[editing - bear with me...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451979 was classified by our software as genai. That's not allowed on HN - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.

All such classifiers are imperfect, of course, but we have no choice but to use them because HN is being inundated with content that has been either generated or edited by LLMs, and the community feels strongly about this.

I've unkilled the comment now, although its information/indignation ratio is low enough that I would not call it a good comment for HN, and no, that doesn't mean I disagree with it.

While I have you: can you also please stop breaking the site guidelines, such as by posting flamebait, snark, and using HN for ideological battle? You've been doing this repeatedly, (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48433250, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420491 in this thread, as well as crossing into personal attack elsewhere).

We're trying for something different here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

People do lie and deceive, but to tell that apart from just-plain-wrongness requires knowing someone's intent, and this is not something that moderators (or readers in general) can do. Even courts of law have a hard time doing that! HN comments don't contain nearly enough information to decide it. You would have to have a mind reader [1].

Worse, readers are all too quick to assume lies, deceit, etc., in other commenters that they happen to dislike or disagree with. The internet is rife with this, as we all know. Most of these insinuations are imaginary—that is, we are much too quick to attribute disingenuousness to the other side. One can easily see this by looking at how the same accusations are made against one's own side.

Once the question has been transformed in this way, it answers itself: of course it's ok to be wrong on HN. How could it not be? Most of us are wrong about most things. Moreover, being wrong is part of eventually getting something right. Curious conversation, which HN exists for, often involves mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes (or seeming mistakes) turn out to be the most creative.

Even if we decided it was not ok to be wrong, how would we enforce that? We don't have a truth meter [2].

As we have neither a mind reader nor a truth meter, we can't base moderation on anything that requires knowing people's intent or knowing the truth about everything. We need criteria that can be decided from people's observable behavior on the site. As I sometimes put it, we can only moderate by effects [3].

That's why HN's guidelines are they way they are (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - there's nothing in there which requires us to know what someone's intent is, nor whether they are right or wrong on a topic. At least I hope there isn't!

What about the truth, then? Do we care about that at all? Of course we do! But working out what's true vs. what false is the province of the community, not the mods. It's the commenters' job to do that, e.g. by answering bad arguments with better ones and false information with true. And they should do this within the site guidelines, e.g. by being respectful and curious rather than aggressive and accusatory.

The moderators' job is to hold the container for this or (if you like) to keep the playing field as fair as possible. This isn't possible in any complete way - there are far too many factors pushing things into messy, unsatisfying places. But we do what we can.

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

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

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

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12960048

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250918

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32771735

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

(I hope that's ok!)

A few years ago I did a thorough search for "HN is turning into Reddit" posts so I could link them at the bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. These 4 predate your July 2008 link (the first one by only 6 days):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657 (July 2008)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057 (Oct 2007)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60767 (Sept 2007)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852 (April 2007)

Here are some more I found:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361148 (May 2010)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=259276 (July 2008)

Ask YC: HN submissions feels like submissions on reddit post sale, do you guys feel the same way? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=225134 - June 2008 (10 comments) (<-- wow, we allowed titles that long?)

How do you separate (1) HN is going downhill, from (2) the world is going downhill, from (3) people always think things are going downhill? It seems hopelessly undecideable. (And yet, being human, I do think that HN is going somewhat downhill. Relative to the world though? not sure)

Old'aVista, a Guide to the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39069910 - Jan 2024 (12 comments)

"Don't be snarky."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Obviously this is a project at an early stage and the title expresses what they're working on, not a claim to 100% feature parity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My gut feeling is that this issue isn't much affected by voting rings, which is too bad, because we have a lot of experience with those. If all that was needed here was another round of work on the ring detector, I would be less worried.

It's a moving and blurry picture, but judging by the users that tomhow and I interact with—which is a lot of users! though still only a small sample—the overwhelming majority of these posts are coming from real people with good intentions, who have no idea of the mismatch between what they're posting and the culture of the community.