Hackernews has "protected people", typically high-ranking Silicon Valley types, for whom, if it is revealed they are scumbags, they will run interference, changing account names and replacing their powerwords with [redacted]. An example is the high-ranking GitHub engineer who has an Indian first name but goes by "Alex", who was accused of mistreating women, and actually pled guilty to at least one incidence of such.
Renaming accounts, redacting posts, etc. are all things that we do for users in general. We make no distinction between "high-ranking" users and others.
We take care of these requests every day and have bent over backwards (e.g. spending hours writing code) to help people individually in cases where their needs were unusually complex. I can tell you for sure that whether the person is high- or low-status in $whoever's eyes has nothing to do with this. Often I don't even know who the person is.
Our approach boils down to this: we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. It doesn't matter who the "anyone" is. Countless times I've deleted posts, redacted personal data and/or randomized usernames for accounts that had long been abusing and trolling HN. I don't rub their nose in it—I just pretend not to have noticed. You'd be surprised how polite and thankful people become when they need something.
Edit: here's the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and nothing has changed since then.
For a few reasons: there are lots of ways to abuse those features, which unfortunately some people would take advantage of; we want to preserve the history of the threads rather than have them be gutted or anachronistically edited; and because wholesale deletion would be unfair to the other commenters who participated in a thread (pg wrote about that way back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226).
That doesn't mean we don't care about protecting users with privacy and other concerns—we certainly do, and like I said we take care of these every day. We just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion.
It's fundamentally a tradeoff: we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum with the need to protect individuals. There's no perfect answer, but we're committed to both sides of it. Of the people who ask us for these things, well over 90% end up satisfied. Probably over 99%, but I don't want to make claims I'm not sure of!
I want to double down on this. I have (unintentionally) run a foul of HN's guidelines, and dang has been extremely polite, patient, and even-handed. I'm definitely not getting preferential treatment. I'm highly skeptical of claims to the contrary.
Ditto. Whenever I messed up, dang always did a great job listening to my explanation and helping to correct. Honestly, he's more lenient in posts that are negative to YC companies to prevent any chance of favoritism (I've experienced this directly when bakinyg posts or comments that are critical of one of them)
I know it's easy to feel that way when the user asking for help has been labeled $bad for whatever reason. But I doubt you would say that about most of the users who ask for this help, and if we're going to do it for some, I don't feel comfortable picking who gets helped and who doesn't. Nor do I think the community would support us in doing it that way.
It’s not about picking. It’s about doing it at all.
Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash.
In all my decades of dealing with public forums, I have never seen this as something done in a reputable forum, outside of a court order.
It’s a betrayal of trust. The fact that you’re not defending it on the merits, but rather that it’s supposedly open to all that knew about the secret door is just the chef’s kiss of abuse of power. If I was asked to do this, I would quit.
Dang, every time you do this, it shows contempt to everyone on this forum. It’s absolute trash. It is bad, and you should feel bad. But of course, you don’t feel bad about doing it. You feel good about it.
I just don't think you would say that if you saw the full range of requests we get. Some feel excessively fussy to me (ok, a lot feel that way) but some are coming from people in genuine distress.
Usually when people say that, they're putting more on other persons ("they fucked up") than they would on themselves ("but, circumstances"). If you're not doing that, I respect your position. But that's a hard karmic row to hoe. Personally I'd rather bail people out because I might want to get bailed out myself in the future.
The worst thing about browsing old Reddit threads is when half the discussion has simply disappeared because the user hates Reddit and edited/deleted all their comments. There's an awful lot of information lost there, and sometimes it's extremely difficult to find elsewhere. The same goes for the occasional deleted accounts and posts I've seen on other forums around the web by people the forum administrator have deemed "toxic" and purged posts instead of simply banning the user (I only have a single vague memory of a forum other than Reddit where a user voluntarily removed all of their own posts, likely due to the difficulty of doing so).
Wouldn't it be worse if HN didn't honor its users' requests to delete data? I legitimately don't know, it seems like both approaches would cause issues.
Dang thanks for the explanation, it is tough for you being the sole moderator here.
Is gnabgib an actual moderator here or did he made a bot account that does regex matching to some words to try to do backseat moderating to farm points?
His account made numerous robotic comments that missed the key context which a human would not have missed.
In case it's of interest, here's the standard language from emails I send people:
We try not to delete posts that got replies, because doing so would be unfair to the other commenters in the thread. What I've done so far is reassign it to a random user ID, so it's as if you'd used a throwaway account to post it and there's no link to your main account. Does that work?
As I just mentioned in a previous comment, I'd like to note how much I appreciate that you keep the contents of posts with replies. It's not only unfair to other commenters, it can also be unfair to readers. There's nothing worse than seeing only one side of a discussion, where the possibly-useful information was purged or edited into personal attacks on the other user. I much prefer SO-style attributed edits (though for a discussion forum this should be limited to mods, not arbitrary users), but time-limited editing with manual thought out exceptions as implemented here is a close second, far preferable to Reddit and other forums that allow arbitrary editing forever and only show a date (if that).
I’m inclined towards believing highly ranking people are more interested in reputation management, and that’s why they request these things a lot more often.
I’ve literally never felt the need to request a change, even though I’ve written a bunch of boneheaded stuff.
In fact it's the other way around—at least to judge by the HN inbox. We rarely get these requests from highly ranking people (at least not anyone I recognize as such), and we get the most elaborate and demanding requests from people who don't appear to have much public reputation to worry about, and often are anonymous to begin with. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.
We do get occasional corporate takedown requests, often from the lawyers of someone who noticed that someone said a bad thing about their company (or occasionally themselves) on HN years ago. But I try to do less in cases where we're not hearing from an HN user directly, and least of all when they lead with a stick (e.g. legal threats). I do check with YC's legal people though, but they love HN and totally get it and are on the community's side.
I think what makes HN the best place on the internet for whatever this place is, is that the god mod here is so focused on it. I can only assume you have a huge amount of scripts and tools that make operating and moderating this place manageable. I always feel like you jump in seemingly everywhere that has issues. It's quite impressive
But there are vastly more important factors. One is that there are other moderators. They just don't post publicly.
By far the most important is HN's community. We have so many dedicated users who care about the quality of this place, and they send a steady stream of heads-ups about things we need to look at*. That's the reason for your "god mod" impression—it would be impossible for one person, or even a team, to see all these things, but what I'm actually looking at are things that other people have seen and are bringing to our/my attention, whether by flagging them or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. So it's a "given enough eyeballs" thing.
We can always use more such help, so if you (or anyone) notice something that we should probably be looking at, please flag it and/or email hn@ycombinator.com. We usually can look at it pretty quickly—though it may take me longer to reply and my worst-case latency is shameful.
* For example, I've got 3 or 4 emails at present asking about why "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mataroa.blog) has been posted 14 times and keeps getting flagged. Yeah, that's probably something we should look at.
Very neat! It would be cool to see, I'm sure. Anarki hadn't changed too much, but there are some things for sure. Any especially cool features added or changed? Must be cool to work in a language you control.
It is extremely satisfying! I would enjoy having community feedback about it too, but so far publishing a new version has been too heavy a lift. Maybe one of these years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240350 has discussion of one change we made to Arc, though it's already 8 years old - the midpoint between today and the original release of Arc, I guess.
Got to love that it appears all based on the title given on HN, because the original post under “Don’t mention AI again” stayed up and got lots of comments.
While technically being against the ‘rule’ against editorializing titles, I guess in this case it was to make it less sensational xD
It's always interesting to to me that although the rule cuts both ways, people only tend to remember one. Maybe that 'unless' needs to be phrased more clearly?
If you go on vacation, is there a backup? And if you retire, or God forbid, get incapacitated from some unforeseen event, is there a continuity plan? I assume contingencies exist
I don't go on "vacation" but I go to workshops that interest me and work on the breaks.
Contingencies exist! There are other mods who know how everything works, and have been at it a long time. I trust them and they'll do a great job if I get hit by a bus. It would just be hard on them to weather the public side of the job.
One thing that would suck if I get hit by a bus is that the people who know the code and the people who know how moderation works aren't the same pepole. That's not optimal.
In light of the flaming, I'd like to underscore why it's entirely reasonable to redact the author of the comment in question: the author outted themselves as knowingly and egregiously violating a ToS for another site, and using//promoting services which are at best unethical, but probably illegal (residential proxies//large scale proxy services are usually built off the backs of botnets//malware).
This isn't, IMO, favoritism or protecting YC interests//founders. The thread in question has nothing to do with Lamda, YC, or anything in that regard. It's someone talking about blackhat growth hacking in the open, which might bite them in the ass later. It's a textbook example of HN's stated policy about deletion/redaction in action.
I think this is correct.
My intent was to point out it looked like 'austenallred realized he'd admitted to doing wrong.
I knew HN could redact a user's data at their request and wrote my comment accordingly, but I didn't make it explicit.
Unfortunately, my comment became a magnet for accusations against HN staff and 'dang personally.
The lesson seems to be to anticipate moderators being accused of conspiracy and malice more when you discuss moderator actions.
This appears true not just where the stakes are high, like in startups, but everywhere.
If you talk about something that may look like special privileges but you know is normal, acknowledge it to save the moderators some trouble.
It may deter some of the accusatory comments and give the passerby a more accurate impression.
I doubt that it will deter accusatory responses, and you may get a few yourself! But it's helpful to disambiguate intent and I personally appreciate it.
I understood your intent, my comment was aimed at the child comments that collected under yours. I just felt like it needed to be explicitly said that this isn't some conspiracy/cover up. The content is still there, and who said it isn't really consequential. It doesn't help or hurt YC, it maybe shielded Austen from getting booted from Twitter, but beyond that who cares? People getting out their pitchforks because HN mods did something inconsequential, four years ago, for a person who's now labeled $bad today seems silly. More so since it's well documented that they'll do it for anyone on request. I just don't see the what justifies their outrage.
I agree partly with the lesson but more broadly I think it is that any hint of impartiality//conflict of interest for governing/regulatory bodies will be construed in a negative light. Where I disagree is that you could have saved the mods the trouble. I don't think there was any way you could have worded your original comment, or I mine, or Dang his, that would entirely quell the accusations that followed. There's one person in the thread that continued to insinuate that this isn't a policy or it's a new policy; even though Dang showed his comments about this policy going back almost a decade.
Right, I thought you understood. I agree with the broader lesson. I didn't mean that one could quell the accusations entirely, only partially at best (although 'dang doubts it in a sibling comment to yours). Discussions have momentum, and the top-level comment is the most visible in a thread, so an explanation in the top-level comment might have more impact than one further down the thread.
Dang just banned my other account because I questioned if the comment was really just Austen using his network of burners. pretty obvious the HN people are in cohoots with their precious Austen and don't want to see his terrible reputation tarnished even more
No idea which account you're referring to but I certainly haven't banned anyone for that reason. In fact I just restored your other comments in this thread.
Dang has to protect their investment. Which is why this whole site is a fucking scam. Can't possible let someone know they invested in a scammer piece of shit
Edit: also, here's the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and nothing has changed since then.
Edit: This is not to suggest 'austenallred received special treatment.