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 keep starting and deleting a reply here. My moderating experience is with much smaller entities, but I've been here more than a minute and I think probably the best thing one can do is keep putting out accurate info about how the site actually works.

A lot of people who are stomping mad are mad because they think, for example, that you personally flagged #Thing and don't realize that's not how that works. A lot of that -- the best antidote is calm, cool education without getting cranky, etc.

In my experience and similar provisos.

Thanks—I appreciate your wisdom and I know that you're largely right. But I'm scared of unintended consequences.

It may be that there's a level-up here that we haven't achieved yet. But answering complaints and pushback is such a big part of what I do, and takes so much energy, that I'm scared to make more of the admin stuff public. I know it would explain things and have a settling effect for some; but others would misinterpret the information and get even more riled up by it. What the total effect of such a change would be is impossible to predict, but if it were 10x of the latter (the nightmare scenario), I'm not sure my heart could take it.

I think if it were me, I would not reveal more than is already on the public record. I would wonder how to do repetition (of the already public bits) well for a smart crowd, knowing that smart people tend to loathe repetition.

For example, I might contemplate translating the guidelines into a few major languages (emphasizing in an intro that the site is in English and the translated guidelines are only intended to ease the onboarding process for a global audience). I think a lot of people fail to grasp how multicultural HN is and that a lot of dust ups are rooted in cultural and language barriers.

I second not sharing anything that isn't already public.

But there is this pattern where these discussions get hashed out either (a) when someone misbehaves and dang posts a reply to remind them about the guidelines or (b) like this, we have an impromptu comment thread on HN's mechanisms. In either case, the content gets buried pretty quickly and we're relying essentially on human memories to keep this institutional knowledge alive.

I wonder if it would help to explicitly collate this information somewhere. Think, something parallel to the guidelines. But the guidelines answer the question, "how should I behave on HN?" whereas this would be answering "how is HN run?" (Or perhaps, how is it not run.)

It's a half-baked thought, so don't take it too seriously, but I figured I'd mention it.

There once was a "undocumented features of hacker news" which was on github when "awesome" lists on github were the gimmick a few years back. I do not recall the link or name now.