what I'm curious about is what constitutes "abuse" and how it's enforced. Like, are we saying that dang and friends have the ability to manually revoke someone's ability to vouch if they vouch for unhelpful comments on a frequent basis or if it's determined they're a sockpuppet account or something, or is there some more automated system that revokes a person's ability to vouch after some number of comments they've vouched are re-flagged?
I suppose I'd always imagined that the (fairly high, in the case of downvoting) karma threshold you have to reach to obtain privileges like vouching and downvoting would do a reasonably good job at filtering out those who might abuse such privileges, and that other remedies would be used rarely - and certainly not often enough to merit your earlier comment:
> It’s not possible to vouch it in its current state, because [...] at worst I’d lose my vouch privileges.
> are we saying that dang and friends have the ability to manually revoke someone's ability to vouch if they vouch for unhelpful comments on a frequent basis
Yes. This is an assumption on my part, but it’s a safe one, based on all the other things they can do. Having all your comments dragged to the bottom regardless of upvotes, for example, or preventing you from posting more than five comments every three hours.
The vouch system is a proxy for moderator decisions. If you’re not a good proxy, then one way or another, you won’t get to make the decisions. And I like being able to vouch comments, which is why I’m careful.
> and the sentiment of fear I read into it.
Oh yes. You don’t want to be their enemy. My full year ban was not a happy one.
I don’t think it was warranted. They did. Guess who had the final say?
You serve at their pleasure. We all do. And the best way forward is to embrace this fact and turn it to your advantage. They won’t ban you if you’re doing what the community wants. And what this community wants is to be entertained. It’s as simple as that.
You can pretty much figure out with >90% certainty what will or won’t attract moderator attention using this heuristic. If it’s entertaining to most thoughtful people, it’ll usually get a pass. Most thoughtful people don’t care to hear a rant about censorship on their favorite entertainment site, which is why this comment didn’t pass.
If any of this seems unlikely, feel free to email them and ask. Dan is nothing if not responsive. He’ll likely say that so-and-so portion of my comment is slightly wrong but that overall it’s correct in spirit, and he’ll explain the reasoning better than I have here. Or, just watch carefully which comments are flagged; in some ways it’s better to watch their actions than to read too far into what they say.
Moderation at this scale is uncharted territory. Dan’s team is figuring it out as they go, and it’s evolved a lot over the last decade. The vouch system is a minor part of the overall picture, but it’s one I love.
There are thoughtful ways to comment about the moderation. If you take the time to phrase things in a substantive non-emotional way, and ask yourself "what am I trying to communicate?" you often end up with something that won’t be flagged. But the combination of user flags and manual mod review with the vouch system adding even more variability means that it’s a tossup whether any given decision will be reversed (or even can be reversed, since e.g. this one can’t be). It’s best to think of it like a casino and not worry on the days the cards don’t favor you.
Amusingly, the change to rank flagged comments above downvoted comments in an effort to push them to places less-seen has catapulted this subthread to the second top comment of the whole submission, which I haven’t seen before. HN never fails to surprise.