My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

Sometimes it's really surprising what comments you guys push back on and which ones you don't comment on. (Yes, I know, you can't see everything, etc.). I suspect it might be because this one wasn't dressed up enough.

While it is a personal attack, it is pretty tame compared to (non-flagged) comments I see here every day. I especially don't see it as a swipe at their family. Yet this is a pretty strong rebuke.

While I highly doubt it's because the subject is a YC pick, the optics aren't great.

There’s something about the point when anger at someone’s actions turns to trawling over someone’s backstory in order to attack/demean them as a person that crosses a line for me; I’ve always pushed back on it whenever I’ve seen it, on HN and elsewhere. People doing it and supporting it always think it’s “not that bad”; nobody likes to think of themselves as doing or supporting something bad.

Any time you see egregious comments on HN that aren’t flagged/dead, you should flag them and email us so we can take a look.

>People doing it and supporting it always think it’s “not that bad”; nobody likes to think of themselves as doing “bad”.

So we're clear, because this implies I'm "supporting" it, I'm not. Just saying that this is more tame than many personal attacks I've seen, with a stronger response than I've seen (when there is a response). And, in this case, that gives off some bad optics/more ammo to people who are critical about when & why you moderate.

Without moderator transparency (which I've read the reasoning for, and can agree with!), optics is really all you've got.

>someone’s actions turns to trawling over someone’s backstory

"using daddy's money" when talking about a VC funded founder is such a safe bet that if Berkshire Hathaway could invest in it, they would.

In the context of this thread (and not other supposedly worse comments in other threads that I’m not able to evaluate), having allowed pretty much everything and anything to be said, I’m comfortable with this point - the point where things turn personally nasty - being the point where I draw a line and push back.

>and not other supposedly worse comments

I'm guessing my comments are pushing on a sore spot, because you've implied that I support the personal attack when I've said clearly I don't, and now you're implying that I'm lying.

Sorry. I'll bow out.

I’m not saying that at all. I just can’t explain the disparity in our responses when I don’t know exactly what the comparison is. I’m not surprised to hear you’ve seen worse things. As you concede, we can’t see everything and we don’t respond to everything and there are all kinds of reasons for handling things differently, a major one being randomness.

But in the context of this thread, it has largely been the free-for-all that people want it to be but I’ve drawn a line at one point where things crossed over into being personally nasty and I haven’t yet seen a reason why what was a wrong call. I know some people will criticize me for that and I’m comfortable with that.

I wasn’t surprised by the pushback. This isn’t like responding to a pseudonymous HN comment opting into a discussion, they are talking about specific people and posting pointedly mean-spirited remarks towards a party that has not opted to discuss their provenance.

The response could’ve been better worded but you can see how no one would want to moderate a community that makes it a habit to disparage specific people outside of a good faith discussion.

>I wasn’t surprised by the pushback.

This comment broke the guidelines. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been moderated. I made a meta comment on the overall moderation on HN, which sometimes surprises me in which comments get reprimanded and which ones don't (and with what amount of vigor the reprimand is delivered with).

FWIW, that comment looked like an egregious personal attack to me too (and yes I hear you that you're not defending that post! but rather asking a fair question about moderation standards).

If there are comments that are that bad or worse floating around HN, which aren't getting flagged and/or replied to by moderators, we really need to see them. If you can recall where any of them are, and can dig up links, we'd appreciate it. Failing that, if you (or anyone) see cases of this in the future, we'd appreciate a heads-up.

The one thing I can imagine you might be referring to are some of the recent politically charged threads where people were really going after each other. Those are hard to moderate without coming across as taking one political side against another (which we're careful not to, but this is easy to miss when passions are high). But even in those cases we do our best to make sure that the guideline-violating comments get flagged.

I realize you already alluded to this when you say "Yes, I know, you can't see everything," but that really is the only reason why comments of this sort should be going unflagged or unmoderated on HN. There's a lot that we just don't see here—there's far too much for us to read it all, and we rely on users bringing it to our attention.

You should temper that observation with the realization that this particular thread is under a microscope. The HN mods moderate less when YC companies are involved, but somewhat ironically that actually requires more of their attention, since they need to counteract some automations. So they are more likely to spot comments here.