Comment by dang
5 months ago
Hmm we seem to be missing each other a bit here. My point is that I'm fine with this article being on the front page of HN today, and I'm not fine with it being at #1 or #2 on the front page. Both of those are moderation calls. Does that help clarify?
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.
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