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.

> In fact it's the other way around—at least to judge by the HN inbox.

That’s hilarious, and a look behind the curtain I didn’t expect to get when making this post.

It does leave the question of why, but I cannot begin to imagine either.

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

Thanks! I'm proud of my moderation browser extension with keyboard shortcuts! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - which is written in Arc by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179860. On a good day, that's the kind of stuff I get to work on.

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.

> Thanks! I'm proud of my moderation browser extension with keyboard shortcuts! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - which is written in Arc by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179860.

Really cool! How different is Arc running HN or your extension from Arc3.1, the last-released version?

That's a good question because Arc the language is distinct from HN the application (and both were released all those years ago).

At the language level, we've changed things but not super much. It's maybe 30% different.

At the application level there have been many changes and it's more like 80% different.

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

You're right of course! but I need to point out that the rule asks for titles to be changed when they're misleading or clickbait:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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?

I appreciate your detailed response.

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.