Please don't do this here. If a comment seems unfit for HN, please flag it and email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can have a look.

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barrkel 4 days ago | parent [-]

I understand where you're coming from, but there's also value in setting norms publicly, especially at times like these, at inflection points. The loud point and stare can have a bigger effect on behavior than the quiet disappearance of a message here and there.

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tomhow 4 days ago | parent [-]

I know, and it's an ongoing and developing issue for us to manage and find ways of addressing, knowing that it's only going to get harder.

Our position now (as always) is that the negative consequences of a false accusation outweigh the benefit of a valid accusation. We don't want to be a site that shames people or piles on. We can't really know what people are thinking when they post a comment, or why they might use a tool to generate or improve it. Downvoting and flagging are strong enough signals, and do enough to hide the comment if others agree that's what should happen, and that's what happened here. It's good to email us so we can see if there's a pattern of behaviour we need to know about so we can penalize or ban the account or take some other appropriate action once we can see the full picture.

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barrkel 3 days ago | parent [-]

I understand. However, I interpret your statement as coming from your position: as a moderator, with a job to do as a curator of a community.

How does the community learn what to flag?

It's not about piling on. You can fix disruptive behaviour by picking off remarkably few individuals, but that behaviour is easy to classify. Everybody knows what a troll looks like. But you can't teach a community what is generally acceptable and unacceptable within the culture of the community without a conversation in public.

Consider two forms of justice for a new rule: one day, it becomes illegal to smoke in restaurants.

In the first form of justice, in the interest of avoiding pile-ons and vigilantism, secret police turn up at your home in the evening and confiscate your cigarettes, or fire you from your job, or simply disappear you. The right way to deal with smoking isn't to say anything in public; it's to inform your friendly secret police and they'll deal with it. They'll look for a pattern and they'll decide the punishment. The offender gets fixed. The decision isn't public, so it can't be criticized either. If a few visiting foreigners also get abducted because they didn't know what the norm was, well, tough.

In the other form, justice must not only be done, but it must be seen to be done. The conversation happens in public. Everyone is empowered to teach everyone else about norms. A friendly word to the folks from out of town let's them know what's what. The community finds its own level of comfort for where the boundaries are. Not everyone is happy, but everybody can see what's going on.

Now I'm not saying you're like secret police. You do however have a similar working model. You're not accountable to the community and you want to make decisions in private without any second-guessing. You mean well. But your tools are more suited to dealing with trolls than finding and socially enforcing community norms. I don't envy you. I would not like to be a moderator.

Best of luck.

	▲	tomhow 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Now I'm not saying you're like secret police. You do however have a similar working model. You're not accountable to the community... We're nothing at all if not accountable to the community; our number one guiding principle in moderation decisions is to keep earning the trust of the HN community. Things like this can be blown up to seem as sinister as someone wants, including invoking imagery of "secret police" operating covertly. That's never how we've operated. Right from the time he took over HN, dang has gone to great lengths to explain moderation decisions and actions, and I follow his lead on that. There was a case a few weeks ago where I engaged publicly in conversation with the author and other community members about the perception that a post was LLM-generated, and other cases where I've commented in response to clearly-LLM-generated comments, and we'll continue doing that. All we're talking about right now is community members taking it upon themselves to publicly accuse a commenter of LLM-generated comments before we've had a chance to investigate. It falls into the same category as accusing users of "astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like" – which is explicitly against the guidelines. As I said in my previous comment, the harm caused by false allegations outweighs the benefit of valid allgations, and the established processes are perfectly adequate to deal with valid cases.