Comment by dang
2 years ago
> How long ago is "a while ago"?
A few days ago.
> Why change the weighting given stories on a given topic without notice?
We don't give notice about that kind of thing.
> And how do you reconcile this change with HN's long-standing policy
It follows it strictly. HN has had over 500 threads about Reddit, containing over 25,000 comments, in the 3 weeks since this kerfuffle went kablooey. (And that's just the threads with "reddit" in the title - there have been plenty more.) For any other topic that repetitive and drama-filled, we would have penalized it much more and much earlier.
The rule is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story. Note the word "less". We still moderate, we just do it less—and we've done it way less on this Reddit tsunami than we otherwise would have. In fact we probably went too far in the other direction.
I mean just look at those search results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434885, and I certainly didn't see a substantively different discussion in the HN comments - merely the same rehash.
As always, thanks for your response, dang.
My principle concern here is with transparency and fairness. I'll argue that HN is reasonably good about the latter. For the former, though, there's some pretty serious spelunking that's required to determine practices and policies. The task isn't impossible, you've written numerous times on why shorter and more flexible guidelines are preferable to long and strict ones. And I often (though sometimes grudgingly) come to understand, if not necessarily accept, your position.
I'm well aware of the recent flood of Reddit submissions, and I've made the point myself a couple of times in the past weeks: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1687485600&dateRange=custom&...> Still high, but not quite so overwhelming as your points>50 threshold. It's also well above the number of stories which have made the front-page archive for 2023 to date.
It would be interesting to compare specific keywords which either don't appear on the front page, with high votes, or which do appear on the front page but with low votes. That's not trivial to accomplish presently.
> There was a suggestion a few months ago for HN to feature a dedicated "customer-service-of-last-resort" section. I'd like to see that developed further.
I'm afraid I must disappoint you. We're never going to do that, because (1) it would go against what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and (2) we don't want to run a customer support forum for other people's products. That would be a circle of hell, and not an outer one.
Re "highly significant" discussions - this is an internet message board. The genre is transient and trivial, and as we know from McLuhan, that factor dominates any of the content channeling through it. That's why when people try to do "highly significant" things in internet threads, it always comes across as overblown and overwrought.