I view a "moderation call" as a binary allow or disallow. Once you get to the point of personally deciding that a post is good enough for the front page but not good enough for #1 or #2, you are making editorial decisions.
I tried to make it clear that I am talking about more than this individual post. That is why I used phrases like "these stories" and "stories like this". In an attempt to stop us from "missing each other", I'll be as direct as possible. The visibility of what is likely the most important ongoing story in the US at the moment should be up to more than just whether you personally are "fine with this article being on the front page of HN today".
Ok, that explains the misunderstanding. From my point of view it's not binary, and yes it's an editorial decision. Moderating and editoring (not a word) are more or less the same thing, no?
> The visibility of what is likely the most important ongoing story in the US at the moment should be up to more than just whether you personally are "fine with this article being on the front page of HN today".
I may have misled you with the phrases "I'm fine with" and "I'm not fine with", which were admittedly a little glib. I'm not applying my personal preferences here. (I'm not even sure what those are—the only strong preference I'm aware of is to try to minimize the pain of masses of people being upset.)
Rather, I'm taking in what the community and software inputs are producing, and then modulating that according to HN principles in an effort to optimize the site for its intended purpose. I wish it weren't necessary—it would so much less work, not to mention less painful—but unfortunately the community system (upvotes and flags) doesn't do this on its own, and there's only so much that software can do, so human intervention is still needed to jig the system out of its failure modes.
>Ok, that explains the misunderstanding. From my point of view it's not binary, and yes it's an editorial decision. Moderating and editoring (not a word) are more or less the same thing, no?
IANAL and I don't know if it is something HN has had to deal with directly, so maybe you know a lot more than me, but isn't that what a lot of the Section 230 debate is about? Either way, I think both our positions on this are now clear and reasonable people can disagree on it either way.
>Rather, I'm taking in what the community and software inputs are producing, and then modulating that according to HN principles in an effort to optimize the site for its intended purpose.
I guess to summarize this conversation, I think the success of this post (now number 3 on https://news.ycombinator.com/best with 2 be another DOGE story from a week ago) is maybe an indication that "the community... inputs" are being ignored too much. Much of the community wants to talk about this ongoing story as evidenced by the upvotes and comments. We shouldn't let a small group of flaggers stop that. And perhaps you are making your own work more difficult by only manually greenlighting a very limited number of these stories. Sometimes you need a pressure release valve in the system. I'm not sure this specific post would have been received as enthusiastically if other similar stories were able to get through and you almost certainly wouldn't have to answer so many questions about your own role in moderating this site.
If HN didn't have user flags and moderators, these stories (not just the current topic but the current affairs of any moment) would dominate the site completely and HN would cease to be HN.
> Sometimes you need a pressure release valve in the system.
I agree! Perhaps we're only disagreeing about the diameter of the valve.
> I'm not sure this specific post would have been received as enthusiastically if other similar stories were able to get through
Yes in the sense that, with some exceptions, the selection of particular articles isn't the high-order bit. The high bit is discussion of the MOT that they're in the orbit of.
> you almost certainly wouldn't have to answer so many questions about your own role in moderating this site
That's definitely wrong. However many users are upset about flags on this MOT, thousands more would be clamoring if they felt like HN was being taken over by it (or politics in general). The bulk of the community here is pretty zealous about preserving HN for its intended purpose.
Basically what I do is try to minimize community pushback by opening "valves" enough to satisfy (well, never to satisfy but at least to reduce the pain) one constituency, but not so much that it causes greater pushback from a different consitutency. The hope is to find a saddle point where we can temporarily hang for a while.
It's hard for people with strong passions on any $Topic to relate to this because they are the most vocal and think they are the community. So they are—but others are too. Users have the luxury of seeing themselves and their viewmates (if I can put it that way) as the community, and others as NPCs or Neanderthals. I don't have that luxury because I've learned the hard way what happens when we neglect the bulk of the community in favor of any vocal contingent—a horrible experience I hope to never have again.
I hope that doesn't sound dismissive—I've enjoyed this conversation!
As I said upthread of that comment, I still think this is the wrong way to look at it. A story being on the site is very different from the story being on the front page. Maybe "time on front page" should be something you look into tracking if it isn't something already available to you on the backend. Because I would guess that the most common way to interact with HN is via the front page. I don't come to HN to specifically talk to people here about this story, but I care about it so I will engage when something on the subject happens to be one of the stories I see on HN.
In fact, having these posts primarily only visible through search leads to worse discussions because the comments are full of people who are already motivated enough (in both directions) to actively seek out the conversation with few "HN normies", for lack of a better term, to help moderate the conversation through their comments, votes, and flags. And if there is a desire to avoid caving to "any vocal contingent", there needs to be an acknowledgement of how easy it is for any motivated minority to keep something off the HN front page with diligent flagging of a topic.
>I hope that doesn't sound dismissive—I've enjoyed this conversation!
I tried to make it clear that I am talking about more than this individual post. That is why I used phrases like "these stories" and "stories like this". In an attempt to stop us from "missing each other", I'll be as direct as possible. The visibility of what is likely the most important ongoing story in the US at the moment should be up to more than just whether you personally are "fine with this article being on the front page of HN today".