> 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.