“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

Because it's interesting. Hersh reporting on it is an interesting story in its own right. Is what he says true? I have no idea. We don't have a truth meter here.

But we do have a proofen and working mechanism: Flagging. If the submission doesn't get flagged, cool. If it does, it does. I don't see a reason to intervene here.

This is not just a story, but a news story. It is supposed to state facts, not juggle with hypothesis.

> Because it's interesting

No. It's interesting to you.

Interests me too. You're always free not to read this article or thread.

The level of engagement seems to indicate there is interest amongst a wide swath of the site.

Some of that interest, rather predictably, is negative.

Dang is manually influencing the ranking system.

So this is not necessarily what is interesting to everyone.

Unfortunately it's not that simple. The flagging system works well, arguably better than the upvoting system does, but you can't just rely on these systems in an unsupervised way—it leads to suboptimal outcomes. Another way of putting this is that moderation is necessary to jig the software+community systems out of their failure modes.

You can of course argue that I've made a wrong call in this case, but the point I'm making here is different: you need moderators who make judgment calls, including to override flags sometimes. And of course no one is ever going to get the calls 100% right; we have failure modes too.

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can't take the human being out of the moderator, nor would it be good to try. No in the sense that I'm not moderating HN just according to my personal interests—it would be very different if I did. As a matter of fact, I spend every day denying my own preferences about HN. That doesn't make me objective (far from it), but I do at least have a lot of practice.

It's a matter of striking a balance: holding space for what the community finds interesting* while allowing for a certain amount of idiosyncracy and unpredictability, but not too much. Without that, things would be more humdrum and therefore less interesting. There are tradeoffs along every conceivable axis with this thing.

* (note: community is not the same as commenters because most readers don't comment)

Yes, moderators moderate this site. This has been true from the beginning, 15+ years ago.

Your comment suggests an assumption that without moderation, the ranking system would indicate "what is interesting to everyone". That assumption isn't just wrong, it's super wrong. Here are some past comments about that, if anyone cares: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... The short version is that without moderation, the site would be dominated by the same few hot stories repeated ad nauseum, plus an endless supply of riler-uppers. This is no way to optimize for what is interesting to everyone. As I said elsewhere in a reply to you, there are tradeoffs along every axis of this thing.

Dang is doing his job.

The number of attempts to either shame or coerce him into doing things the way you think should be done, versus what he thinks is appropriate -- seems childish to me.

>The level of engagement seems to indicate there is interest

Far more heat than light being generated though, though. Which is predictable with this kind of story, raising emotion is part of the desired outcome of posting it (1). "interest" in baseless speculation and conspiratorial thinking is not a good thing.

Standards are slipping, that this story is protected.

1) https://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/more+heat+than...

> community is not the same as commenters because most readers don't comment

Do you have stats on what percent of regular HN readers have ever commented on any story? Or are stats more like, for every 100 readers of a story, 1 will comment on that story? To put another way: if I read 100 stories and comment on 1, would I be counted as lurking 99 times and posting 1?

Basically, I'm curious if engagement is lopsided toward lurking because some users never comment, or because most users never comment on every story they read.

Yes, I looked it up a couple times over the years and it was astonishing close to whoever's law that says 1% of users produce 90% of UGC.

I think it was something like 1% of total readers and 5% of logged-in readers but I'd have to check again to be sure.

I see far more bickering over whether or not this article is appropriate than actual discussion of the article, which is unfortunate. Unsubstantiated claims can be dismissed, but there's no requirement to do so. The NS2 destruction itself is a notable story, and it's worth discussing as resource dependence is important.