Issuing warnings or reminding people of the guidelines (rules) is also part of being a moderator, so the moniker is perfectly cromulent to describe dang's role
The other reason I think "admin" is a much better word is that it much more clearly indicates that this is a special, privileged role. That vast majority of "moderation" on HN is done by normal users with upvotes, downvotes and flagging (and also, of course, by automated systems e.g. with spam filters/bot detection).
But again, my primary point is that I see users blaming "the mods" for why their post is downvoted or hidden, when usually it's that people just don't want to acknowledge that the community, at large, didn't think they were contributing productively to the discourse of the site.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-does-cromulent...
This is far more control than reddit mods have. Reddit mods have one ability, an that is the ability to remove or not remove a submission, which is a very public action. HN can put its finger on the scales in a way that is much more subtle.
Your account can also be effectively shadowbanned with everything you submit going straight to the “dead” pile. Again no explanation and the only way you realize it is cause your submissions slowly die with no comments (and when you view the site in a non logged in fashion your submissions are not there)
There are some weird edge cases, like sometimes a banned user, once they're unbanned, will revert to posting abusively. Then we ban them again and they revert to posting good comments again. Who can fathom the psyche of homo internetus.
It's also common for an account to post both fine comments and abusive comments. It's the latter that determine whether we have to ban the account—that's how rule enforcement works. But if a banned account posts something good, there's no reason why the good post needs to remain [dead]. This is what vouching is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.
I'm going to contact the moderation indeed, it's the first time I was seeing non-spam comments being shadow banned automatically.
The behaviour of the account holder.
Unfortunately we don’t and we just have to trust dang and the benevolent hacker news gods to always have our best interests at heart and only spam us with the content that they want to spam us with and of course their friends and insiders content which we should be grateful to be spammed with.
This is not hard to figure out plus when it was frequent, they did.
> Hacker News currently has one full time moderator: Dan Gackle (dang), and formerly Scott Bell (sctb). Their comment replies provide a pseudo-log of Hacker News moderation.
I've never seen an anyone else besides dang comment that they are an HN admin in the past 5-ish years or so.
Speculation/intuition, but I figure it happens in ways specifically designed to evade the type of detection you're basing your claim on, akin to shadow banning, whereas on Reddit there's often more visible evidence like corpses of deleted comments.
The reason this is a pet peeve of mine is I often see people complaining about "the HN moderators" (e.g. "the HN mods are on a power trip and keep flagging my submissions!" or some such), where they are clearly taking this conceptual model from Reddit, and they seem to think there is a shadowy cabal of "mods" who control what gets downvoted/flagged (and, in fairness, this does and can happen in subreddits). In other words, when you see your submissions being flagged or comments being downvoted or flagged, 99.9% of the time it's not "the HN mods" who are downvoting you. It's just other, normal HN users (who have earned 501+ karma as TFA explains) who simply don't like what you have to say.
Not saying dang never blocks users/comments, but it's exceedingly rare and I've only seen it for the most obnoxiously egregious behavior after (usually multiple) warnings.