Dang is going to have 65,535 karma points soon

Congrats Dang, you have done a wonderful job so far and moderate one of the most fantastic online communities out there. I am sure most of the job feels somewhat thankless but I want to let you know I(and many many other users on this site) appreciate your hard work and dedication.

If by “finest” you mean a Reddit mob mentality for tech, then yes I completely agree with this statement.

What do you think we could do differently? Serious question.

I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.

I consistently wonder why posts critical of HN-affiliated companies that have stats like upvotes per hour and number of comments that would theoretically make them the top story getting pushed off the front page.

Are there people whose upvotes count for more than others? Or are these actively suppressed? Either way, it makes it hard to have important/robust conversations when the people seeing them gets suppressed

I'm afraid I don't understand the first bit - but in case this is what you meant: we definitely don't moderate HN to suppress criticism of YC-funded startups. That's actually the #1 thing of all things we don't do. There's tons of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... but the short version is that we know the community's good will is the only value HN has, so we try never to do anything that would damage that.

Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore.

* By "bad" I mean bad relative to HN's intended purpose as defined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Relative to that, "bad" means snark, flamewar, ideological battle, etc. — all the things that zap intellectual curiosity.

> Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore.

Thanks for confirming this. There was some speculation last year about partial shadow bans for voting,* and it's good to hear an authoritative answer.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317059

When this happens to an HN account, is it permanent or can it be reversed if the account stops upvoting "bad" comments? If it's permanent, affected users would like to know. Evaluating comments and determining whether they should be voted on can take a long time, and the affected users could save a lot of time if they knew that their votes would never count again.