PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

I haven't written much about my experience moderating HN. Occasionally little blobs squeeze out under pressure. Also, I'm not sure I could describe it very well. It might take more of a novelist's skill to explain the experience. I'd probably just use a lot of words like "surreal" that don't say anything, or come up with metaphors that are good for venting but again, don't really explain much.

What I do want to do is distill the moderation explanations I've posted over the years into a sort of expanded FAQ or commentary. If anyone has noticed how often I post HN Search links to past explanations (which I hope is not too annoying), that's because the explanations have converged over the years, on I'd guess at least a couple dozen different significant issues. Things like how we moderate politics on HN, how it's not ok to insinuate astroturfing, how we handle reposts, and so on.

Here's one to add to your list from today (now flagged dead) that I thought was particularly surreal in its logic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808107. It's short, so I'll just quote it in full:

Hacker News pays close attention to the content on the main page. They purge anything that doesn't trend left leaning or counters the standard left's corporate interests.

For example, I posted a link to Michael Moore's film in which he eviscerates bio-fuels. This post was mysteriously removed. It was also removed the second time I posted it. This was despite the link the "A year wearing shorts to work" as another HN article link at the time continued to exist.

A link to a Micheal Moore (the quintessential 90's leftist documentarian) film "eviscerating bio-fuels" is "mysteriously removed", but a fluff piece about shorts remains: Collect underpants, ?, profit!

I've found that having some amount of time spent to just keep a timeline of notable events on a forum is extremely crucial for any forum that lasts a long time and has political discussions on it.

This should probably be a feature for all subs/forums.

I think that might be very interesting, and potentially pretty valuable to people working in a similar position.

> If anyone has noticed how often I post HN Search links to past explanations (which I hope is not too annoying)

Those are not annoying. (although I do not doubt you could introduce me to someone who says they are...)

On top of all that the forum is skittish about embracing controversial political topics in general, because many people would prefer to just talk about tech.

Why wouldn't HN users flag some Michael Moore content to oblivion?

What is wrong with this? I'm a far cry from a Silicon Valley liberal, and nothing's wrong with it that I can see. There is no One Forum To Rule Them All, and there shouldn't be. Let a thousand forums bloom their own way.

The one thing I'd like to see is a franchise model based on HN - this place pays just enough attention to civility and topicality to promote good discussion without feeling Orwellian. If only that magic could somehow be replicated.

I mostly agree with you, there's nothing wrong with it. What's happening is the same thing that goes on everywhere in social media. People projecting their worldviews, opinions, and believing that their opinions are special and The One view that should prevail. That they should have a right to be heard everywhere, that their opinions should carry weight everywhere (regardless of the forum).

It's like we're dealing with a very emotionally & intellectually spoiled generation, brats. The everyone gets a trophy generation. People that can't accept that their opinions don't govern the universe and are not important everywhere; nor are all opinions equally important everywhere. Social media has warped all of that severely. It's almost like it has deluded a mass of people into thinking their opinion broadcast inside of their home/space, has (or should have) the same weight when broadcast outside to the world and that the two should be given the same kind of consideration.

I think this is a very common logic failure. They're unable to mentally separate concepts effectively. In my observation very few people actually invest into thinking, how to think, how to use logic, how to reason. It takes a lot of effort to get good at it.

Critically people need to learn that their opinions do not always matter and are not valuable all the time. It's a concept that the woke, cancel culture generation can't tolerate. I think the US culture needs a hefty dose of this right now: your opinion is not as important as you think it is; your feelings are not that important; feelings are not more important than facts.

It really is the fragile, coddled generation. They can't live with the notion of the lack of their importance. It makes perfect sense though, it's also the hyper narcissistic selfie / influencer generation. It all goes together.

PS: Thanks for keeping the trains running on time!

There's nothing necessarily wrong with the flagging itself (well, except in this case I believe a lack of awareness of the content of that documentary likely contributes to ongoing destruction of the earth's ecosystem)...but there is a problem where the moderator of HN claims that what you say above is outright false. Purely a misperception on your part.

Another way I can see it being harmful: a never-discussed here (or anywhere else that I know of) topic that I believe may be a key issue with the growing polarization in the world (in turn increasing danger across multiple dimensions), is that there seems to be certain topics that render the human mind unable to sustain consciousness and rational, unbiased thought. Of course Reddit and Facebook are full of this sort of behavior, but there is no shortage of it here on HN either. If solutions to existential threats like climate change require public consensus (do they not?), and even we here on HN are unable to behave in a conscious, logical manner (or even try), then how do we expect the general public to do so? And if no one here is even willing to consider the potential importance of this idea, then those same people shouldn't be too surprised if people like me (and I'm far from unique in this respect) have about as much respect for them as they have for Trump supporters, and roll our eyes at the low-dimensional thinking behind climate change hysteria. If it was really that important to people as intelligent as HN'ers, they should be willing to think - or at the very least, consider the notion of thinking.

As for how this general phenomenon may be dangerous: as a mental experiment, let's assume that it is a very real phenomenon, that does occur in objective physical shared reality. That's bad enough. But now imagine if one or more powerful entities were able to realize that certain things are virtually guaranteed to sink humans into subconscious, unthinking, tribal, non-cooperative behaviour. Could this knowledge be used for nefarious means, and what might the techniques look like? Now, look around the modern world - do we see any new (in the last decade or so) phenomena that have become quite common that may plausibly be invocations of these techniques, to achieve certain goals? Might that perhaps go a little ways to explain the inconceivably irrational behaviour of people on certain topics?

That's mistaken. Users in SV are about 10% of the population here, last I checked, but that was for a very wide definition of SV, and by any measure some chunk would not be "tech liberals", so the number is significantly less than 10%.

This site is far more geographically and culturally distributed than people assume it is. I've written about this in several places; one is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 if anyone is interested.