Thanks for the response. I agree it was leading into a potential flamewar, however no anger or harassment was said by either side.
I'm not sure how the # of hops it takes matters if a conversation is still related, why there is gatekeeping - other than it makes it a quantitative decision for you vs. qualitative - cutting out moderation responsibility of actually determining if one party is speaking in good faith and the other is not, which it sounds like you admitted to not caring about. So if a pattern matches you flag/hide it. I can understand why a sole moderator may take that, however that's a terrible thing for holding space and helping people learn their behaviour isn't okay - in fact, you're teaching people to not hold the line for integrity.
Do you not care for people to learn, for lines to be held in regards to integrity and good faith conversation - just like how you responded to me, and I'm responding to you?
Also, those aren't red herrings at all from my understanding of that term; does me saying that mean this is degenerating into a flamewar and should be flagged/hidden too, or perhaps my previous paragraph is somehow considered a personal attack - when no malice was intended (and is valid conversation unless invalidating by gatekeeping to make moderation easier)?
I'm curious too - how does my reply getting flagged/hidden to others nudge conversation rather than censor/suppress it to others who may then add to the replies - on either side of the discussion - or maybe upvote/downvote lazily?
The more hops a thread takes in generic directions, the less related it becomes. Worse, the generic topics are predictable. They are like large planets that suck in all passing spacecraft. We want HN threads to meander in less predictable ways—this is literally the biggest issue with discussion quality on the forum, so it's a big deal. I'm not sure what else to tell you other than the links I mentioned above.
I certainly didn't say we didn't care about good faith. I said we didn't care about the 'high-order bit', meaning whether you're battle for left vs. right, $country1 vs. $country2, and so on. I'm not saying that for theoretical reasons, just empirical ones: it doesn't make a difference for discussion quality, and actually the comments of people on either side of the hard divides resemble each other (e.g. in being rigid, predictable, adversarial) more than they resemble anyone else's.
If there's still a question here that is super important to answer, I'm happy to try to answer it, but I need to know specifically what it is.
The less related it becomes to the original post but how is gatekeeping that relevant, other than using it as a quantitative metric to use to simplify moderation decisions?
And of course generic topics are predictable. If you don't think global security, a generic topic, as important - of whatever planet you're from, or whatever countries/nations - whomever happened to be the first one to excel at capitalism first, and then the other to benefit from capitalism + lower labour costs to accelerate themselves to a global power - then I don't know what to say. You're moderating repetitiveness which is strange, like you don't like boring conversation, another quantitative/pattern based moderation metric vs. qualitative - strange gatekeeping, though I understand how it simplifies it and it is then a narrative you can state as a justification that doesn't require you to actually engage or understand either side.
And I strongly disagree that my comments are interchangeable with the other person's in this case - however yes, if some person is arguing in bad faith and someone else puts the effort into holding people to integrity and good faith, then that conversation will be predictable - especially someone like you who all day long you're seeing patterns of conversation, and adversarial, by definition - there's friction at the point of bad vs. good; perhaps you're bored and/or overwhelmed, so you just pattern match and create quantity-based decisions instead of qualitative to hold the space in a more nuanced way.
There's no question, just perhaps some judgement on the "dumbed down"/simplified moderation practices - ideally there'd be 10 to 100 of you so you could afford the time to not condense things in such a way.
Gatekeeping that is relevant because moderation's job is to prevent the system from ending up
in the failure modes that it will otherwise default to. By "the system" I mean HN as a whole: community, software, moderation, etc. Someone needs to monitor the global state of the system and intervene to nudge it when it drifts off course. Moderation is like a small feedback control mechanism to regulate that, and little else.
What determines what counts as "failure modes", "off course", "on course", etc.? That sounds vague but it is actually easy to answer. We're trying to optimize for just one thing, namely intellectual curiosity [1]. Everything follows from that. For example, since curiosity fades under repetition, we try to avoid too much repetition [2]. Similar with nastiness. Repetition plus nastiness is sort of the essence of flamewars, so those are particularly a moderation concern. And so on. Actually the fact that HN has a clear definition of what it's going for, and it's possible to derive all sorts of interesting and counterintuitive consequences from that, is my favorite thing about the job. We're not claiming that any of these rules or judgments should be universal—simply that they're necessary for the kind of site HN is trying to be.
I'm not sure how the # of hops it takes matters if a conversation is still related, why there is gatekeeping - other than it makes it a quantitative decision for you vs. qualitative - cutting out moderation responsibility of actually determining if one party is speaking in good faith and the other is not, which it sounds like you admitted to not caring about. So if a pattern matches you flag/hide it. I can understand why a sole moderator may take that, however that's a terrible thing for holding space and helping people learn their behaviour isn't okay - in fact, you're teaching people to not hold the line for integrity.
Do you not care for people to learn, for lines to be held in regards to integrity and good faith conversation - just like how you responded to me, and I'm responding to you?
Also, those aren't red herrings at all from my understanding of that term; does me saying that mean this is degenerating into a flamewar and should be flagged/hidden too, or perhaps my previous paragraph is somehow considered a personal attack - when no malice was intended (and is valid conversation unless invalidating by gatekeeping to make moderation easier)?
I'm curious too - how does my reply getting flagged/hidden to others nudge conversation rather than censor/suppress it to others who may then add to the replies - on either side of the discussion - or maybe upvote/downvote lazily?