Then I must disagree with everybody, as I moderate comments from all sides of these. Anyone who looks fairly through my posting history can see that for themselves.
Everyone with strong feelings on a topic feels like the mods are secretly against their view and moderating in favor of the other side [1]. I think it's because we're all hard-wired to notice the things we dislike and to weight them much more heavily [2].
In this context, it only takes 2 or 3 datapoints (actually, it probably only takes 1) of a moderator scolding a comment that you agree with for you to feel this way (<-- I don't mean you personally, I mean all of us). It's hard not to. But of course the people on the opposite extreme of the topic from you are feeling exactly the same way about the mods—they're just basing it on a different 2 or 3 (or 1) data points.
(Btw, pg has had nothing to do with HN moderation for almost 10 years.)
What makes you flag something as flamewar and can you openly show how both sides are affected? Because the feeling of some seems that you are abit biased.
Mostly it's whether I see accounts breaking the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That includes swipes, putdowns, name-calling, ideological/political/nationalistic battle rather than curious conversation, fulmination, cross examination, repeating internet tropes or talking points, and so on.
I don't know what you mean by "openly show how both sides are affected". That's a tricky business. Everyone with strong feelings feels like the mods are biased and few are persuadable otherwise. Most people (with strong feelings) would be satisfied by little less than "promote all the posts I agree with and ban all the commenters I disagree with", though they don't phrase it in those terms, presumably even to themselves. It just works out that way in practice because when strong feelings are involved, all opposing comments tend to feel false and/or trollish and/or abusive.
What I can tell you for sure is that we're moderating all sides of this topic, same as with any divisive topic, when we see the site guidelines being broken, and we do our best to be even-handed about it. That doesn't mean there's no bias (unconscious bias is a thing, and total absence of bias is surely impossible), but it does mean that we work hard and consciously at it, and have many years of practice in doing so.
p.s. when you ask "What makes you flag something as flamewar", I suppose I should clarify that most [flagged] posts have been flagged by users, not moderators. Mods do flag some though.
Thank you for your sincere answer. Yet it would be great to have more lights shed on the administrative decisions in HN, like when replies are flagged or when the algorithm is manually adjusted by admins for some content.
Honestly Dang, just from casual browsing and happening across your "dont do this" responses, it does seem like you chaotically jump in. I can't discern a specific pattern, other than it being a bit too quick on the draw. But that's maybe just me being more okay with flamey discussions.
This is probably because applying the site guidelines involves interpretation, both of the guidelines and of the comments they apply to. Everyone interprets these things differently.
I'm not too concerned when people disagree about particular moderation calls, since that's inevitable, especially in borderline cases. I am more concerned that people understand the underlying principles and try to abide by them.
To be honest this is a unique type of moderation I haven't seen elsewhere. The site owner (or head-moderator?) himself publicly engaging with and spending time and effort on a disbehaving commenter puts a different spin on things when you are on the receiving end. I mean this is very effective, for persuading both the commenter and the bystanders witnessing the situation to behave accordingly to the site guidelines.
No, they generally stand down heated topics even when it's something the hive mind would agree with. There are delicate ways of talking about these things that GP and plenty of others have a history of having a hard time employing.
At this point I've been entrenched enough in discussion long enough to appreciate how this place is moderated by dang etc
I don't think that's fair. dang is a great moderator, and this is a particularly tough subject to moderate - as he says, every side tends to feel that people are biased against them, and to some extent it's true. (If you wonder how people can be biased against both sides - it can be different groups of people. E.g. the UN is biased against Israel, but the US is biased for Israel.)
I don't know if pg is still involved in moderation decisions on HN. He's widely considered anti-Israel, by most Israeli techies at least, but I don't think this necessarily means anything about HN. (And although I don't know pg personally, I'm willing to give quite a bit of benefit of the doubt to him, and I'd bet that his personal integrity would keep him out of directly intervening in moderating HN about this topic.)
