Re:Ask HN: Why was this Airbnb HN post that hit 15 votes in ...
by dang on Saturday March 28, 2020 @03:25PM
(#22713681)
> I think all moderation activity should be transparent to the users of the community
It's a reasonable thing to think, and a lot of people do, but the worry is that a full moderation log would lead to reams more meta-discussion and litigation, which would amount to a DoS attack on the limited resources we have. That is, resources which ought to go into making the site better for everyone would get squandered answering objections from the litigious sort of users who make two new objections for every answer you give them. That would be a catastrophic outcome, not only because of the DoS aspect, not only because those users are a tiny minority, but because of what it would do to moderator morale, which is precarious to begin with and could easily tip into burnout.
That doesn't mean we don't care about transparency—we do! We always answer users' questions. We just do it on an ad hoc basis rather than with a bureaucratic system.
It's a reasonable thing to think, and a lot of people do, but the worry is that a full moderation log would lead to reams more meta-discussion and litigation, which would amount to a DoS attack on the limited resources we have. That is, resources which ought to go into making the site better for everyone would get squandered answering objections from the litigious sort of users who make two new objections for every answer you give them. That would be a catastrophic outcome, not only because of the DoS aspect, not only because those users are a tiny minority, but because of what it would do to moderator morale, which is precarious to begin with and could easily tip into burnout.
That doesn't mean we don't care about transparency—we do! We always answer users' questions. We just do it on an ad hoc basis rather than with a bureaucratic system.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...