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.
> 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.
and the sentiment of fear I read into it.