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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

They are constantly tipping the scales here, and if you say so everyone will show up and claim they're the best mod team on the planet and totally fair and it's outrageous that you want to see accountability for mod actions via some sort of mod log and the mods will say that a mod log will allow some sort of bad actors to do something vague and threatening and they'll also use rules like a cudgel and claim a technical reading of some rule will absolve them. Then again, we are on a site run by a VC so what would you expect, of course they're going to tip the scales.

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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...

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.

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.

A mod log doesn't solve any of these concerns. People will just argue about whether the mod log is complete or abridged.

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