> and heavy moderation.
I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense. It’s primarily user-driven, aside from obvious abusive behavior. The downvote and flagging mechanisms do the heavy lifting.
The heuristics that detect a high ratio of arguments to upvotes (as far as I can tell) can be frustrating at times, but they also do a good job of driving ragebait off the front page quickly.
The moderators are also very good at rescuing overlooked stories and putting them in the second chance pool for users to consider again, which feels infinitely better than moderators forcing things to the front page.
It also seems that some times moderators will undo some of the actions that push a story off the front page if it’s relevant. I’ve seen flagged stories come back from the dead or flame war comment sections get a section chance at the front page with a moderator note at the top.
Back in the Slashdot days I remember people rotating through multiple accounts for no reason other than to increase their chances of having one of them with randomly granted moderation points so they could use them as weapons in arguments. Felt like a different era.
> I don’t think there is heavy moderation in the traditional sense.
It seems to be a combination of manual and automated moderation (mostly by dang but he has more help now), using the kind of over/under-engineered custom tools you'd expect from technophiles. I've wondered a lot about the kind of programming logic he and the others coded up that make HN as curious as it is, and I have half a mind to make a little forum (yet another HN clone, but not really) purely for the sake of trying to implement how I think their moderation probably works. If I went through with this, I'd have it solely be for Show HN style project sharing/discussion.
> (mostly by dang but he has more help now)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43558671 for those who missed it
I'm pretty much decided on making the Show HN clone even if nobody uses it. Because I know it's a good idea and I believe in it:
* For every N=round(10) years software experience, you can click submit N10 times.
* You must* provide a link and year proving your earliest project or employoment.
* Max 256 submissions per day for everyone total.
Should be a fun experiment. Email me if you want an early invite.
How do people with experience that predates the internet prove that?
They'll find a way.
Somewhere in my garage there's a box containing a physical package for one of the first pieces of published software I ever wrote. I wonder if there's a date printed on its CD-ROM?
HN is heavily moderated by humans. They've discussed it before. They're machine-assisted, but heavily involved day-to-day.