Two HN Announcements

Do you have any thoughts on the metrics you might use to evaluate the success or failure of the "vouch" feature?

Yes. We're going to look at all the vouched comments and the feature succeeds or fails to the degree that those follow or break the HN guidelines by our usual moderation standards. Not sure if that's a "metric" but that's the idea. Beyond that, the only thing that would make us retract the feature is some bad consequence we didn't foresee.

During testing we did notice an unforeseen consequence, but it was a good one. Reviewing vouched comments naturally leads to looking at the history of a banned account, and in a few cases we just unbanned it. Some had been banned for an obvious reason in the past, but recent comments were fine. Others had been banned by mistake, such as by a rogue spam filter. So although this feature applies on a per-comment level, it can have per-account side-effects.

This also raises the question of whether we can take this feature all the way to letting the community manage which accounts are banned (presumably with occasional moderator overrides). That's on our list, though it's too soon to tell if it will work.