dang, if you are reading this, please take a moment to seriously consider the actions you have taken today. I understand your desire for the community that Hacker News could be, but that is so far away from what it is today that it's almost laughable. Yes, this is a no-win situation but that's bascially how it is globally when trying to be centerist about any issue. I use Hacker News referers to change the page slightly (mostly to add a deserved "hey, can you please not be an asshole, thanks" via this code: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/686cc58fb6fc8f2e3bf0197e9b38...) and I would be very frustrated if that went away. Maybe even to the point of having a worker process figure out if my articles are posted to hacker news and making them go dark if they are on the front page. I know you value the articles I post (as our email threads have contained), but really it's an abuse vector that I need to keep metrics of.
Website administrators should be allowed to block Hacker News referers. Yes this is a thing that is not desirable for you as an administrator, but at some level something's got to give. The enshittening of Hacker News is something that is very undesirable for me too. I've gone over this in our emails. This was going to be another one of those emails, but I really would prefer this one to be out in the open.
As far as i can tell the problem you have with HN is that if one of your blog posts makes the front page you get idiots making shitty comments about you in the HN comments, right?
Do your posts get discussed anywhere else (reddit?), and if so how how does it compare?
But it's relevant to the point I'm making.
This is a thoughtful, carefully-worded argument that has been repeatedly upvoted and downvoted (the downvotes seem to come in pairs -- admin action?)
The moderation of this comment allows anonymous people, lurking in the shadows, to make decisions about what other people read, with no accountability or consequence.
It is forbidden to talk about the moderation decisions, yet the moderation game mechanic is, in 2023, no longer fit-for-purpose, given the new realities of the political climate. The moderation mechanic is the story, and is no longer able to provide fair, reasonable, accountable crowdsourced moderation. A relic of less polarized times.
Prophecy: Hacker News will either change, or perish. The usual deal, presented to organisms and organizations alike.
Preserving its heirloom-varietal forum interface into the coming decade will be popular (in a decade increasingly stricken with nostalgia,) but also lethal.
Thus, I predict the demise of Hacker News.
The website will of course persist for as long as it remains useful to Y Combinator, but as the natural center-of-gravity for all of tech culture? Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei.
Thought experiment. Suppose there was a planet, and on this planet, there is a population which is 90% left-handed and 10% right-handed. Left-handed people on this planet are intensely uncomfortable and disinterested in having anything to say, do, or hear with right-handers, and on public forums, where they have equal votes, they systematically silence, erase, and downvote any comments that even so much as hint at the existence of left-handed people. When this is pointed out, someone shrugs, and says, well, I guess people are not that interested in right-handed people.
Meanwhile, every other article, for months at a stretch, is vile slander about a supposed surge in right-handedness.
I claim that would still be an unjust state of affairs, and would still be broken moderation, even if a majority of people on this fictitious planet's Internet were happy with the arrangement.
Minority rights are a thing, you understand? There is such a thing as a tyranny of the majority. It is solely addressable through enlightened moderation that seeks to protect minority voices.
That's why "The hard part is convincing others what you want to say is what they want to see here." It's not that they need to read everything, it's that they need to see those things they typically want to ignore as something worth them spending time on. No amount of moderation will make people spend time reading things they aren't interested in reading. Part of this is you end up with communities with different focus, and that's usually the way these kinds of differences co-exist in the same world at scale. Once the communities get large enough, they are in some way forced to find neutral ways to interact. Typically this happens more in the real world than on the internet.
The only time this really breaks is when the divider isn't related to content, rather some arbitrary attribute unrelated to it. E.g. if a conversation about the best quality paints ignores someone because of their handedness. The content of what they were saying had nothing to do with the exclusion so people want to protect against those kind of exclusions. The same feeling does not extend to those that want to bring a content reason for exclusion into the conversation, e.g. someone that constantly talks about how paint is a conspiracy by $BigCorp and can't talk about paint without always bringing it up. In that case the person needs to find people interested in talking about $BigCorp paint conspiracies, not a moderator to force people to listen to them.
HN, like much of the culture, has undergone a rightward lurch over the past few years.
It was especially bad about a year ago -- every other post was some anti-woke screed. Seems to have levelled off in recent months, albeit at a subtle cost: anything "political" is shadow-banned, and what counts as "political" is basically, "dang will be yelled at if this stays up." Which, of course, hands the de-facto definition of "political" over to the very people doing the yelling.
My best guess is that HN became too attractive as a pool of recruitable eyeballs for a community-based content moderation system to maintain homeostasis. Folks on HN tend to be well-heeled, thoughtful, articulate, and prone to fads ('fads' here being used non-pejoratively, to denote a naturally-occurring artifact of successful discourse.) In other words, they are the perfect audience for anyone with a platform.
Why? Because convincing ten randos on HN of the legitimacy of an idea or stance likely has a real-world impact equivalent to convincing a thousand people on, say, Reddit. Measure the impact however you like: readership, political donations, voting patterns, comment sentiment. We're high-value. To pols of all stripes, we're like the pretty girl at the rave: a first-choice target for ideological pick-up artists.
So of course, the mods try to keep a lid on the whole anti-pattern, lest it corrupt the possibility of community. Hence the new-ish HN posting guidelines: we are to avoid anything that "tramples curiosity." But whose curiosity? And who gets to say when it has been trampled? The problem persists at one remove.
The moral of the story is that there is no safe space from the culture wars, and any space that appears safe is necessarily already politicized, because the effort taken to tamp down conflict is itself a potent political speech-act, as it must necessarily refer to what needs tamping-down.
It's 2023 and the Anglosphere just cannot have nice things. Sorry.