Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him

This post is decaying off of the front page of HN very quickly (every few refreshes it drops a position or more), despite have more upvotes and being posted more recently. Reddit is a YC company as well. Is this post being artificially pushed down?

Nope. Literally the first rule of HN moderation is that we don't do that—i.e., we moderate stories less, not more, when they're negative about YC or a YC startup. Also, we were slacking this afternoon (where by slacking I mean hacking on an arc compiler) and had no clue this thread existed.

It set off the overheated discussion detector (a.k.a. flamewar detector), which lowers the rank of a thread. We do turn that penalty off for particularly substantive discussions—which, though this may surprise you, I'm not sure this one is. Not every Reddit drama shitshow is uniform in its excellence. Can I say that without evil catnip effects?

Edit: ok, we've reduced the penalty and changed the title to something the post actually says. (The submitted title, "Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him", breaks the HN guideline about not changing titles unless they are misleading or linkbait. Please don't do that when submitting here.)

-1 to the title change. The current title doesn't convey the situation effectively and imo serves to hide the true nature of the incident. There isn't really an article title to source from here, anyway.

Here's what I just emailed to a user who asked about the same thing:

I think people can pretty well figure out what the story is from the linked page and the HN comments. No?

There's a downside to spelling things out completely—it gets people out of the habit of doing their own work to figure things out. Admittedly it can sometimes be helpful for getting a story attention in the first place, but once it's on the front page, there's nearly always a good reason for that, and it's good to expect readers to have to dig a little sometimes to find it.

Edit: There's another aspect too. When a title uses language that isn't from the article itself, it typically departs from the article in ways that subtly reframe it into something it isn't. (This is also the case with many media pieces whose headlines are not written by their authors.) For example, the courtroom tone of the submitted title frames this story as a grave breach of trust and leaves out the (I'll be generous) equally important aspect that this is a Reddit shitshow and nothing about it can be taken completely seriously.

This is an important effect to avoid, and sticking to language from the article itself is the way to avoid it.

Honestly I feel like all this boils down to "I'm friends with spez" and I don't like that. You are suppressing this story. Ironically your moderation in this thread is pretty similar to the behavior on Reddit that's being called out in the first place.

You're imagining things you don't like and then not liking them. I'm not sure I can help much, but I'll try.

I'm not friends with Steve. I was introduced to him years ago, when we went through YC, and that's it. I'd be shocked if he remembered.

Moderators put the story back on the front page, so obviously we weren't trying to suppress it. The thread has over 600 points and over 600 comments now and there is at least one repost nearly as big.

I reverted the title because that's standard practice on HN and spent most of my evening in here patiently trying to explain that to you and others. Actually, normally I'd just do a why bother and give people the title they clamour for, but something about this case struck me as ridiculous, and I'm not going to throw years of moderation practice out the window just because Reddit culture had one of its tantrums here. The reason I feel that way has nothing to do with this particular story; it has to do with the principles of this place, which it's my job to protect.

(If you must know, I actually kind of like it when Reddit shitshows hit HN. The hivemind usually only has indignation for one forum's management at a time. I feel a little guilty about this, but when the wasps go off in a frenzy and are busy stinging someone else, I can't help but enjoy it that, at least for a little while, they're not stinging me. Also, when Reddit is the story I get to do as the Romans do and joke a little. Just a little though.)

No, reverting a title is not "similar" to editing a user's comment. Comments are individual property and titles are shared, so that's like comparing painting a road sign to rewriting someone's diary. A hint that they're not "similar" is that one has been established practice for years while the other is currently provoking multiple rage threads.

When I referred to "you", I kind of meant YC. Fair point, though.

I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling. In this case, though, it's particularly important that posts about i.e. censorship get their fair shake. The title you changed it to didn't really come from anywhere (Reddit comments don't have a title) and fails to convey exactly what's going on. Stepping in to change it like that reduces the weight of the title to the point of being meaningless to lots of people - I'm sure plenty of Reddit users don't even know who spez is.

Alright, I'll buy that, though I don't agree that the story didn't get a "fair shake". It got quite a fair few wiggles and is still getting them. But the point about it being a quasi-censorship story seems reasonable, so I'll change the title back to the submitter's for now.

It would be much better if the title used language from the article itself, so if you or anyone can figure out a fair way to do that, I'd appreciate the suggestion. Obviously my attempt to do so was not universally well received.

As for "I find all moderator actions inherently distasteful except in the cases of obvious trolling", that doesn't rub me the right way at all, for two reasons. First it implies that most of our work is useless, and if that's true, we're fools, wasting our time. Alternatively, if it isn't useless, you're spending time here benefitting from all of it, in which case a line like that seems pretty smug.