by dang | 2025-04-19 19:31:09+00:00
I agree—they're not all the same story. On the other hand: stories in an ongoing sequence usually lead to repetitive discussion, which is bad for HN—especially because people get angrier as they repeat things [1]. So the question is: how do we decide which stories should be treated as new discussions, worthy of major new threads, vs. repetitive follow-ups, which should be downweighted [2]?

HN has had a well-defined and stable set of principles for answering that for many years now. It goes back to the Snowden avalanche of 2013 [3], when the front page got overrun by follow-up stories and duplicate discussions, and there was a user backlash to that.

(I call these principles well defined and stable because they've held up well over the years, and because once we figured them out we haven't had to change them.)

It goes like this: when there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) [4], we try to reserve frontpage time for articles that contain Significant New Information (SNI) [5], and which seem like they have a chance to support a substantive, and substantively different, discussion. Articles which don't contain SNI, we tend to downweight as follow-ups [2].

This applies to flags too. When an article meets the above criteria but has been flagged by users, we're open to turning off the flags [6]. When an article has been flagged but doesn't meet those criteria, we tend to leave the flags on.

Sometimes, an article contains SNI but also is written in a way that seems to have no chance of supporting a substantive discussion, for example it's so inflammatory or one-sided that it seems doomed to instant flamewar. In cases like that, we wait for a more neutral article about the SNI. If the information really is significant, one should come along soon enough.

That is the answer to your objection here: "we can't talk about the next thing because we just talked about the last thing".

We can and do talk about the next thing, but it's a question of what the "next thing" is: how do you define what counts as a next thing (a new story) rather than a repetitive variation on the last thing [7]? We do that according to the principles I just described.

Of course, this shifts the question to "which articles contain SNI", and users frequently disagree about that. But I'm not talking here about specific calls on particular articles, but rather the principles by which we make those calls.

The specific calls we make are inevitably inconsistent and sometimes mistaken. That's ok; we can't be consistent at the level of individual cases (though we're consistent at the level of principles [8]), and we can't not make mistakes, but we're open to reversing a call when users make a good case for why an article meets the principles and we made a bad call about it.

To make such a case, you have to know what the principles are and make your argument based on them.

Most users don't do that—rather they post blanket complaints about how "all $FOO stories are suppressed on HN", the mods are imposing their pro-$FOO or anti-$FOO agenda, and so on. This is understandable as a reflexive response to seeing things one dislikes [9] (e.g. an important $FOO story being [flagged]). But it doesn't help us do a better job as moderators.

To help us do a better job, you (I don't mean you personally, but anyone) need to address what HN moderation is trying to achieve: what kind of site HN is supposed to be (optimized for intellectual curiosity [10], not current affairs [11]), what the fundamentals are (e.g. frontpage space is the scarcest resource [12] and we can't simply turn off flags on all political stories or even all important ones), and what the principles are, as I've described them above.

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[1] The mind resorts to indignation to amuse itself in the absence of new information - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] We tend to downweight follow-ups - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] The Snowden deluge of 2013 taught us how (not) to moderate a Major Ongoing Topic - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] For a Major Ongoing Topic, some but not all submissions should have major threads - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[5] The primary criterion for a new major thread is Significant New Information - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[6] How we think about turning off flags on a story - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306

[8] Moderation is inconsistent at the level of individual posts, but consistent at the level of principles - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

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

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

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