Tell HN: Announcing tomhow as a public moderator

When I've found myself being publicly tsk'ed by the people around me, I've taken a moment to try go figure out why they disapprove of what I'm saying. It's been a useful life exercise.

Yeah the flagging is definitely much worse than it used to be. I’ve seen very legitimate LLM critical posts with lots of upvotes and comments flagged

A political talking point can be nationally popular but still political, so, outside the scope of the site.

Anyway, which nation? I think we also aren’t allowed to push Communist party talking points here, despite that party being highly supported in some countries (not that I’d want to, just saying, nationally popular doesn’t mean much).

I understand, and lament, that the world is so polarised these days. There's a limit to what we in this little corner of the web can do to correct such powerful global macro trends, but we'll continue to try our best.

If you see things that are unfairly flagged, you can email us and we'll look at them. As long as comments/submissions are within the guidelines, we'll restore them.

We want HN to be a place where people can discuss contentious topics. This is a major reason why I've moved into an expanded role here. I think HN has been, and can continue to be, one of the better places on the internet for discussing contentious topics.

The thing to remember is the guiding principle of HN is curiosity. This place is not meant to be for ideological battle, or for trying to win arguments. It's for conversations where we can learn from each other about things we're curious about.

I've always liked to learn about the opposing side of whatever position I hold. That's why I've found HN to be so valuable, and I want it to be a place people to come to for that reason for many years into the future.

Flags are issued by regular users like us though. What do you expect a moderator to do, except maybe manually intervene to "un dead" something if it seems like a case of overly biased flagging? That's assuming mods have the ability to do that (I've always assumed that they do).

> I've seen positive news about Musk and his companies get quickly flagged and squirreled away.

Huh, I always thought it was the other way around. Anything negative about Musk also gets quickly flagged and buried. I guess we can agree that Musk is currently a lightning rod, and brigades on both sides are acting to hide (positive and negative) coverage of his actions.

Some valid threads will get flagged because the comment section will be extremely predictable flame wars and have nothing to do with the article. That's the nature of social media. People can't help themselves. There's plenty of other social media sites for that sort of sports team drumbeating, so not much is lost by flagging some news article off the frontpage.

I hope people don't get punished for flagging Musk appreciation content. There's a lot that can be wrong with such submissions (cultism, uncritical praise, excessive volume, lack of substance, etc.).

I will assist in reporting brigading leftist commenters. There are many of us that want to see politics out of commentary when unnecessary.

You should supply links to whatever accounts you had that were banned, so readers can make up their own minds about what happened and how fair or unfair we were.

When someone makes claims about how they were unfairly treated, but won't let people look at the actual situation, that's sort of a tell. If the mods had actually treated them so badly, you can be sure that it would be pointed to with neon hypertext.

upvoted.. not because I agree, but because dissent has to be tolerated in a civil society.

I would like to see more discussion on HN around topics that seem unpopular here, and are perhaps politically divisive .. such as : economic inequality, climate change, demographic crunch

Somewhere between the prevailing economic malaise, cynicism and despair ... and tech-bro fan-boi greedy optimism : there might be a middle way where we can use the new technologies of AI to actually improve our lives and create wide wealth generation, and more prosperity for the middle class.

dang is Canadian.