We spent a huge amount of time on the Cloudflare blog making sure that it was precisely not a marketing outlet but technical. I think that's why it took off here. And we were/are very honest about when we had/have problems* and use simple, clear language. I personally spent/spend hours per day editing/writing for the blog.

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30069658

"One of the smartest decisions we made at @Cloudflare was recognizing that the primary purpose of our blog was attracting employees, not attracting customers."

The Geek Atlas is one of my favorite books by anybody, BTW.

Paul Graham, Patrick Collison and Vitalik Buterin all have this ability to express ideas in an extremely deep yet clear and concie way.

It's one thing to do this individually, but what amazes me is their ability to scale out this communication sty;e to their entire organization. If you read any of the blog posts by YC, Stripe and the Ethereum Foundation you'll understand what I mean. You can also see how it stands so far ahead of most other companies.

A recent example that comes to mind for anyone interested: Ethereum Foundation's blog post explaining why they're moving away from calling their upgrades "Eth2"and just calling it "Eth" instead.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2022/01/24/the-great-eth2-renaming...

As a founder myself, I really want to figure out the tactics to scaling clear and effective communication to an entire team.

I'd love to read more on this topic - how companies learn to do this, and then go about establishing it internally, so that it becomes part of their brand and culture.

I looked into whether it was employees doing the flagging, but I didn't include that in the GP because I can't tell for sure who was or wasn't an employee. What I did find is that of the flaggers, most haven't ever voted for a stripe.com submission (before or since). There were two flaggers who have voted for quite a few stripe.com submissions, but not enough to trigger any manipulation detectors. They both had voted for many thousands of submissions over many years, so I didn't find any evidence of abuse. In the case of one of those two users, there is a bio in the profile which makes it seem unlikely that they worked for Stripe. In the case of the other one, I don't have any info.

FWIW, looking at the flagging data on that post pattern-matched to 'normal' in my brain, not to 'suspicious'. I realize that won't (and shouldn't) carry any weight for users who aren't already inclined to trust what I'm saying, but (a) we do have a ton of experience looking at suspicious voting and flagging patterns, and (b) it's true, so I figure I might as well say it.

Edit: I just thought of another way to investigate this, which I overlooked earlier: I looked at everything else that those users had flagged. That was easy enough, because none of them has flagged more than a few dozen submissions over the years. There were no other cases of people flagging Stripe-related submissions, except for this one, which was a pro-Stripe story:

Stripe has democratised online payments and reshaped the digital economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18153909 - Oct 2018 (43 comments)

- This is your job and from everything I see you already put a whole lot of thought into it and I don't think I can outsmart you here.

- IMO things have become better the last decade so it seems to me some adjustments (either technical or in the user base) have already happened. [1]

That said, maybe we as a community could become even better at not flagging things that others enjoy?

[1]: alternative explanation, I've learned to look at /active instead

If I hadn't checked /active today I would have missed the story about Google classifying 1 and 0 as copyrighted.

Is there a reason why flagging that story shouldn't count as abusing flags?

It is just that I spend quite a lot of time on HN and I missed it until I checked /active.

So either I didn't notice it at first or I had a 13 hour break from HN ;-)

That said, doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days? Am I mistaken? (And if not - do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this one?)

It's actually kind of a shocking exercise to do, because it brings home how there is no "real" HN - we all think we're seeing "the" front page, but it's a Heraclitus (Heraclitian?) river.

> doesn't some stories with a 5-600 hundred upvotes linger on the front page for days?

That should be very rare. The software downweights any story that has been on the front page for more than 15 hours, unless we specifically tell it not to (which we might do if the community was particularly enjoying it). If the upvotes are massive enough, a story can linger on the front page despite that penalty, but then moderators will notice it and push it below the front page.

> do you have time to explain why I can find a <700 points story here the next day but not this one?

I have time, but I don't understand the question!

I have realized I was probably wrong again ;-)

Given the quotes it seems poster was aware that the word wasn't perfect.

I'd try something along the lines of "I guess the word you are looking for here is fraudulent or abusive".

I am surprised so many people decided to flag a post just because it is Enterprisy. It may also be the case some people create account for submission, voting and flagging purposes. And only participate in minor discussions to gain / wash karma points.

I have a theory which I didn't post yesterday because it's speculation—but it's speculation that fits my intuition about how HN works, so maybe I'll share it in case anyone's interested.

I speculate that some users upvoted Bolt's post because they thought it would be funny to see "How Bolt does fraud detection better" in a cage match with Stripe's "Improved fraud prevention" on the front page at the same time, as briefly happened—see #5 and #6 here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180418212112/https://news.ycom.... In other words, classic internet drama.

The two titles are so similar that I wonder if Bolt had seen Stripe's post on the front page and rushed their article out to challenge it with that baity title. (If you look at https://web.archive.org/web/20180418211511/https://blog.bolt..., you'll see that the article itself had a completely different title.) That would certainly have been clever! Either that or it was just a coincidence, but either way, some users would have seen both, would have found the collision hilarious, and would have upvoted for that reason.

Since that has nothing to do with article quality, you would expect other users to then see the article on the front page, go "WTF is this doing on HN", and flag it. This is standard HN dynamics: baity title -> upvotes -> annoyed users -> flags. That's how the front page operates all day.

If this is what happened, then Bolt only made HN's front page in the first place because Stripe's article was already there—which would add considerable irony to yesterday's antics.

I agree and speculate the same as well. Although I generally do upvote post that gives different opinion on the subject. In the hope that HN's view does not become monolithic.

Dang you should really write a book on how to moderate Internet discussion.

I assume the accounts in this flagging event were otherwise active and "healthy"? On Reddit, accounts are created years in advance so they seem legitimate when put to use for nefarious purposes later on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741485

I was told the reason for the orange username was so that we didn't start a fight with other YC alums, which would have been awkward back when the community was only a few hundred people.

I'm stealing this lol

Everyone knows that the best pr strategy when your being attacked by someone who's claims appear true to anyone who has their eyes open is to keep quiet and let it pass, instead you blew this up.

I now believe them. Congratulations.

The stuff about YC in general and Stripe in general I left out, partly because it's not my purview and partly because there's nothing concrete there.

Perhaps one day I will be zen enough to let false accusations fly by as I abide in bliss. Not there yet.

"Someone can disprove specific claims with hard evidence, but because they did so, the original claim must be accurate."

I don't think "everyone knows" that if a post making baseless claims about you is going viral, and you have concrete proof to dismiss some of the claims, that you should just "keep quiet."

Perhaps in some cases, perhaps not in others.

In this case, the integrity of this forum was called into question, and I think a transparent response is warranted and effective.

But... to each their own.

I still think anything about PR erode our society in general. We prefer to hide, avoid telling the truth and discard any transparency.

I welcome the well formulated argument of dang. It contains his point of view and multiple missing facts about the situation.

By having both point of view and the different fact we can make our own mind about the situation. This is what critical thinking is about.

YC can earn a lot more by funding competition and has a lot to lose from the community from mistreating competition or favoriting others.

I also haven't seen any evidence suggesting any.

At a scale of funding hundreds of companies/year, nothing will go perfect all the time either, i suppose.

Fyi: long time HN reader, Belgium, not affiliated and received a ( correct ) ban from dang one time ;)

If I try to argue about 11 things I'm not an expert on, it should downweight _my_ arguments on the 1 thing I actually know about.

Moderators get involvedin flagged articles on their own initiative all the time. Inaction is a form of action.

> He's clearly insinuating that we use insider powers to favor stripe.com submissions with special treatment on HN. That's precisely what we don't do.

You've admitted on multiple occasions that you intentionally choose to do specific things depending on the content, its authors, and the users. I'm not sure special treatment is even a concept that applies; everything mods do or don't do is special treatment because it's all based on instinct and whim, not some unbiased algorithm (and algorithms have bias too)

> Stripe succeeded on HN because they were favored by the community for many years. They are one of a small number of startups who have reached what you could call 'community darling' status

And that status comes from being coached in how to become a community darling. And from YC loving on Stripe, which the "community" is naturally biased towards. If jgc takes a dump, it gets upvoted. So backing Stripe in any way buys them a part of the community.

Whatever you believe, at least recognize that you don't have to consciously choose to favor someone for it to influence your actions subconsciously. That's the entire idea behind bias in hiring and cultural stereotype. The effect is real and it effects everyone, even yourselves at HN. If you haven't observed it, you're not looking for it.

When I said moderators didn't do anything, I meant we didn't penalize the post or override any of the software affecting its rank (or anything else). I was not talking about Sartrean inaction, which ontologically is also action.

Sometimes we do specific things, depending on...things? Who doesn't "admit" that? Everything the mods do is special treatment? Not following you. Instinct? Yes. Whim? No.

Stripe wasn't coached in how to become a community darling. At least I never saw that. They were just really good at making products, writing, and interacting with the community. Is the community naturally biased towards YC? In some ways yes and in other ways biased against - it's complicated. jgc (assuming you mean jgrahamc of Cloudflare) is not part of a YC startup, so I assume that's actually a counterexample.

Unconscious bias? I strongly agree. But if you're making some specific point about it, I'd like to hear something specific—otherwise it seems kind of hand-wavey.