> That's not only completely false, it's a shameless misrepresentation that eats half the hope out of my soul.

This is not my intent, I moderate forums too and I know it's hard but I'm trying to explain something to you about what happens when one is merely an observer of the witnessed behaviour and not privy to any information to explain the behaviour.

Bear in mind that as a user I have a different view on HN than you do. I do not see flags alongside stories, and do not know the workings of the algorithms and moderation tools put in place.

There are many examples of people trying to observe and divine the behaviour of HN, mostly focused on "How does the front page ranking algorithm work?".

Observed behaviour: A story about YC appears to take a strong politic position and received many extremely negative comments. I could not then find this story, thus it has been removed.

Guess (because moderation is not transparent, visible, and searchable after the event) of what happened:

1) Was it flagged? Possibly, but would expect to see a [dead] text much like how comments show [dead]

2) Did it just not have ranking attributes? No, it was highly upvoted and had only been on the site a short while when I saw it.

3) Was it likely to have been removed by some other mechanism? Given that I can't see it's #1 and don't believe it's #2, yes.

This is what I mean by lack of transparent moderation.

I cannot see anywhere that says: "When a load of people flag it, the result of the collective flagging will penalise the story". Except, of course, in your comments here. This means that anyone (the majority) who hasn't read the comments of this story may also not know this is the case.

Without understanding what can happen and why, the behaviour of HN is subject to people attempting to make their own sense of what they observe.

What I observed and remarked on are three things:

1) Things can be whitelisted and their place on the front page assured (skip filters and checks)

Confirmed, you state that you have done this.

2) Things can be killed in a way that excludes them from the front page without leaving the item as [dead] (penalise in the placement algorithm)

Confirmed, but you've clarified that this is a consequence of collective flagging rather than an editorial moderation policy

3) Things can be silently removed (soft delete)

Seems to be a dupe of #2, a harsher penalty.

The key question that transparency would answer is this one: Are the adjustments the result of the community collectively deciding what content to show, or is the result of an editorial policy within YC?

The lack of transparency meant that there is little awareness of how the moderation tools work, how they effect things. Without that understanding it cannot be a great surprise that people (including me) are considering the latter of the two explanations.

> it seems devoid of even a grain of good faith

This is what I mean by trust being broken. I'm personally sorry my posts appear this way to you.

The more that unexplained behaviour is observed, the more the observer is going to be left with what unanswered questions sowing uncertainty and doubt.

Perhaps my view is biased as beyond the technical, the stories I am interested in include the set of stories that cover politics around startups. It's likely that many other stories were affected, but I didn't observe those. And perhaps my being on a different timezone means I don't see explanations you (or others) make at the time, we see a story placement be modified in our afternoon, but miss your explanation in your afternoon.

I love this place and spend more time on here than is probably healthy. I certainly want to believe and I question things so that I can. Your responses in this thread help a lot.

I am not someone who wants HN to change in any great way (a bit more towards the quality, but nothing seismic), but that's precisely my concern when behaviour I have never noticed before I now notice frequently enough for me to comment publicly on it (and risk whatever social penalty comes from questioning something people love).

Perhaps this could all just be solved by someone updating this page: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Make it clear on there that collective flagging introduces penalties. Explain how flagging and downvoting changes things. Encapsulate pg's "Stay out of the controversial" policy.

Transparent moderation does not necessarily mean that you need to create software that lists every single thing that happened and why, it merely means that the users shouldn't be left guessing when a story they're reading vanishes on them or suddenly takes a dive down the front page.