To me, HN is not hostile toward new users. But part of what makes HN HN is it discourages behaviors new users might bring from elsewhere on the internet when those behaviors are disharmonious with the norms of the HN community. This is how new users acculturate into HN. Or how new users discover HN might not be for them. Or what might stay the determination that it is or isn’t.

HN hasn’t been turning into Reddit for a long while because sometimes the moderators make comments like this and the community goes “Okay” because they value the community and can see the moderator’s point and those matter more than typing something easy to type because it is all over Twitter.

More seriously, if HN’s moderation conflicts with your deeply held principles, HN might not be for you. Like any social media that makes someone unhappy, a voluntary break, temporary or complete, may be warranted.

HN is not going to suddenly become a democracy or collective. Moderation is a big part of what makes HN HN.

I think you're underestimating the ability of HN readers to figure things out. Perhaps that is the answer to both questions.

For what it’s worth I agree with the parent comment. This is the only forum I’ve ever seen where moderators are not clearly labeled as such.

But you never present how that’s a problem. You’d be succumbing to the ancient forum pastime of hypothetical rules/scenarios lawyering where you confuse the ability to invent a scenario (someone not knowing dang is a mod for 60seconds and that’s worth worrying about for unsaid reason) with the need to change the forum.

fwiw, it's just dang as far as I'm aware.

Curious are there other more significant differences?

This equivalent of "RTFM" is a hostile percept for communication, as it implies that it is right to hide or obfuscate relevant information so that the speaker has less of a job to do when producing clear speech.

There are benefits to "RTFM". They may involve making sure there are shared assumptions during speech that allow further speech to be economized equitably between speaker and receiver. They may involve the internalization of the structure of a model so that they it be applied fluently in some practical setting. Your suggestion fails to satisfy either condition as the cost is either inequitable, or the benefit is irrelevant.

Putting a tag that says "moderator" next to a username is such a cheap quality of life improvement that even if what you claim is true, it really shouldn't be the job of the audience to figure anything out in the first place, as by comparison, it looks like a strong disfavor.

> it really shouldn't be the job of the audience to figure anything out in the first place

Words to avoid living by.

Things can be made endlessly complicated, or absolutely simple. So it's better to lean towards simplicity as one can converge towards minimal confusion.

Oh I don't agree. I think there are downsides to putting a 'mod' tag beside usernames, quite strong downsides actually, in addition to the upside that you guys are correctly noting. It's a tradeoff. I'm glad that I listened to my intuition 7 years ago (ack) when I became responsible for HN, and chose to trust the way things had always functioned here.

I don't see this as RTFM; there's no FM to begin with, other than perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

> Oh I don't agree. I think there are downsides to putting a 'mod' tag beside usernames, quite strong downsides actually

What are those 'downsides....quite strong downsides actually'?

It would change the feeling in the community. It would introduce barriers in communication that would make it harder to relate. It would fuck with the psychology of both moderators and non-moderators, the same way that uniforms do. It would turn the mods into abstractions/roles rather than human beings. It would infect HN with that priggish approach to authority which appeals to the smallminded and depresses creativity. It would signal lack of trust. It would demoralize any moderator who didn't have the soul of a meter maid.