This is a fast moving situation and is directly related to the industry. I’d like to see as many of them as is distinct and relevant.

I didn't know HN was biased like this, found out about this tweet on Reddit and was wondering why it wasn't front page here.

That 'bias' is part of the reason it has worked so well over the years.

I don't think anyone would consider hiding information about one of the largest and most well known tech platforms in the world to be an example of beneficial bias.

Yeah given paulg's tweets I'm wondering if our free speech absolutist view as a website, actually holds here.

dang has done a phenomenal job at moderating this site, and I trust his judgement. It is heavily moderated, and that's a good thing to keep it focused. Too much twitter drama would be lame. But this feels like an important moment.

I generally agree, but I also think that a certain subset of political beliefs get upvoted here that creates a real echo chamber, and that there's this idea of a "middle path" rationality that is assumed, but doesn't actually exist. It's a class of problem I think could be classified as a "I don't have an accent" problem. I wrote to dang directly about this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817

I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.

In my experience, you can post stuff that's politically as far left as it gets, so long as you phrase it politely.

I am deeply concerned that only one person is holding this ship on course, and that person's time is running out.

IIRC there’s more than one mod but dang is the most visible. sctb used to be another mod but it looks like he left in 2019.

It is?

(well I guess everyone's is)

I always found HN much more VCist than free speech. any comment criticizing plutocrats tends to get downvoted

Well HN is run by plutocrats. Who pay a lot of money to run the site. I’d rather have HN with this obvious bias than no HN at all.

This doesn't feel like an expensive site to host/develop, but the moderation costs might be up there.

It probably IS expensive to host because it’s written in a language no one uses without an optimizing compiler, and apprently most of the “db” is flatfiles on disk, some of which get read on every request.

Computers are fast. This isn't a particularly demanding workload; pages for users that aren't logged in are cached, and there probably aren't a ton of people logged in.

Last time I looked, Let's Encrypt had one big beefy Postgres database to issue pretty much every single TLS certificate on the Internet. Computers are fast.

You vastly underestimate how much impact ONE server can make if you don't use modern cloud garbage tech

its hosted on a single random server, so no, in absolute terms it very unlikely is expensive.

HN isn't that expensive to host. We have two servers at a colo and various backups to S3.

Now you’re getting somewhere. At this point HN has hundreds of undocumented features and isn’t the technical cakewalk you think but sure, factor out the tech part. Just do the math on moderation costs vs. revenue generated by text-only ads with zero visual distinction.

Moderation as good as HN would require at least 3 costly staffers, fully loaded cost something like $30K-$250K each, fully loaded depending on where they live.

If doing HN were easy there would be a dozen awesome competitors.

You are wrong on so many levels. HN IS the ad. The whole point of HN is to push VC narratives and "Greed is good" style things onto nerds and less-nerdy but more business hungry folks. It's not meant to generate any revenue at all, it's a marketing funnel.

Moderation is pretty much JUST dang.

HN DOES have competitors, lobste.rs is pretty much directly competing, and more importantly, this very concept of "simple board to post links and comment" was borrowed to build freaking REDDIT

Reddit predates HN by two years

You're right, but mrguyorama isn't wrong either since the same person came up with both ideas. They just had the time arrow reversed.

I know it might be hard to believe, but it's not the point of HN to push VC narratives or "greed is good". The strategy is much simpler and has a bunch of nice properties, one being that it works even better if you tell people what it is. It's simply to keep the community interested and happy. That's not easy, but it's the way to maximize HN's value—even if you look at it in the most self-interested way from YC's point of view.

I've written a bunch about this in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) read those explanations and end up still having a question which I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.

I've seen plenty such upvoted comments. By and large, what matters is the tone of criticism.

I assure you that HN has at least as many comments (actually far more) dissing VCs and plutocrats.

Your comment may be suffering from the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We're all far more likely to notice the shit we dislike.

Turn showdead in and tell me this website is a “free speech absolutist zone”.

I mean, subjectively most of those accounts deserve to be dead, but don’t pretend this is something it isn’t.

Unfortunately, hypocrisy is possible.

One interesting thing I heard recently was this idea that even in communities of the most rusted on free speech absolutists, there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why?

It's totally possible to believe that unrestricted free speech is the best policy and to also not implement that policy.

> there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why?

Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. Generally free speech maximalism is about allowing all controversial speech for various reasons which tend to include the importance of dissenting voices.

It's not that simple. A lot of censorship happens under the guise of "removing spam". For example, dang regularly censors HN comments promoting viewpoints he doesn't like by claiming that they are "flamebait" or similar, which is to say, if enough people dislike something then it is spam.

Doing it right requires the intellectual honesty to draw a line between these two comments: "lol hitler did nothing wrong gas the **s! 1488 woo!" and "Hitler did nothing but implement some social control policies which would be widely accepted in today's society, if presented differently."

I obviously don't agree with either sentence. But the second one should be permitted and vouched against downvotes while the first can be deleted without a second thought. Honesty required.

> Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them.

I'm pretty sure, looking at twitch chat, that this isn't universally true.

Then the next question is, if this supposed truism isn't universally true, what other moderation decisions and flagging, aren't?

>...Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant,

Free Speech absolutist don't put any concern the listener may have on the content, but the fact that the speaker is being prevented from distributing their message. Not to mention, one of the points cited by free speech absolutists is "who determines facts/truth/value" and who determines the entity who gets to do that. That means you can't make a judgement value about the spam being spam and have to treat it as something SOMEONE somewhere might desire.

"Let me turn on the built in way to see all the comments to prove that they don't support free speech!"

Hiding comments from 99.5% of users is functionally the same as deleting them.

HN is definitely not a free speech zone. It doesn't need to be, and I think they let a lot of legitimate discussions take place, but in no way shape or form is this a free speech discussion forum, it's a business (a I personally think a decently run one, as for moderation is very difficult).

Hmmm... good point. This is already at 63 points and nowhere to be seen on the homepage.

Normally the penality on Twitter links is such that a good number of upvotes can still rescue it; now, it seems that penality has changed and there's a very strong penalty, which I strongly disagree with given the industry impact of what's been happening at Twitter.

It's on the front page now, after 100 upvotes.

I agree that it's wrong to penalize these topics. I don't normally get caught up in the drama of the day, but this trainwreck has really gotten my attention. Whatever the outcome, these events are going to have a major effect on our industry and the broader economy. The reckless absurdity of it all makes it even more newsworthy; major developments have been happening almost daily.

It doesn't hurt that this episode has brought some friends around to agreeing with my dismal view of Elon :)

It is a little strange that I have seen almost no Twitter stories on the front page in the last week. Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be? Is it getting caught in the flamewar algorithm? Are they treating this as one big story so any individual article gets removed as a repost?

> Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be?

I’ve personally been visiting new and flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts I see (i started doing this after getting sick of all the Twitter/mastodon posts hitting the front page).

I don’t want the front page to be all Twitter all the time, and most of the posts boil down to speculation and gossip and the ones that don’t, usually don’t offer anything meaningfully new and interesting.

I suspect there are plenty of others like me.

Well, that is a misfortune for the rest of us who find it relevant.

The front page doesn’t need 5 posts from random people talking about how they’re moving to mastodon and boy isn’t toot such a weird name for tweets.

Likewise it doesn’t need continued speculation about what Elon really meant when he posted ‘blah blah blah’.

Substantive things will get through (this one did).

Yay Elon/Boo Elon drama won’t.

If you really need it, feel free to browse new yourself and vouch.

> The front page doesn’t need 5 posts from random people talking about how they’re moving to mastodon and boy isn’t toot such a weird name for tweets.

Nope, it doesn't.

> Substantive things will get through (this one did).

Are you only flagging the non-substantive things? Because that's not what you imply above ("flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts").

I flag almost everything I see, but I am just one vote.

If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter.

And it’s not like I have an army of bot accounts continually refreshing and flagging.

I’m just using my one vote to signify I’m not interested in hearing about Twitter drama.

HN downranks posts that get both a lot of flags AND a lot of votes so

>If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter.

Is just flat out wrong.

Thanks for the correction.

It still achieves my objective of less Twitter drama on the front page.

imron has it right on this point, because upvotes and flags are in a sort of tug-of-war. Minimal flags can't defeat maximal upvotes.

Speculation and gossip are annoying, but the actual things that are happening (and there are a lot of them) are worth keeping.

Agree. And substantive things (like this piece of news) make it through.

In principle, sure, but this submission and all the others I've seen is clearly in the "speculation and gossip" bucket. The only non-speculative information here, that Twitter offices are closed tomorrow, is moderately interesting at best and we can see upthread that nobody's really interested in talking about it except to feed tangential speculation.

I'm with you. I've seen some fairly low quality discussions on HN, many of which fixate on Musk. The Twitter situation is magnifying it to stupefying dimensions.

Are the goings on at Twitter relevant to "the industry"? Sure. But, the inability to have serious discussion about it speaks poorly of the those that populate that industry.

Somewhere between the 10,000th iteration of "see how billionaires are evil?", "see how Musk is a genius?", "see how Musk behaves badly?", and "Look at what's Musk accomplished?" nothing new is said. Anything novel or serious that does manage to pop-up gets drowned out in the sea of noise.

I join you in downvoting all of these. There are good discussions on HN, but these discussions are them.

You're right, and the people complaining are also right because the story does deserve oxygen—just not all the oxygen.

It's our job to balance this so that it gets some oxygen but not all the oxygen. The system tends not to be able to do this without human intervention—either the flags win (in which case the story gets smothered) or the upvotes win (in which case HN becomes Twittermusk News with a side dish of SBFTX). Human intervention is needed to keep the teeter-totter from tottering too far either way.

We're super open to user feedback about it. If you (or anyone) want to influence the balance, you should make your case to [email protected]. That's the only reliable message queue.

Thanks for all the work you (and other mods) do to keep things balanced.

I think for the most part it's been working well.

It would surely be the flame war algorithm. Throwing some numbers out there, would this be too exaggerated? There have been 30 stories this past fortnight here with over 700 comments, mostly repeating the same love/hate musk battleground playing out across every other website. I think it’s a very interesting topic that’s unfolding but if dang wants to limit the frenzy from consuming here as well I certainly understand.

It’s interesting, but if the discussion isn’t interesting it doesn’t work here and is better culled.

The comment threads in them are a train wreck.

Which would be apropos for the train wreck under discussion.

Hard disagree. I think the best discussions can be had with chaotic circumstances, because they provide a new surface for thought. A very small percentage of the comments in these threads are appropriate for HN [1]. These comment sections look like they're straight from reddit.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

they are heavily moderating it. I only saw a couple of front page stories last week, and these events have been headline news internationally.

i hope the reason is because of the risk of flamewars, rather than YC leadership's desire to protect the reputation of someone who is hagified in SV circles and currently crashing and burning very publicly.

I agree with you all that some of these Twitter/Musk deserve HN threads (though many don't). That said, it's a feature-not-a-bug that stories making "headline news internationally" don't automatically show up on HN.

Paul Graham and some of the YC partners have been surprisingly defensive of Musk's actions.

It's been massively disappointing to watch since Musk's behaviour has been abhorrent and has resulted in a lot of unnecessary hurt and despair for innocent employees. The same employees who may end up running future startups.

Lol one of his tweets aged well, https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961?s=20&t=...

Huh? You have no evidence either way yet.

Well we know that after an ultimatum, enough employees quit that Musk is now asking some of them to come back. The number of employees leaving is also so high, that they're shutting down access to offices. There's also been reports of features like 2FA not working anymore after the first round of layoffs.

Not exactly the results I'd expect from someone who really knows how to run a company.

If one of Musk's middle managers had messed up this badly, Musk would have fired them already. But Elon deserves the continued benefit of the doubt for some reason.

All that you've mentioned may or may not matter eventually but it's not any sort of evidence of how Twitter did. The only things that matter are revenue, expenses, and growth. This tweet was made two days ago and nothing has happened since to provide any sort of evidence of how these actually important factors will unfold. To say that this tweet has "aged badly" is just nonsense.

> The only things that matter are revenue, expenses, and growth.

So... not the general operability of the service?

Sheesh. First of all, we already know that because people have already died due to Tesla software not working right.

And second of all, he thinks Twitter can’t lead to deaths? Let’s say the Iranian government was given unfettered access to DMs and metadata for all Iranian citizens with an account. Not hard to imagine scenarios that end in death.

At first I thought paulg must have posted that weeks ago, but no, it's from yesterday. I wouldn't expect such a vote of confidence on Musk after all the data points we've received since he took over the company.

I'm not even sure what paulg's point is. Are people actually claiming they'd do a better job than Musk, or are they simply commenting on the missteps and bizarre behavior. You don't need to have run a successful tech company to know that spending your time as a CEO antagonizing your employees on social media, and then threatening your remaining employees with an ultimatum is not a good idea.

What's really weird is that he even pushes Musk's conspiracy theory that leftist activist groups are the reason advertisers are jumping off: https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1593297818420236288

"This Tweet is unavailable" - what did it (roughly) say?

> It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.

Then the next tweet says

> In both those companies, people die if the software doesn't work right. Do you really think he's not up to managing a social network?

Thanks!

I was able to view it in Incognito. Why- I don't know, it's been happening with many linked tweets lately as well.

It's remarkable that someone who's never run Twitter thinks he knows how to run Twitter better than the people who run Twitter.

It was a nice r/agedlikemilk candidate but they now have a no Musk rule (https://www.reddit.com/r/agedlikemilk/comments/yqclex/rule_1...)

when you spend your whole life acting like a genius because you made a bunch of money, then a richer guy shows how incorrect that is, you are going to squirm.

There were already dozens of Russian oligarchs with net worth exceeding PG's. I don't think anyone is conflating wealth with genius or wisdom.

Half this comment section is people going "Nonono elon couldn't be dumb, there must be some angle to this". It's the american way to call a rich person smart and a smart person a threat.

> Paul Graham and some of the YC partners have been surprisingly defensive of Musk's actions.

Thing is, I agree that Twitter needed to be shaken up. But, Musk has made the wrong choices every step of the way. It's like he's giving a masterclass on how to be a terrible leader. It's amazing the miscalculations Musk has made. First, his longest tenure, most experience employees likely just got a huge payday on their stock/options - so of course they will peace out. Second, his antics are driving up the price of hiring new employees. Third, Musk still had a lot of goodwill before taking ownership that he's now squandered. I could go on...

The only thing I can think is he looked hard at the financials and the debt load he saddled the company with and panicked.

A lot are getting caught in the flamewar algorithm and/or being flagged by users. Moderation basically goes by these principles:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

or skip them if you see twitter in the title?

It's on the front page for me (as of 9:19PM EST, #19)

Number 29th as of November 18th, 8:08AM EST

This is an actual historical event in regards to the web. This story will live on.

Dang is too busy playing enlightened centrist to have anything meaningful to contribute here.

Ouch. I don't mind so much when people call me 'SJW cunt' and 'literal fascist' but 'centrist' gets my goat. Now you know my terrible secret.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxYl5EzNG3Q

It’s all ass pained kvetching.

The current thread ended up spending 10 hours on HN's front page. IIRC it was flagged by users and we restored it. I didn't see your comment till just now. (@dang doesn't do anything—if you or anyone want to tell me something, the reliable message queue is [email protected].)

I agree that this is a major ongoing topic (MOT) and needs to be discussed. At the same time, so many of the submissions are repeats of things already posted. This is a classic situation that comes up a few times a year (the FTX saga is another going on right now).

Obviously some of the gazillion Twittermusk stories contain SNI [1], and some (most) are just follow-ups [2] or repetitive angerwars, and we have to make a distinction between the two or HN's frontpage will consist of nothing but.

With user flags and the flamewar detector also downranking stories, it's possible for this strategy to get overapplied, in which case a MOT ends up getting insufficient oxygen. That's not good for HN either! It isn't because of sinister plutocracy or anything like that—it's a failure mode of the strategy I just described. User pushback is helpful!

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

p.s. HN has worked this way for a long time - coming up on a decade now: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

As elsewhere in this thread, I think you all do a great job juggling a bunch of different factors. Thank you!

I really appreciate that, considering that the two of us have been arguing (nicely!) about these things since long before I was dang. Thank you as well!

Dang, what is the deal with accounts being unfairly blocked from submitting links? And can mods apply this punishment arbitrarily?

Some accounts are allowed to submit links frequently, even a few minutes between submissions, while other accounts are being blocked from submitting and can only do so once every few or 24 hours. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." Is this some type of new punitive action?

It also looks very unfair, when applied to accounts that are clearly not spammers (and maybe submit a few times in a day or week) or appears as a punitive action because of some difference of opinion with a mod.

We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars, as your account did recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33578462.

I see. Have to avoid the low quality comments and involvement in flamewars. The original comment was removed as well, in addition to the ones after and before the one linked. Understood.