Hacker News
points by tomhow 4 days ago | 0 comments
Please don't post ranting accusations like this. We're accountable to this community every single day, as this case demonstrates. Any time we do anything that seems even a little bit suspect, we hear about it very quickly.

> a mod log will allow some sort of bad actors to do something vague and threatening

I don't know of any time we've said anything like that. Dang has explained plenty of times why we don't publish a moderation log [1]. Mostly it's because we don't want to promote meta-discussion, because the thing we want most here is for discussions to stay on-topic. There are plenty of ways for people to see what we're doing and hold us to account if we get things wrong.

> we are on a site run by a VC so what would you expect, of course they're going to tip the scales

HN is only any use to our bosses if we continue to be the place where the best (i.e., "smartest") hackers come to have the highest-quality discussions about the most important topics, and the best/smartest hackers have the best bullshit detectors, almost by definition. But even if we thought we should deprioritize that consideration and instead "tip the scales" in aid of the narrow commercial interests of our parent organization (leaving aside the flawed presumption that it would work), YC has zero interest in protecting the reputation or commercial interests of the megacorps, which it demonstrates through its actions continually [2,3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-i...

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/y-combinator-says-apples-a...

[–] ok_dad 4 days ago
Make a mod log then if you don’t want complaints about opaque moderation. I’m not ranting you literally edit user parts without notice. That’s not acceptable where I come from. I’ve seen it personally happening here way too much and your claims that we’d notice it are logical fallacies or something. You make sure any discussion like this is down modded into oblivion.

You came here doing exactly what I said you’d do, too. I’m done complaining for now but your comment isn’t convincing anyone who complains about your moderation.

Avoiding these meta discussions is what makes me wary of you mods. You guys basically shut down any discussion of moderation here like an iron fist.

[–] tptacek 4 days ago
A mod log doesn't solve any of these concerns. People will just argue about whether the mod log is complete or abridged.
[–] tomhow 4 days ago
We happily explain all our actions all the time, here in the comments and via email. There’s no great mystery to what we do and why. We explain things more openly and thoroughly than the moderators of sites with public modlogs do, from what I’ve observed. We’re also completely open to the public and highly forgiving of people who break the rules but earnestly seek to contribute positively. Unfortunately not everyone is here to contribute positively, but it’s not hard to do so for people who want to.

The underlying accusation of bias/manipulation is self-evidently false because it assumes our employer’s selfish agenda – even if you believe that’s what we most care about – is the opposite to what it actually is.