Would like to mention Dang here, he is doing an extraordinary job in keeping this place sane and civilised.
I really am wondering how he can read and react to so many comments quickly.
Dang, care to elaborate? Do you see a flat list of new comments, review them quickly? Do you use a moderation tool that scans the mood / tone / aggresiveness of a post? How do you do the screening and the replies? Manually?
Minor nit: I've posted about this before, but I wish folks would not refer to dang as a "moderator" or say stuff about "the HN moderators". If anything, I think it's more appropriate to refer to dang as the site admin.
The reason this is a pet peeve of mine is I often see people complaining about "the HN moderators" (e.g. "the HN mods are on a power trip and keep flagging my submissions!" or some such), where they are clearly taking this conceptual model from Reddit, and they seem to think there is a shadowy cabal of "mods" who control what gets downvoted/flagged (and, in fairness, this does and can happen in subreddits). In other words, when you see your submissions being flagged or comments being downvoted or flagged, 99.9% of the time it's not "the HN mods" who are downvoting you. It's just other, normal HN users (who have earned 501+ karma as TFA explains) who simply don't like what you have to say.
Not saying dang never blocks users/comments, but it's exceedingly rare and I've only seen it for the most obnoxiously egregious behavior after (usually multiple) warnings.
dang, or someone at HN, can and does silently modify the "weight" of a submission. That is why some articles stay on the front page longer, and some slip off the front page in a couple of hours.
This is far more control than reddit mods have. Reddit mods have one ability, an that is the ability to remove or not remove a submission, which is a very public action. HN can put its finger on the scales in a way that is much more subtle.
Very much so and it all happens with zero transparency, explanation or acknowledgement, very sus.
Your account can also be effectively shadowbanned with everything you submit going straight to the “dead” pile. Again no explanation and the only way you realize it is cause your submissions slowly die with no comments (and when you view the site in a non logged in fashion your submissions are not there)
That happens to spammers and serial abusers and, as I understand it, nobody else. People are overwhelmingly told when they're banned.
I've seen at least one user recently which has all his comments as [dead] automatically and they are pretty normal comments. I did not write down the name but I've seen that only once.
Assuming no violent (as in promoting) or particularly racist/sexist comments in their history, this hits some new accounts if they're using a VPN (some particular VPNs, I guess?). Sometimes they get caught up in the same filters used to block spammers/abusers from using HN. Or if their first (or one of their first) comments was a link without substantial text, that also gets people put into some kind of "spammer" category. You, or they if you tell them, can reach out through the email in the contact link at the bottom to get the ban addressed.
I found back the username in my browser history, the name is baybal2, it's a fairly old account so I'm not sure what caused it.
I'm going to contact the moderation indeed, it's the first time I was seeing non-spam comments being shadow banned automatically.
You've found an odd edge-case. baybal2 is banned intentionally, despite the fact that most of his posts are good, and some are great. Unfortunately, the remainder aren't. The compromise is that he's banned, but users like me vouch for many of his good posts to make them visible. Here's a post from Dan about him a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29692791. And another from 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898.
so I'm not sure what caused it
The behaviour of the account holder.
This could be because they got caught in a spam filter, or because we banned them and the comments they've posted since then are better. In such cases we're always happy to take a look and unban the account if they're using HN as intended.
There are some weird edge cases, like sometimes a banned user, once they're unbanned, will revert to posting abusively. Then we ban them again and they revert to posting good comments again. Who can fathom the psyche of homo internetus.
It's also common for an account to post both fine comments and abusive comments. It's the latter that determine whether we have to ban the account—that's how rule enforcement works. But if a banned account posts something good, there's no reason why the good post needs to remain [dead]. This is what vouching is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.
Thanks, I didn't know about vouching. I guess there's indeed an history behind each ban of a real user. (Not talking about spam of course, it's a different thing)
Not saying dang never blocks users/comments, but it's exceedingly rare and I've only seen it for the most obnoxiously egregious behavior after (usually multiple) warnings.
Issuing warnings or reminding people of the guidelines (rules) is also part of being a moderator, so the moniker is perfectly cromulent to describe dang's role
I had never heard the word "cromulent" and so that led me to a Mirriam Webster article describing how The Simpsons made the word up for a joke and then from there "seeped into our lexical consciousness". Worth a read!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-does-cromulent...
It's way too good a word to be left unused! ;-) That whole episode is hilarious tbh
My issue isn't so much with the word, but it's that so often I see tons of users who are clearly bringing preconceived notions about how the moderator role works at Reddit and thinking it works the same here. At the very least there definitely aren't moderators, plural, on HN currently by that definition.
The other reason I think "admin" is a much better word is that it much more clearly indicates that this is a special, privileged role. That vast majority of "moderation" on HN is done by normal users with upvotes, downvotes and flagging (and also, of course, by automated systems e.g. with spam filters/bot detection).
But again, my primary point is that I see users blaming "the mods" for why their post is downvoted or hidden, when usually it's that people just don't want to acknowledge that the community, at large, didn't think they were contributing productively to the discourse of the site.
and I've only seen it for
Speculation/intuition, but I figure it happens in ways specifically designed to evade the type of detection you're basing your claim on, akin to shadow banning, whereas on Reddit there's often more visible evidence like corpses of deleted comments.
You can see the [dead] comments if you go to your profile and enable "showdead". Most of them are very bad, but from time to time you can find a false positive and vouch it.
Yes, I keep that enabled. I guess I provided poor examples but what I'm saying is that it seems like on Reddit moderation activities are quite obvious (i.e., a giant chain of deleted comments tends to indicate moderation and elicit resentment) and here they're less obvious (there's an air of strong moderation but little to point at directly, which is great IMHO as it evades resentment).
You can see all of those deleted/flagged comments if you turn on "showdead" in your options.
There are, I believe, multiple HN moderators; Dan is just the only vocal one. And among all the different sites on the Internet, there are multiple different moderation styles, of which Dan's is just one.
I don't believe that is correct anymore, and I think TFA is right:
Hacker News currently has one full time moderator: Dan Gackle (dang), and formerly Scott Bell (sctb). Their comment replies provide a pseudo-log of Hacker News moderation.
I've never seen an anyone else besides dang comment that they are an HN admin in the past 5-ish years or so.
Dan is the only one who currently posts publicly as a mod, but if you search his comments, you'll see he implies there are others.
The list at https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors is definitely not "the complete set of colors users have set" as claimed. I know this because it doesn't include my top color (namely #64BFBD).
Perplexingly, my color appeared there shortly after I posted this. Does that link contain colors of recently active users, perhaps?
Yes; users who have recently posted.
(For the curious, this is because HN only loads profiles into memory whenever users post. Then they stay in memory until a server reboot, which seems to happen every day or two.)
Everything I hear about HN makes me feel like it's a hobby side project hosted on an old laptop in someones basement, and not literally the PR arm of a giant venture capital company.
It was. That’s why it won.
Welcome to 1995.
Ah, nice - so "my color doesn't appear on the list" is a problem that fixes itself automatically when you complain on HN about it!
A suitably recursive property for an internet forum, which I doubt pg had in mind when he wrote that code.
I’m grumpy because I am 100% sure that the “automatic downweighing” is applied to me (my comments are often below faded despite multiple upvotes), but it’s never been explained.
I’m just guilty without knowing the crime.
Email dang he can let you know what's going on.
This actually happened to me when I first signed up and after emailing dang asking why, it went away. I don’t think I ever got any actual explanation but I think it must have been some false positive which, once corrected, would never recur.
Weird, mine is near the top. I wonder what the sort order is.
It’s random. I emailed to submit a patch ordering by popularity and adding caching, but got no answer.
EDIT: You can see for yourself how it's ordered here: https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc#L2611-L26...
This is the original code, which survived untouched till at least 2019 or so. I've wondered if they changed it since then.
The key is the (users) function:
https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc#L144-L145
This returns the keys of the profs* hash table (short for "profiles"). At the time, profs was populated each time the server restarts:
https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc#L88-L91
(dir profdir*) essentially returns an `ls` of the directory in which user profiles are stored. (Yes, they are (or were) stored to disk, not a database.) This was one reason it was hard to add a feature to rename users, which Dan somehow figured out.
So it takes the `ls` of that directory, giving a list in mostly random order, and loads them one by one, putting them into a hash table, whose iteration order is also random.
In modern times, profs* is populated in a lazy fashion whenever users post after a server reboot.
Arc uses "maptable" to iterate over a hash table, which under the hood used hash-table-for-each: https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/ac.scm#L1082
Nowadays in Racket, it probably uses hash-for-each: https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/hashtables.html#%28de...
It does have a "try-order?" option, which gives a deterministic ordering if set. But whenever I set it, I sometimes get strange errors, at least on MacOS. Since it's disabled by default, I doubt they set it. Even if they did, it would be ordered alphabetically, which means your topcolor wouldn't be anywhere close to the top unless someone else whose name starts with "a" also set it.
I only know all this because I've spent five years updating Arc for the modern era over at https://github.com/shawwn/sparc
Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38586832
Speaking of the top colors, the repo doesn't mention that the color changes to red during Christmas.
Looks like it was updated to include that. As someone who is color blind I never noticed that the submission numbers have alternating red and green colors! That was new to me!
Mine isn’t on the list either - #9db2cbd
Drop the extra `d` and it's on there.
I once submitted this link to the front page, which promptly took down HN because it had no caching.
I fired off an email to Scott, frantically telling him "I think I took down HN. If you’re scrambling to figure out what’s wrong, it’s because so-and-so story is on the front page, and you can fix it by booting it off." A minute or two later the site came back to life, so I emailed saying "oh, never mind. I guess it was something else." And to my surprise he emailed back saying you were exactly right, thanks.
Presumably they either added caching, prevented it from going to the front page, froze the list for posterity, or it’s still a ticking time bomb that can take down HN again if you happen to submit it. Either way, maybe the explanation of your missing topcolor is there somewhere.
Well, given the name I assume it's a ranking? Though some colors are weird and it would be hard to believe a lot of people use it (like #fafafd or #0082a0 )
And yes my choice is there (#ffaa33)
Didn't know about this list. It's time for a vibe shift, so after a decade I'm switching to #2288ff. Thanks for sharing!
Inclusivity […] Unfortunately. (Moderators occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although it rarely sticks).
Why would this be described as “unfortunate”? For example tings like LLM:s being trained on flawed/biased data is a known real and unfortunate thing which can hurt already marginalised groups in society if used for eg. policy derisions.
If you quoted the whole thing it would be more apparent:
[...] they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Unfortunately.
What the author finds unfortunate is the flagging by users, not the moderator action.
I hope i can agree with you. But are you really sure? The period seems to indicate that the “unfortunate” belongs to the moderator action and not the flagging.
In my mind unfortunately can only ever refer to a previous sentence, not the next one. I read the period simply as a stylistic choice meant as a pause. They could have written it with a dash or a comma:
[...] they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless — unfortunately.
To me it is always preceding, like here:
1. Placement: “Unfortunately” is typically placed at the beginning of a sentence or clause to emphasize the regrettable aspect of the situation. It sets the tone for what follows and ensures clarity in your expression.
https://thecontentauthority.com/blog/how-to-use-unfortunatel...
Unfortunately, my time is limited.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/unfortu...
Sorry in advance if this is too much detail, but you seem to be interested in the nuance here.
"Unfortunately." here is a sentence fragment. It's idiomatic (conversational + informal) English to modify a preceding sentence with a sentence fragment. ("We could have some iced tea. Or lemonade.") There are cases where a sentence fragment can be used to introduce a sentence ("Delicious. I ate the whole thing.") but this is never an adverb (you can say "Unbelievable. You've done it again" but not "Unbelievably. You've done it again").
If one were trying to write "Unfortunately, there has been an error" with a long pause, you would write "Unfortunately... there has been an error", never "Unfortunately. There has been an error." The latter looks like a typo.
That's why (as a native speaker/reader of American English) I don't see any possibility of interpreting the text the way you're describing. Hope that helps!
"[unfortunate statement]. Unfortunately." is idiomatic (if informal) English. "Unfortunately. [unfortunate statement]." is not, especially in this case where the second statement is parenthesized. If it was "Unfortunately:" or "Unfortunately," that would be different.
The “unfortunately” refers to the preceding text rather than the following.
However, despite these discussions not being off-topic, they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Unfortunately.
That’s my point, I think. It seems to me that moderators are doing the right thing by HN rules and context by tagging such discussions are not off-topic. Why is it described as “unfortunate” then?
I think you're reading it as "Unfortunately, moderators occasionally unkill such threads..." when it's meant as "...they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless, unfortunately".
I think so too perhaps and hopefully, but there is no comma As in your example. Just a period suggesting the previous sentence has ended.
True. But the following phrase is set off by both a period and a set of parentheses. I think it’s pretty clear the author’s intent is for there to be a complete sentence about the behavior of HN users and then a complete thought saying that was unfortunate. (Then a parenthetical about the moderator behavior.)
fine, I'll update the list today
Guilt Driven Development
Ha, truly! I read his comment, refreshed the GitHub repo and saw the "changes made < 1 minute ago" flag.
I needed an excuse to be productive. :)
This is legitimately useful for new folks. Nice work
This is the only paradigm I follow :(
If DMs about web site bug > X then push fix lol
I figured this list was on the front page again when I was notified that my PR [1] was finally merged :)
[1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/pull/6...
Thanks for putting this together. I’ve been on HN for a while (even before getting an account) and learned a ton with this list
This is what happens Larry when you provide a service to the community.
H
I actually really hate this feature. The landscape has changed and I've been seriously contemplating asking @dang to nuke my account.
I would greatly encourage you to not nuke (but do contact) despite having had this thought myself.
But I appreciate the fact the consequences for everyone are not the same, and potentially even fatal in current times.
I believe I understand why it's done in the way it's done, but also this can drive self-censorship. Which is a growing problem at large.
Without speaking out of turn, which may just create more work, they can help.
Contact hn@ycombinator.com.
but also this can drive self-censorship.
Actually, this is the motivation __to__ nuke. It's what I mean about the environment changing. HN is one of the big places that get scraped and everyone is scraping all data that they can these days. It's very reasonable to believe you can be de-anonymized much more easily and that it's only going to get easier. It's not unreasonable to think that someone can mimic my speech and this creates a new vulnerability. I am thinking much more about self-censorship now and being more measured now than I have in the past.
I do agree with you that self-censorship is a growing problem. But I'm not sure how to solve this when we're entering a world where it is the language you use that becomes a fingerprint. I appreciate the records because there is a lot of valuable information here but at the same time these records make us vulnerable in a way we haven't been before. And that it is in a way that not just worrying about nation states being able to do this but that we're posting these records to huggingface. The processing is just getting easier and that's about all that's needed now.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Maybe the answer is to let trusted users become polymorphic, but that defeats some of the spirit of the site.
I'll have to think more on it, get back to you.
It is a hard problem to solve. Switching usernames doesn't fix the issue but could be more noise. Even disappearing messages is only noise, but stronger than the former. Probably pretty helpful because I don't think people are scraping every day but that could change.
Idk, if you have thoughts I'd love to head. I've been thinking of writing them down and posting to HN but unsure and it feels like one of those things that sounds conspiratorial until years later people will say "of course this was coming" lol
I do think people are scraping the site daily, if not hourly, and rate limiting is usually trivial to overcome. But I suspect the implementation is not standard.
Scraping doesn’t even have to be hourly, scraping a thread or account once then `diff`ing the two between weeks or months or years would easily reveal any interventions.
Which would actually expose users who you should retroactively investigate. Canaries.
I presume you are aware of “fuzzed” users. With unassociated comments, submissions, and possibly even changing names. I only recently discovered this myself after a little digging, but you may be able to do this and continue posting.
I’ve been hesitant to mention this anywhere, as discussing how you would red team a site you like publicly might not be the best for the site.
There are other clever possibilities, such as using some combination of artificial & organic content to wash users identities. Like banned or shadowbanned accounts mixed with real users. An acid bath if you will. If you dissolved 100 people into each other, who can really say who is who?
this can drive self-censorship. Which is a growing problem at large.
I suppose it depends on one's perspective. We used to call self-censorship "decorum."
The nature of human beings didn't change when we went online, and sometimes it behooves a person to just read the room before speaking. Because of the karma system, the upvote downvote system, and the user curated flagging system, I would classify Hacker News as a "decorum-friendly" message board where a certain amount of pre-filtering is not only necessary but highly encouraged.
I do put a lot of value on privacy, but I actually don't really find that problematic. I don't have the expectation to be able to just erase everything I wrote online, I assume it is public and persistent. So for things where I want to preserve private aspects I have to take that into account from the start.
There are certainly individual cases where some post might turn out to be problematic later, but that's more of an exception and can be handled by manual intervention.
I do find it annoying in some places how users can just erase their posts without a reason. Because they don't just erase their own content, they take the responses to it with them or at least make them less understandable. And those people responding did put some effort into it.
I accidentally hit “hide” on an item I want to see. Where’s the documentation on how to unhide?
Your view of your profile page https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=drfuchs should have a “hidden” link where each story has an “un-hide” link instead of “hide.”
Thanks. For those wondering how someone may have missed this: Evidently I had not in fact accidentally done a "hide", so nothing was in my hidden list, and thus my profile page cleverly didn't have a "hidden" link at all.
Things expire off the hidden list over time as well, presumably based on when the link itself disappears, but such links will then show up on hn's historical view.
Yeah it's very easy to accidentally hide (or flag!) posts on my phone. Wish there was an option for a confirm screen. Every once in a while I check what I've accidentally flagged and unflag it. I'm sure I'm not the only one...
I agree. An unhide flating link (like in gmail) would be very nice. (But it would double the ammount of javascript in HN :) .)
If you see it on this page (not accessible to anyone except you, logged in), you can just click "unhide"
Very cool, thanks. How does one become aware of this class of magic? It seems completely undiscoverable, not being in the FAQ, nor in the present "List of Hacker News's undocumented features..."
When did Hacker News start applying topcolor to the YC logo? I just noticed it today but am curious if it’s been there for awhile.
I did it a couple days ago because a user had been emailing since 2016 that the orange Y doesn't look good when the bar is changed to Christmas red.
Btw, that's not the record for how long a bug fix has taken. We get there eventually.
This update broke my workflow!
I did warn him that people might complain about side effects
is it possible that NetNewsWire (possibly other rss readers as well) don't show the favicon for https://news.ycombinator.com/rss anymore because of this change? I noticed this a few days ago
I use [bgcolor='#ff6600'] as a CSS selector for the <td> wrapping the header to remove the header bar color.
So this really did break my workflow, hah
That’s pretty amusing. Does switching the CSS selector to td[bgcolor] do the trick?
Don’t make me start emailing you every day to update the default font size from 12px to a modern default like 16px. This isn’t 2007 when everybody had 1024x768 monitors. I had to dust my monocle out of storage before adjusting my browser zoom level.
Idea: 1000 karma should get custom CSS as a setting.
and a dark mode button ;)
I'd settle for that too!
Why don't you use Dark Reader extension instead?
But I sometimes use Hacker News from remote machines, and it would be a pain to configure all of them with custom extensions!
Yeah this is the reason. I want a solution that works from any browser/device without the need to use extensions.
You and parent might enjoy checking my profile for customised HN CSS.
(I apply those using the Stylus CSS manager browser extension.)
1) I enjoy figuring out how HN works over time by noticing certain patterns. Still haven't figured out (please don't spoil) why I can't downvote certain comments in threads where I see both arrows on other comments. HN feels like games in the past - you're given some docs but over time you'd go "ooooh" about something undocumented. Good stuff.
2) voting system works well for just users but HN is infested with corporate voting manipulation. It seems that an entity monitoring eg. brand's name is able to use just a few 501+ karma accounts to bury, or a few more to strongly boost, any post
3) based on what I learned about posts' scores (more than a grain of salt - as I mentioned - I'm still figuring things out) it seems a little out of place that sometimes a few hours-old posts (not as old to qualify for the "second chance" thing) with barely any comments and points are positioned higher on the top page than younger posts with more activity (higher score and more comments). I've noticed it more than once with substack and my assumption is that HN may be boosting YC-backed products
It may not even be official corporate manipulation. HN is frequented by a lot of industry insiders, and if they see something that doesn't resonate with what they know to be true they'll downvote.
Exactly: there's a ton of people here who work at the big ad-tech companies, so of course they're going to downvote anything that promotes ad-blocking since that harms their own paycheck in a way.
Imagine a discussion forum for medical topics (science, research, etc.) where 1/3 the users work for companies that sell homeopathic "remedies", and how that would influence moderation there.
They do the opposite thing: they're extra hands-off with YC-backed things, and quicker to turn off flags on stories critical of YC-backed things.
I don't see much evidence of voting manipulation (and a lot of evidence of HN being hair-trigger about suppressing vote manipulation).
I don't think Dang is advancing YC interests - I think it's just bog-standard astroturfing. Especially with the low vote count of most stories, it's not hard to make your story pop or disappear.
2) voting system works well for just users but HN is infested with corporate voting manipulation.
You mean to say that next week's Kagi thread won't be as organic and spontaneous as it purports to be? Impossible.
I've noticed a shadowbanned behavior. If you submit a link that is a banned domain, you will notice that the 'discuss' link is missing and the post doesn't show up at all (but you see it).
Any examples? I didn’t know about this one
There's lot of articles from this site on HN, including recently. But:
* It seems low-quality, at times almost like the Weekly World News. On HN, we sometimes replace even high-quality science writing with primary sources (when the paper is recent and the writing is just a summary).
* It's high-volume, which is problematic in that it incentivizes users to submit lots and lots of stuff from this one site; front page slots are the scarcest resource on HN and everything competes for it, so high-volume low-mid-quality sites tend to get downweighted.
* It's slathered with ads and bait-y gimmicks.
If there's something on this site that you think would make a good thread for HN, you can probably just find whatever it's blogspamming and submit that instead.
LinkedIn, as I discovered earlier this year.
(I'd emailed mods after noting that my submission seemed to have been autokilled. They revived it, though the submission didn't see much action.)
Turn on show dead in your profile and visit the "new" link (https://news.ycombinator.com/newest). You'll see a lot of [dead] links, those are the sort GP is referencing. [flagged][dead] are killed by user action (flags).
It's missing "highlights" at https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
... which, anecdotally, I learned about JUST after getting a comment on there. Imagine my surprise at learning about this (in a manner totally unrelated to the post I wrote that made it to the list), and seeing my own writing as the most recent item on the list.
Truman show vibes for sure.
Interesting! Is there something similar for stories?
There's "best" (Highest-voted recent links), "classic" (Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts) and "active" (Most active current discussions):
I wonder how you'd qualify for "classic".
Apparently the account must be created before 2/13/2008:
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...
Not at present. The links aragonite mentioned all exist, but are determined by upvotes. The /highlights page (for comments) is a manually curated list. But if anyone sees a comment that's good enough to be on /highlights, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't want to be the only ones finding these things!
Here are a few things that could be corrected or added.
Corrections:
* These URLs aren't public - you can only see them if you're logged in as $name:
https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=[name]
https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=[name]
* > Moderators occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although it rarely sticks
Moderators sometimes turn off the flags on posts like this, in which case the thread will usually stay on the front page.
* > Hacker News allows users to see what the front page looks like at any point in time
This wording makes me squeamish because the /front pages don't show what the front page looked like at any point in time - they're a blended average of the frontpage stories from a particular day. At no point did the front page actually look like that, but that's because you can't get a 24 hour view from any particular snapshot.
Additions:
* /next (or /prev) link on comments jumps to the next (or previous) comment at the same nesting level
* /root links (on item pages) jump to the top-level GP comment (this may be renamed to /top in the future)
* /context on a comment (when not on the original /item page) links to the comment in its place on the original /item page
* in the RSS section, could include: https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss maps the frontpage and up to 9 pages after that
* HN's software auto-edits titles to make them less linkbaity, but if it gets the edit wrong, you can change it after you submit (per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38775366)
* the bookmarklet could probably be added, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778787
Also, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779156 because that's another undocumented aspect. How to sum it up in a sentence? Maybe: "If you only use HN to submit your own stuff, the software will eventually start filtering your submissions." But then I need a second sentence: "It's fine to submit your own stuff, but it should be part of a diverse mix of unrelated/interesting things."
Does your use of "moderators" imply "dang" is actually a collective of moderators all using one username?
No. Comments by dang are always me.
It would be a lot easier (in the short run) to have personas and shit like that, but I somehow just know that (in the long run) it's not worth it.
I'll work on adding these. (I know you sent me a list awhile back; I'll add those too)
Thanks again! :)
NB: One characteristic of "/context" is that where a comment has been flagged or killed, then the comment for which context has been requested isn't visible. The more so if "showdead" isn't enabled or when viewing from an unauthenticated session.
I run across this fairly frequently when checking on dang's comments, particularly when I'm not logged in, as moderator comments are often made following moderator actions or where members have downvoted or flagged a comment.
I'm not sure that a fix is needed, but the behaviour is slightly unexpected and confusing.
HN also has rate limits on making comments for certain users. The limit is easy to hit and takes hours to go away. This results in having to ignore people's questions because it will waste a comment contributing to one's rate limit. One can also respond to people by editing one's comment, but that has poor ux.
You’re talking about the “you’re posting too fast, please slow down” message? IME it’s not a rate limit but a passive-aggressive way of banning someone from a conversation for some amount of time.
Not the OP but I think that's what the OP had in mind, yeah.
It's interesting because that limit has made me even more "radical" (by the unwritten standards of HN), i.e. when I know that I only have a limited amount of comments per day to make my point I use those comments in a more "push-y" manner by responding to the most provocative replies to what I had previously said, while also ignoring replying to comments that are too bland. Which means that I go by the logic of "why should I reply to this reasonable comment when there's this other more radical comment that's a lot more thorough and violent when trying to debunk what I had just written? I should use my limited number of comments by answering to the latter, not the former".
One of the many paradoxes of confrontation ("war") at work, that is if you regard many of the discussions in here as confrontation (even "war") of ideas.
This is an annoying feature which I have encountered. I know it is to calm heated discussions, but the ambiguity of the message is belittling. I'm not overwhelming the database; just tell me how long I have if you're going to put me in timeout for a few hours.
It isn't a frequent issue, but putting duct tape on someone's mouth when they're talking about something they care about does not calm them down, even if it achieves the primary goal.
Or wait a few minutes to answer, because frequently someone else will ask an even better question to reply to.
Had it in the past on my acct. It always showed up when I posted on topics about trees and commented faster than normal. Wasn't aware it was a thing until emailing HN and dang mentioned it.
I'd maybe suggest updating the message to include some approximate time the limit expires. 'Come back in a few hours' or something. I say this because it was unusual enough for me to hit that I'd rewrite my comments thinking it was some kind of word flag I'd tripped, then try to repost it in 5-10 minutes only to have it fail again.
Any hidden feature to get past shadow moderation? I know I am not entitled to anything and no one cares unless they are affected directly but it would be nice if "you're posting too fast" restrictions (could mean 3 or 4 times in one day) showed up before I spend like half an hour composing a reply to someone, not after. But alas, not owed anything, hn is a social engagement site for a VC at the end of the day. But the non-transparent moderation stuff speaks volumes about the culture and all.
Will try to post non-FUD, high quality comments and posts (read between the lines lol).
I hear you and am willing to meet you on this, but you simply can't post things to HN like "you are just an ageist tribal presumptive jerk" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769241) without getting penalized and/or banned. I understand that the other person was being provocative, but a lot of this is about how we handle provocation—i.e. it's about learning to get hit by provocation (whether intentional or unintentional), absorbing the shock in oneself, and then not responding in kind.
You're just as welcome on HN as anyone else is, and if you build up a track record of using the site as intended for a while, we can definitely take a look and hopefully take the rate limit off your account.
@dang, the "jerk" part was over the line and I was in the wrong. However, my problem is not with the rules or in the restriction but with the fact that your restrictions where not transparent (shadow moderation) and you didn't think simply asking me to refrain would not work. In the past for example, you asked me to avoid brigading and I have avoided it since. You used a humorous comment I made (like I've seen others do once in a while) as an example of low quality comment so I avoid any sort of humor on HN now.
I will assume in cases such as what you quoted, you would treat the person I replied to with the same level of non-transparent hostility? If so I will avoid defending myself, else I will just avoid using "over the line" terms like "jerk" and use more tolerable terms like "unkind".
and if you build up a track record of using the site as intended for a while
You tolerate political topics on HN. On such threads, it seems my problem is that I do not understand what you mean by that. My expectation is either you tell me or others flag my comment if it is inappropriate. I never attack someone's character and try to focus on technical analysis of things, what you quoted there was in response to someone attacking my character (will refrain).
I will read your rules again. Perhaps I should avoid sensitive topics entirely on HN but truth be told, I make them in anticipation of a healthy discourse (which if you note on that comment thread was had). This is the only site I know of where that is actually possible these days. But I'd hate to think simply sharing my views is causing such a burden.
You're just as welcome on HN as anyone else is
I don't think that is true. But no worries, I undersrand your perspective well enough.
At least I now know that this isn't in my head, thanks for confirming. I sincerely hope you reconsider this approach and inform others (if they exist) of your disapproval or measures instead of shadow/secret approaches. You absolutley have the right to moderate content and tell people to stop any behavior, just like this.
I'll seriously consider stopping active participation as a 2024 resolution.
Happy new years!
You used a humorous comment I made (like I've seen others do once in a while) as an example of low quality comment so I avoid any sort of humor on HN now.
:/ this is sad
I believe the hidden feature is to email dang at hn@ycombinator.com and promise you'll never ever shit post again.
But then I have to use email! You're right though.
Seems to be missing comment vote manipulation. Users can see the number of votes their own comments get but can't see the number of votes other comments get, or even if their vote changes the vote count on a comment, which allows shadowbanning of unwanted comments by vote count alteration by mods/admins.
That only covers downvoting comments, it doesn't mention why comment vote counts aren't publicly visible. Keeping comment vote counts invisible makes sense if upvotes on some comments are not being recorded as a form of shadowbanning those comments/users.
Other people's vote counts are invisible because they led to constant bickering about the merits of any given comment's "spot" vote count (this is also the reason there's a guideline that asks you not to write these kinds of comments, but changing the affordances so you can't see them at all was a much more effective solution to the problem).
(My confidence in this explanation comes in part from the fact that I'm pretty sure I had a hand in this coming to pass: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716).
The conspiracist rationale here doesn't make much sense, because the site operators also control the displayed comment count and the registration of votes.
I thought a lot was about preventing bandwagoning or manipulation. In both directions, but especially downvoting.
I'm not sure if this is undocumented, but I've noticed that submitted links sometimes have either the pathname or search parameters portion of their URL truncated or stripped entirely. Sometimes the truncation happens after a slight delay.
For example, if you try to submit a link to a particular Google Books page, say the one I just tried:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Albert_Einstein_Col...
the link will remain intact for a short while before losing its search parameters and turning into a link to the book itself rather than to a page in it.
Jtsummers's answer is correct, but we turn off canonicalization for some classes of URLs and I think you've found a good example of that. I've exempted Google Books links for the future and put your submitted URL back in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38774261.
Thanks dang!
Possibly canonical links. HN looks at the submissions and updates the links to the canonical link if present. I'm on mobile so not able to double check the Google books page at the moment, but if you view source check to see if there's a canonical link in there. This also bites some blogging sites that end up with a canonical link to their base http://blog.example.com on all their posts.
Just checked and you are exactly right (it's not in the raw source but the element is found in the DOM tree). This explains the delay also!
There is another hidden feature, a "weak shadowban" which places your comment lower on the page than default. I think it is a manual flag set by some unknown heuristic, basically a "we don't like you but not enough to ban you" signal. This happened to me several months ago after a heated political debate and still is in effect (I'm sure it will happen to this comment, for example).
You're rate limited. So am I. Even emailed dang about it. I suppose my case is similar enough: started happening some time after some discussion that went wrong. I really don't remember which but I don't deny participating in them.
Truth be told it's probably a good thing for someone like me. HN is addictive and getting kicked out after 5 posts is essentially a better noprocrast setting. I actually thought it was the noprocrast setting at first since at the time I had just begun experimenting with it.
It's the automatic downranking of posts that hurt me. Noticed it recently. I've been trying to be more selective towards which posts I reply to but it feels pointless since any and all comments immediately sink towards the bottom of the page, unseen.
A smaller problem with this system: taking the time to write a comment, submitting it and only then being denied. I actually wasn't sure if this comment was going to go through but the timer must have reset. I hesitate to suggest some kind of indicator. It would be very helpful but it would also create a timed reward schedule not entirely dissimilar from those Skinner's box simulators they call mobile games.
Are you sure you're not just hitting the post timer limits? You can't immediately reply to deep threads
Dang confirmed it.
The following message is returned after the 5th post:
You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
Unfortunately it still doesn't mention "rate limited" accounts[0], which is extremely confusing when it happens to you. It's happened to me on this account, I can't comment more than 5 times per some arbitrary period - I'm guessing 24 hour UTC.
No explanation or information is given - you don't even know until HN seems broken and you go searching. dang mentioned that's something they'd like to impove, but given the slow movement of HN features, I doubt it will.
Note that none of this is meant as a slight on dang - I respect the work he does and really like the site, but it doesn't make it less frustrating. The result will be me rolling a new account (against site guidelines), as I have no other privacy preserving way of handling the issue.
0. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...
Beautifully stated at your link:
dang often says that he's concerned about protecting HN as a vessel. But he seems less concerned about the truthfulness of the contents of the vessel. So IMO, HN is less appropriate as a place for reasoned, free discussion, and more appropriate as a place to gauge the opinions of certain demographics.
HN is less appropriate as a place for reasoned, free discussion, and more appropriate as a place to gauge the opinions of certain demographics.
has HN ever claimed to be a place for "free" discussion? I feel the sentiment of "free speech forums" was cracking at the seams some 18-20 years ago, and compeltely fell apart around 9-10 years ago.
If you want unfiltered opinions, you go to a place with minimal moderation. HN was never that.
You can get rid of it if you email HN, if you behave :-D
Guess I need to figure out how to get more Karma! I didn't know there were more features to this site since I'm essentially a lurker.
This mindset turns this place into Reddit. I think the features should be enabled after a certain time rather than how likable the person is.
I'd propose participation for X days and a very loose karma metric (e.g. non-negative karma to block out consistent hecklers) as a compromise. You don't want someone who posted once and disappears for months to be given elevated permissions, because the idea of the karma gate is to adjust to how the community works before getting more features.
semi-artbituarily, I'd say 2-3 months worth of distinct days making a comment or post should be enough time.
Yeah, the karma requirements mean you frequently see people adding noise to discussions rather than signal, just to get out there and seen. I rarely comment and haven't hit the 501 threshold to downvote despite being here for a number of years, mostly because I just upvote what I agree with rather than posting a "me too".
(And I'm now concerned that this comment will feel like a "me too" :) )
One undocumented heuristic that I wish was documented better is that repeated submissions to the same domain, especially without discussion activity, leads to an automated shadow ban. This is just from what I’ve observed browsing /new with Show Dead turned on. There are lots of people submitting their own blog posts or repeated posts from their favorite news outlets who have been shadow banned. Vouching provides a mechanism for restoring posts of particular quality, but most of these people aren’t trying to spam, they just don’t know this unspoken rule.
That's connected to this guideline (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity."
If people submit primarily their own stuff, our software eventually starts classifying the account as "promotional" and starts filtering the posts.
People are totally welcome to submit their own work—that's great—but to use HN as intended, they should do that as part of a diverse set of submissions on unrelated/interesting things. There are too many bloggers/marketers/writers out there that use HN merely as yet-another-channel for the content they're pushing, and that's definitely not in the curious spirit which is supposed to animate HN.
As we used to say at the other site, it’s okay to be a redditor with a website; it’s not okay to be a website with a reddit account.
there's a slight difference between "your own stuff" and "same domain"...
I don't know how many false positives would fans/people with narrow sharing interest make, but slight editing of the guideline might help make them less "false"
Thank you for compiling this list. I have been using the site since 2007 and had never looked into the classic page (assumed it was an old stylesheet or something similar). Also had no idea about some of those special URLs such as noobcomments.
If a user has 31 Karma, they can also vouch for a [dead] submission/comment. A vouched submission/comment has its rank restored (and potentially improved as the vouch can counteract the effects of flags).
Is this consistent? I recently vouched for something on the New page and it wasn't restored.
One other thing I would like to ask: I currently bookmark about 20 users whose comments I find especially insightful across a wide range of subject matter expertise. Is there another way/better way to do this?
I currently bookmark about 20 users whose comments I find especially insightful across a wide range of subject matter expertise. Is there another way/better way to do this?
I don't know if it still works, but I used this a few years ago for this exact reason: https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends
val.town has a hnfollow thingy that i use now, but tbh i dont know when it doesnt work
Missing “Classic”
It’s missing the relatively recent new list called “Classic”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Classic: Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts
Not relatively recent! The feature is from 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
I see it there: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
Is the 501 karma level true? I heard 801?
It's 501.
This list is pretty nice, I learned a lot from it.
I've lurked here and on other discussion/aggregation sites for years (I've apparently been here 10--oof) and only recent started commenting a little more. This whole time I didn't realize the top color could be set. I noticed it in my profile a couple days ago and thought it was an entirely new site feature.
Seeing all this info I was unaware of laid out in front of me makes me wish there was a docs page linked in the footer, like Tildes has.
The second chance pool blew my mind the first time I got an email to resubmit. You figure if a post gets no traction, that’s just how it is. But I’ll never forget getting that email.
+1
My post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37956065 got no traction when I posted it and quickly disappeared from "/new" without many people noticing it. The next day, I received an email that this post was entered into the second chance pool. Then sometime later, it got picked for the front page and led to a good amount of community participation! Thanks to the second chance pool, I received several interesting demo submissions to my hobby project!
Hacker News allows people to use the old front page ranking algorithm, which only counts votes from early users. Early users are defined as being created before Feb 13, 2008.
anybody remember the significance of that date? i apparently joined five days later, and i'm guessing i was part of some wave of new signups triggered by some event.
It was "users who joined in the first year": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073513.
Wait, so you're telling me that after 501 karma points it's all just as meaningless as before 501?
Well, yeah. There are not extra perks except for the leaderboard.
I've run forums with various types of tiered systems and you don't gain much by having "ranks".
Are there any browser extensions that provide a user tag feature, similar to Reddit Enhancement Suite?
There are so many notable tech people on HN, it would be useful to be able to recognize their posts and comments.
Discussion from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973
Nice to see that some of the suggestions from there, like listing the hidden URLS (/leaders, etc.) seem to have been implemented.
Let's document it shall we:
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 - Oct 2022 (68 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 - Feb 2022 (64 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018-20) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 - April 2021 (255 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June 2020 (266 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (183 comments)
Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 - Feb 2018 (391 comments)
Ought the bookmarklet for submitting links[1] be mentioned?
Granted not exactly undocumented, as it is linked on the /submit page. But I think worth including, as it is not in the Guidelines or FAQ.
I added that to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778450. We'll see if minimaxir goes for it :)
I don't see anything related to IP protection. For example, if I log out and log in with another user, can I upvote a comment? If so, this can lead to vote manipulation. Browser fingerprints are useless if the user is using Adblockers or an extension stripping that information while submitting data.
What is preventing vote manipulation here? Signing up is so easy without email so I think there should be something.
A lot of these backend features/behaviors are super interesting to read through, especially in regards to the "flame war detector" section. I've only ever seen link aggregator websites such as Reddit relying on community moderation & spam detectors rather than anything to improve the quality of the discourse.
The 'over' url parameter is a great feature and I'm surprised I haven't heard about it until now
Your ability to download or upvote comments and stories can also be shadowbanned, rendering these actions ineffective.
Another little discussed feature is that the 'active' list shows flagged submissions. For this reason I almost exclusively use this list.
Another undocumented feature is that flagging posts/submissions very likely is weighted differently for different users.
There's other moderators than daang and some users help out with site stuff sometimes.
My favorite is /leaders.
Shame I'm not in the top 50 anymore, but there just ain't a lot of good content to submit anymore and karma whoring seems like a waste of time.
I'm curious about the full list of automatic headline changes. They seem reasonable, but it's worth knowing that if they change a headline for the worse, you can immediately edit the submission and restore the original headline (or an "in the spirit of" edit that fits within HN's character limit).
Assuming one has full vouch privileges, why do some flagged comments have vouch links but others can not. Perhaps one can check the source code to answer questions like this, or perhaps the code is constantly changing.
I used to think so until the shadow restriction/moderation stuff. I must agree with the quality part though, just not the methods. But like reddit and other platform, the majority of users don't give a shit about this stuff until it's their turn. Oh well, shit is.
I have posted one or two outlandish things whilst enjoying a few too many drinks and I have been properly downvoted; I have never seen or heard of anyone being restricted/moderated inappropriately. Any specific examples that come to mind?
Edit, to add: I also say ridiculous things when sober, on occasion. I didn’t mean to imply that the only time my mighty brain falters is when I’m inebriated.
This comment got my account aggressively throttled for ~24h: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38728278#38730194
There is definitely messed-up biased moderating on HN. That you don’t personally suffer it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
just because you link to a single comment doesn't mean it was the sole cause of your throttling.
It’s the only recent comment of mine that went fairly negative, and free internet advocates are pretty militant. It’s not rocket science to make the inference.
with all due respect, this sort of response and tone is exactly why that kind of throttling exists:
I commented in response because a comment downstream from what you linked felt much more caustic and may have been a bigger suspect than the first one. But by the nature of threaded comments, you will see less participation in a deeper comment. And I'm sure HN accounts for that. (-10 on a top level comment that was the first comment on the page may not be as bad as -1 on a deep comment).
If the repo is correct, these features are made to throttle comments that can cause flame wars. So, food for thought. A lot of times it's less about what you say and how you say it.
Something about a mirror. Or: do you think you deserve aggressive throttling now?
Honestly, some of my comments might jive less with HN’s echo chamber, but that doesn’t mean they’re not based in fact, and it doesn’t make them inciting.
Edit: I’m trying to practice taking complaints as actionable feedback, so
Thanks for this. I’ll keep it it in mind!
I feel like this isn't getting through to you, but I wanted to at least try and reach out. Feedback is important, but I can't force people to take it to heart.
One more guideline to keep in mind:
going around calling the community you comment in an echo chamber in order to justify your views never changed anyone's minds. And insulting others as a group nor individual doesn't make your factual statements stronger to begin with. It's the same useless fluff you complain about. If your audience truly doesn't appreciate your views, you should seek one that does.
guys let it go
I was on the fence sending the last comment. But if the user is instead going to try and make it all about me. , I wanted to send one last comment to try and emphasize the community aspect of how the rules work. I'm a bit neurodivergent, so I do want to assume good faith whenever someone feels like they can't understand the rules and needs an explicit pointing to what and why something is there.
But yes, we're doing the very thing the rules were meant to prevent, my apologies.
Do some introspection. Really. You are repeatedly failing the standards you are measuring me with, literally whilst espousing those same standards.
Likewise and I was in the wrong. I hate to beat a dead horse but look at my reply to a sibling comment in this comment thread for an example.
My honest opinion: I have geopolitical views that tend to upset ideological people which includes...coughpowerfulcough folks and got stuck with reputation accordingly (whatever, no complaints). I normally avoid politics because in the US at least, I am too contrarian and "centrist", but on HN people do engage and correct me or educate me when I am incorrect. At least it used to be so, times are achanging. But tech people keep being political so it's hard to avoid. One particular thread about signal or something, I made a point about Silicon Valley tech types presuming things and interfering with politics in other countries (something about signal or other apps enabling one side of politics to win over the other I think), I think that comment was the last straw before the restrictions (can't be sure though, just guessing), this must have been in 2022. But as the saying goes "if a cop tails a car for 500 miles, that car is getting a ticket!", I am sure I have done plenty more that violate the rules, my only complaint is on how my "punishment" was in secret with no opportunity to self-correct. Maybe like reddit, HN is best lurked?
I hope to see better times on HN and make dang's job easier on my part at least. happy 2024!
Show us some of the stuff you said so we can judge that ourselves?
People can still see with Show Dead turned on, over the many years have never seen anything there that wasn't either inflammatory, spammy or otherwise very low quality.
In my understanding, comments that need moderator intervention would be flagged, not just downvoted. Downvotes and flags are not what I talked about though, this might help with context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773957#38777787
HN is the only site where I even comment publicly. No warning restrictions where you don't even know if you are restricted == shadow moderarion. Probably best I simply take a hint though, i should spend my time on more productive things anyways. Although, I really do enjoy healthy discourse with people who know the subjects in question far more than I do.
HN should either have different rules for non-technical threads or avoid political/sensitive topics altogether imho.
Moderation isn't easy, and I'm only being so critical because I am personally affected. Chances are this comment I spent time composing won't go through and I would have to abandon it because of the restrictions. An unfortunate side effect of it all is others like you can't see I am restricted. Or you would reply to me and I can't reply back because of those same restrictions.
I hope we all can take a step back (especially myself) and and forge a new path where we trest others as we would like to be treated (can't ask for more).
For what it’s worth, I can see your comment and reply. Though I realize that might not mean you can reply back.
I disagree slightly. Usually HN is fine, but there's a lot of weird shifts in site culture. Sometimes you'll see comments on political submissions slide way to the right and shit gets flagged. My tinfoil regarding this is that HN is getting freep'd[0] - a thread gets linked on a conservative or far-right forum and is either flag bombed or spammed with propaganda comments. As mentioned in the "implicit downrank of DEI" section, the moderators try to unflag these threads (since they're relevant and people want to talk about them) but they just get flagged by the community a second time.
If I had access to a better moderated community not being actively attacked by the far right, I'd use it. But I'm not aware of any[1].
[0] Short for "Free Republic" - a conservative political forum that would ballot stuff online polls for the sake of pushing their political agenda.
[1] Note that I stopped posting to Reddit after /u/Spez decided to powertrip to kill a mod protest over third-party API clients.
I have never once thought of this place as getting attacked by the far right.
'Attacked' is a bit subjective, but there are certainly trigger topics that attract large numbers of strongly right-leaning posters. I won't list these topics as they are basically exactly the 'culture wars' topics that you'd expect.
I do personally find HN quite uncomfortable when discussion strays into social issues. I obviously don't feel that unwelcome here as I've been here since 2009. But there is a lot of bottled-up hostility to certain groups of people that can be released when the discussion takes a certain turn. And my subjective perception is that this has got much worse over the past decade.
Extremist comments usually get flagged eventually, but lots of people have already read them by the time that happens, and you can post outrageous things here without actually getting your account banned. It's galling to be a member of group X, see an unambiguously hateful comment about group X, and then see this same account continuing to post for years afterwards.
With less aluminium foil: HN has an crude anti-flamewar system that roughly triggers when the ratio comments/upvotes is greater than 1, and the post is quickly deranked.
Often this means it is a controversial post, but I've seen it happen with two or three posts/Ask HN of mine where a vibrant discussion causes them to disappear from the frontpage after 1 hour because commenters were too active and triggered the anti-flamewar system, which is quite disappointing.
Please, not everything on the Internet revolves around your political issues. But if it were the case of a thread linked elsewhere and flooded, this system would trigger as well.
I hate this idea that discussion on HN is inherently "better" or "more civilised" than in other forums. Some HN users will say the most outrageous things but with a superficial layer of "civility".
Parts of this site were a cesspool during the pandemic. No matter your position on it, discussion was of really low quality. Certain other emotionally charged topics (anything Apple, anything politics related, Elon Musk) also attract really bad discussion.
By and large, humans suck and aren't capable of reasonable debate when emotion runs high, and this place is no exception.
Dang is just a 10x moderator
He's so good that I wouldn't be surprised if he was literally 10x moderators. Thank you dang (dangs?) for what you do.
Not sure if you were (half) joking, but in case you weren’t:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139
(Spoiler alert: it’s all Dan G.)
Even if you said 100x, he wont upvote you, hehe
People thanking the censor and exposing their defense mechanisms is quite the dystopian sight. I guess I must be one of those paid instigators and every positive feedback I receive is from people I personally brought in from the outside.
This whole thread could be full of people expressing their dissatisfaction with the way HN is being moderated and most would never know. At least everyone is safe from a healthy debate on important subjects like an objective comparison of the US health care system with comparable systems the moderators censored last week.
I have no more intentions of participating in this toxic community. It's pretty evident everyone with a brain left already.
Moderation != Censorship. Any online community without moderation is doomed. By now we have decades of proof for this, so I'm baffled that people still don't understand it.
I got to be one of the people who learned today that it's "Dan G," not [only] "dang."