I changed the title as part of moderating this thread less than we normally would. We moderate HN threads less, not more, when YC or YC startups are part of the story—this has been established practice since the beginning: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
The way we'd normally moderate a thread like this is by downweighting it as a generic riler-upper (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Posts like the OP are extremely common, because the internet is perpetually noticing something seemingly outrageous, jumping to the most extreme interpretation, exclaiming angrily, and then egging itself on. That's how the medium works. If we didn't downweight such posts, the front page would be be nothing but sensational/indignant material; there'd be no room for anything else. This is a no-brainer as a moderation call, and this practice has also been established on HN since the beginning. However, because the thread mentions YC startups, I haven't touched it or done what we normally would.
Editing sensational/indignant titles to be more neutral and reflect the substance of a story (not that there's really a story here) is another well-established moderation practice on HN, again for what ought to be obvious reasons: if we didn't do it, then the front page would consist of nothing but that. So in this case I limited myself to the minimum viable title edit, while letting the post continue to burn at a much higher rank on the front page than it would ever normally get away with.
For me the real conflict or tradeoff here is: how do we balance the need to not suppress criticisms (even when they are unfair or untrue—because the good will of the community is more important, in fact it's the only asset HN really has), with the need to preserve HN for its intended purpose. The ecosystem is fragile and takes a lot of tending to, and one of the most important forms of tending—which only moderators can really provide—is to not allow garden-variety internet indignation to drown out the quieter, more interesting material that HN is supposed to be for. It should be clear why the rule is "we moderate less when YC is the story", rather than "we moderate not at all"—the latter would be a loophole you could drive a convoy of trucks through.
Therefore, when I asked myself what was the minimum reasonable thing to do, editing the sensational or (to use your word) salacious title to accurate reflect what (little) substance the post actually included, while not downweighting the submission the way we usually would, seemed to me the right tradeoff. This post doesn't deserve the hours on the front page that it's getting, but that's the local price we pay in favor of a global optimization.
Bro, the post effected positive change (several updated job posts before regulatory bodies were involved), and could have been done with a lot less tact. For example, I could have screenshotted or even just mentioned offenders.
Maybe the tone wasn't perfect - but isn't it YOUR job to pay attention to what gets posted here? Were you not aware of the labor laws in these states? It isn't something that happened just a couple of times.
Get off your high horse, buddy. HN has gone down hill in the last 10yrs and part of that is because of these stupid policies and actions.
There's no transparency into what you do. Your words are just words.
Hey, I'm sorry. I acknowledge the positive effects of your post, your good intentions, and the fact that you could have been a lot less tactful.
I was writing from a place of general irritation and even defensiveness. I wasn't thinking about your point of view or how you would feel reading my general putdowns of this type of post. If I were in your position, I'd be pissed off too.
Even after doing this for a long time, I still find myself making unhelpful assumptions. All I can tell you is that I'll continue to work on it.
This whole thing is pretty silly, right? The penalties for noncompliance with NYC's law apply to the listing company, not to the board they posted on. If you really think YC companies are deliberately skirting the law, report them to NYC.
NYC does a one-time 90-day notice-and-cure, so you can "effect positive change" with listing YC companies without subjecting them to fines, if that's really what you're worried about.
Exactly, and - assuming a mistake rather than maliciousness should have been the first take. There are 100's if not thousands of rules and regulations companies need to conform to and you should normally at a minimum give them a chance to fix this rather than to right away start yelling about them 'breaking the law', because no CEO that I'm aware of does so willingly (assuming they intend to stay in business and take their responsibilities somewhat seriously). This seems more like an exercise in grandstanding than actual concern.
It's also just so weird to suggest that HN should be policing this. They're fixated on NYC's law, but NYC is more lenient, at least statutorily, than Colorado, which has had this rule for over a year. But NYC and Colorado have different disclosure requirements, as will California and Washington. That's not just down to who needs to disclose (if you have fewer than 5 NYC employees, for instance, you're apparently not obligated to report) but also what you have to disclose.
It's not reasonable to suggest that HN should also run an HR practice. Again: totally fair to be irritated at a YC company who lists a noncompliant job. Go report them!
I would be highly surprised if in any given startup in the first 24 months they were not at least in breach of several laws, especially in the HR domain. Usually this gets fixed during the first fundraising (during legal DD and for a regulated industry compliance review) but your average 3 people in a room start-up trying to get a product out the door will inevitably make mistakes like these - and worse. The GDPR is an easy one to mess up on, local employment law, employment contracts, especially when hiring people remote can be super tricky and if you are in a regulated industry my advice would be to hire a part time compliance officer (and probably an HR professional as well) as soon as you can afford it, it will save a whole raft of problems later on.
Regulators are usually more than willing to work with such young companies to get them to become compliant, rather than to throw the book at them at the first opportunity.
Given the state of the companies advertising on YC my assumption would be that they are too busy to get to either an MVP or to break even to be acutely aware of all of these compliance issues. One thing YC does is to help the companies with legal support, they probably could give some assistance with making sure that public job ads are compliant either by serving as a clearing house or to offer a set of written guidelines to ensure basic compliance, thus minimizing the risk of accidentally running afoul of the law.
I mean, no, local regulators are not generally friendly to startups (I've experienced drama both in SFBA and in Chicagoland) --- but nobody is really being fined for these salary disclosure laws. :)
Companies should list their salary ranges! Like, regardless of the law!
> Companies should list their salary ranges! Like, regardless of the law!
Yes, definitely. It's to everybody's advantage. The assumption should be that if a company does not list its salary range and they're young that they don't know better and if they're older that you are about to get screwed.
No, I didn't put a massive amount of thought into the post, I admit. But it is a problem with the HN board here (content is posted here) so I didn't think it was inappropriate to highlight it here.
I also don't really expect Dan to moderate this. Seems like it isn't really his job, unless he made the decision to allow that content here to start.
Technically, in the phrase "YC startups are breaking the law", there is no clear implication that it is all YC startups.
The phrase simply does not speak on the point of quantity, and is pretty decent 'headline English', which traditionally does away with 'some', 'the', etc, trading specificity for celerity.
However, with the phrasing 'Some YC startups are breaking the law", there is actually additional information being added. Intentionally or not, dang is injecting into the discourse a self-protective disclaimer.
If you're really curious, one can probably work out a symbolic representation of the truth claim being made in any higher-order logic that can express Vagueness (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vagueness/) and demonstrate how the truth functions differ, but frankly I'm not a grad student anymore, and I'm less excited to do free symbolic logic problems ;D
Popping the devtools on my brain, I think the reason this issue jumped out at me in the first place is that YC's moral ground has shifted lately, mostly because of its exposure to blockchain bets, many of which turned out to be, how to put this politely, more valuable than worthy.
In this new climate, it's impossible for me not to pay close attention to how organizations shield themselves from reputational risk.
It might be advisable to HN to come up with some self-regulatory editorial policies and guidelines to prevent unintentional conflicts-of-interest.
For example, if it turned out that HN was being used to systematically privilege coverage of its friends, allies, and clients, that would have reputational impact on the publication going forward.
I don't think that's what's intentionally going on here, but I also feel we've seen just how fraught the act of edition actually is.
It's fraught, but from my perspective it's no more fraught than it used to be. The very first thing pg told me about moderating HN (before I even had time to grab a chair) was not to suppress anti-YC stories. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... has years worth of these cases, and there have been masses of others. I think the editorial policy is pretty clear (I've outlined it in this thread, and many other comments reachable through that HN Search link); it's also been stable for a long time.
Rephrasing: HN needs better self-regulation, because the weather has changed, and it's not a good look when you're standing halfway between several unhinged billionaires.
This is a friendly observation. Please be well and do the best you can.
The “minimum” reasonable thing to do would have been to leave the thread alone if it is in fact your policy to moderate YC threads less than usual.
Can you point to some non-YC posts that you have explicitly removed references to breaking the law from?
It is, in fact, breaking the law to list NYC jobs without providing salary range in the same way that it is breaking the law to jaywalk or piss on the subway. Do you find references to those laws to be salacious and sensational?
It was a mundane observation that these companies were breaking the law in the same way that it is a mundane observation that editing a title to obscure that gives the impression that it was not motivated by some sort of stoic adherence to some objective ideal.
Was “TikTok is an illegal fork of OBS” a sensational, salacious title?
I admit it was a lot of words, but I believe that lot of words already answered most of your points. As for the rest...I generally haven't found it to be a good use of time to answer that sort of cross-examination. The bulk of the community seems quite happy when we explain our thinking in good faith and don't do anything too extreme, but the cross-examiner is usually impossible to satisfy. I'm not talking about you here! but in my past experience, patiently answering a cross-examination usually only produces a longer cross-examination. I'd rather spend those resources making HN better for the rest of the community.
But you did get me curious to see if I could find a past example of this kind of title edit. I did find one from earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30680267. We changed "Google Fi Illegally Bricked My iPhone 11 Pro Max" to "Google Fi bricked my iPhone 11 Pro Max (2020)" That's a typical example of HN moderation because we not only took out the sensational/disputable word, we also added the year—which besides being a normal edit, has the side effect of damping the riler-upper aspect. (The internet only likes to get angry about fresh things.)
Re the Tiktok bit, you seem to be asking about this post: TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103 - Dec 2021. I couldn't find any record of us moderating that post, so my first thought was that perhaps we just didn't see it. But I commented several times in the thread, so that can't be it either. Given that https://twitter.com/Naaackers/status/1471494415306788870 was exactly the sort of riler-upper that we routinely downweight, and in this case neglected to, my guess is that I was too busy in the comments and forgot to look at the article.
In a case like that, it would be normal to add a question mark as a way of making the title more neutral. We did that, for example, here: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33343681 - Oct 2022 (246 comments)
Now I have added another lot of words. I hope some of this is useful!
The way we'd normally moderate a thread like this is by downweighting it as a generic riler-upper (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Posts like the OP are extremely common, because the internet is perpetually noticing something seemingly outrageous, jumping to the most extreme interpretation, exclaiming angrily, and then egging itself on. That's how the medium works. If we didn't downweight such posts, the front page would be be nothing but sensational/indignant material; there'd be no room for anything else. This is a no-brainer as a moderation call, and this practice has also been established on HN since the beginning. However, because the thread mentions YC startups, I haven't touched it or done what we normally would.
Editing sensational/indignant titles to be more neutral and reflect the substance of a story (not that there's really a story here) is another well-established moderation practice on HN, again for what ought to be obvious reasons: if we didn't do it, then the front page would consist of nothing but that. So in this case I limited myself to the minimum viable title edit, while letting the post continue to burn at a much higher rank on the front page than it would ever normally get away with.
For me the real conflict or tradeoff here is: how do we balance the need to not suppress criticisms (even when they are unfair or untrue—because the good will of the community is more important, in fact it's the only asset HN really has), with the need to preserve HN for its intended purpose. The ecosystem is fragile and takes a lot of tending to, and one of the most important forms of tending—which only moderators can really provide—is to not allow garden-variety internet indignation to drown out the quieter, more interesting material that HN is supposed to be for. It should be clear why the rule is "we moderate less when YC is the story", rather than "we moderate not at all"—the latter would be a loophole you could drive a convoy of trucks through.
Therefore, when I asked myself what was the minimum reasonable thing to do, editing the sensational or (to use your word) salacious title to accurate reflect what (little) substance the post actually included, while not downweighting the submission the way we usually would, seemed to me the right tradeoff. This post doesn't deserve the hours on the front page that it's getting, but that's the local price we pay in favor of a global optimization.
Edit: I changed the title again after posting this, in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973106, which made a fair point.