Two HN Announcements

This is exciting! I look forward to seeing the vouch feature in action. I notice a certain classes of stories regularly being flagged off the homepage, mainly those that deal with racism or sexism in the tech community. Being able to rescue quality stories on those topics should provide some interesting fodder for discussion.

I'd like to be optimistic. Yet the issue I experience with stories on those topics is that the discussions tend to attract trolling behavior and the exact sort of expressions of outrage that behavior seeks to evoke. To me, the quality issue isn't the story. It's the counterproductive comments.

Oftentimes racism or sexism topics aren't flagged off the homepage, but subject to decreasing rank based on comment activity. Lots of comments -> likely flame wars, or so the argument goes.

Vouching won't change how those topics are treated. And to be honest, I don't know that I mind. HN has a problem discussing sexism in a nontoxic way. I accept the argument that sexism in particular should be a banned HN topic (the way politics is) for the sake of healthy discourse.

Now I think that the conversation on sexism in the tech industry is important, and I think 'healthy' discourse is an illusion used to mask certain political motives, and I have a generally low opinion of HN's moderation policies, implementation, and clarity.

That doesn't mean that banning sexism as a topic would be inconsistent. It would be too consistent: instead it's easier to just penalize quickly commented posts, which happens to frequently apply to topics on sexism.

I just wanted to point out that "interesting fodder for discussion" is not exactly a goal of the moderation team, at least not if it includes "racism or sexism in the tech community."