The other post incorrectly had "2010" in the title and I made a comment about how this should be corrected. The "2010" was then removed.
If, like you say, the moderators never saw the story then who made these changes? I find it hard to believe that foob would put the wrong year in the title of his own post.
Edit: ok, I think I know what happened now. A moderator put 2010 on the title by mistake. I haven't checked the timestamps on the user flags, but it's possible that people flagged the article because they thought it was old, in which case the title change would have acted as a moderation penalty even though obviously we didn't mean it that way. I was wrong to say "moderators never saw it" because I checked the log for moderation penalties, found nothing, and didn't look for title changes. So I made a mistake too.
We're sorry for the mistake. I don't recall this particular thing ever happening before, but plenty of other moderator errors have. We try to admit them and correct them as soon as we know about them.
As much as I love this place, every time I find out more about how the sausage is made, I lose faith in HN a little bit more.
Look at just the stuff from this case - heavy handed uneven constant moderation (you claim moderators dont see a bunch of stories, but those that you do see like this one, often get adjustments), misreporting, questionable transparency, too much hardly visible power of flags, etc.
I know the rules, but It really seems like at best we are a few moderator changes from having this place turn to something that wouldn't be valuable to people like me.
Are there other online discussion forums that also go into such detail about how the sausage is made you can point to as an example?
From the ones I frequent, HN via Dan and team is the only one I've come across which frequently and directly engages the community in a detailed and genuine way about their policies.
I'm sorry that any user who loves this place would feel that way! I've tried to answer some of the concerns you mention in comments elsewhere in the thread—not that you'll necessarily agree with the answers, but if there's something unaddressed, let me know, and if you don't get a reply, hn@ycombinator.com is best.
I know how difficult it can be to run a volunteer review system, but we have done it for years and have learned a few lessons. One thing you should do here is remove privileges for a bit from the moderator in question. Reviewers need to have some consequence for mistakes, otherwise they will tend towards moving faster and faster in their actions, with lower quality as the result.
Would there be a way to be a bit more specific about flags? E.g. "inaccurate title", "duplicate post", "advertising"?
There's been times when an older article is posted and adding the year in the title might give better perspective. Or other times where it's clearly a PR post for a company and we just want it off the front page.
If, like you say, the moderators never saw the story then who made these changes? I find it hard to believe that foob would put the wrong year in the title of his own post.