An example, to my first point, is like some old cyphernomicon txtfile from 1994 that's been submitted every few years for like 10 years and never really gotten many upvotes nor discussion, now gets submitted a day ago, I'm assuming not much traction again, and then submitted to Pool and now has 74 upvotes. It's weird. Never got much attn before, over and over and now all of a sudden all these things are getting large amount of upvotes. It shouldn't really get that much more attention and my gripe is that it shouldn't be on my radar as something new/interesting for the day because overall it really isn't. It's old and never warranted much interest repeatedly over time. Changing audience (a decline imo) or like something else driving more HN votes in recent year...hmm

Mods, or "community mechanics", have to be our better nature, because our natural instinct, the things we're wired to prioritize under partial attention, is for indignation and sensationalism. In other words information about risk or excitement. because for fast paced life in a group where partial attention is the only possibility, such information probably has the highest utility.

but our better nature relative to hn has to be something that gratifies intellectual curiosity, something genuinely interesting. Something that if you were to spend your full attention immersed in a comment thread or reading an article would have the highest utility for you.

It's not exactly trivial. I don't know how they achieve it at all.

But they do somehow. Because I keep coming back here to learn something. and I look forward to coming here more than I do to a news site because I think there might be something interesting I can learn here. but on a news site it's probably more of the same.

People might complain about the power imbalance that moderators have about how they're this "privileged few" poking the community this way and that from up on high. But this can't possibly be true. Who wants the "privilege" of having it to be their job to stand against face and invite the abuse of the resentful? How can one person with a stick stand against the madding crowd? They can't. Any respect the moderators have from the community is earned certainly not "given" as a "privilege". Do they have power? yes they have power but that power only comes from the community respecting their decisions. And they use software to give that stick a multi-local reach.

Such no-moderation advocates would prefer absolute unmoderated freedom: an idyllic community self-regulated and self-moderated, we're no individual has the power besides the social power they can accumulate through their interactions, every other form of power must be trashed and rejected. such criticisms of moderation are necessarily selfish because the people advocating them can only see their local corner of the community. And they don't concern themselves with the well-being of anything outside of that. If anything outside of that is a miss they simply shrug it off return to their safe corner. It's their privilege to not have the responsibility to have to moderate. a privilege given to them by the good work the moderators do.

But if they had their way, you end up with a partitioned world of all isolated tribes and no global optima . so the cost of this freedom (that no-moderation supporters want), is the freedom of other people, everyone else, to be genuinely interested and have their intellectual curiosity gratified when they visit the site.

By corraling the community to work as a whole you can approach the global optima of submission quality for the metric of genuinely interesting.