https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326953 is grey (i.e <=0 karma). my top-level comment is at 14 karma. we posted within 15 minutes of each other. their comment is higher up the page. ive never seen something like that before.
the two posts calling out unethical behavior have been living at the bottom of this post the entire time, until a couple of actually [flagged] comments ended up under them.
i do not care about the karma itself, at all. but i do care to know if launch/show posts have comment sections with cherry-picked ordering or organic ordering.
edit 2: i am at 19 points, and now below two grey (<=0 karma) comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47326455). whats up dang?
edit 3 (~1 hour later): you've responded to a handful of other comments and ignored this one as it becomes more and more evident that someone has artificially ordered the comments to ensure that critical comments are at the bottom of the page. it has shattered my perception of show/launch posts to know that you manually curate the comments to form a specific narrative. i really (naively) thought you guys were much more neutral about that sort of thing.
I hadn't seen this until 30 seconds ago. The assumption of moderator omniscience leads to a lot of mistaken conclusions!
Sure, we marked the offtopic comments offtopic, which lowers them on the page. This is standard HN moderation. If we didn't do this, then nearly every thread would be choked with something offtopic at the top.
At the same time, we haven't killed the posts or put them in a "stub for offtopicness" [1] like we otherwise would. They're still here for people who want to read them, while at the same time the main discussion can be about the main topic, which is the startup launch.
HN is actively moderated and always has been. Downweighting offtopic/generic comments is one of the biggest things we've ever discovered for improving the quality of the threads. For us it's about the quality of the site as a whole, not specific narratives, but of course everyone can (and will) make up their own mind about this. What I can tell you is (a) the way we do these things has been stable for a long time (HN time is measured in decades, not years), and (b) we're always willing to answer questions about it.
Oh, and (3) - when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story, then we moderate less than we otherwise would [2]. We do still moderate, though—we just do it less.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
But if I may ask, doesn't the policy of moderate less not more your (3) point opposite to what you said about offtopic from how I perceive it?
> Sure, we marked the offtopic comments offtopic, which lowers them on the page. This is standard HN moderation. If we didn't do this, then nearly every thread would be choked with something offtopic at the top.
>Oh, and (3) - when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story, then we moderate less than we otherwise would [2]. We do still moderate, though—we just do it less.
I would suggest that the minor disagreements that we have is because these two points seem contradictory to me from how I perceive it. I would suggest (if possible) to moderate less as you mention not more and let the order of ranking be natural which in this case might be that john's comments can come at the first place for example. Because you are moderating it by putting it into downweighting it and that's one of the concerns that we sort of have.
Thoughts?
especially when that company wants you to curl | bash their code onto your machine -- potential users deserve to know that despite being a YC-backed company (which would typically be a positive indicator, people may reduce their scrutiny) that they have been caught scraping data they shouldnt be, and then using that data for marketing, and refuse to respond to anyone who bring it up.
but it is your world and i am just living in it, so i will carry on. i appreciate that you did not collapse them.
Clearly I am not the only one here as john_strinlai here seems to have had somewhat of the same conclusion as me.
Dang I know you care about this community so can you please talk more what you think about this in particular as well.
I understand that YC companies get preferential treatment, Fine by me. But this feels something larger to me
I have written everything that I could find in this thread from the same post being shown here 3 days ago in anywhere.ai link to now changing to github to skirt off HN rule that same link can't be posted in short period of time and everything.
This feels somewhat intentional just like the spam issue, I hope you understand what I mean.
(If you also feel suspicious, Can you then do a basic analysis/investigiation with all of these suspicious points in mind and everything please as well and upload the results in an anonymous way if possible?)
I wish you to have a nice day and waiting for your thoughts on all of this.
If https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47327129 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328465 don't answer your questions, can you maybe try picking the most important question and making it as specific as you can? Then I can take a crack at that and we can go from there.