Looking at the list of removed stories makes me really happy with the moderators here. They're all sensationalist, advertising for some company, clickbait, way off topic, or some combination of above. In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel should not have been removed.
Thanks, mods.
In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel should not have been removed.
I don't understand why this story was removed: "It turns out the six-feet social-distancing rule had no scientific basis", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200511
On a forum with an overwhelmingly science-minded audience, it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.
Stories about COVID controversies are almost certainly getting flagged off the front page by users, not touched by mods. People look at the titles of these stories and think that's all flaggers are going by, but lots of people flag stories based on their experience of what the threads are like, and the threads on COVID controversies are fucking dreadful. I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
But why must they be dreadful? Genuine question, I am not being obtuse. We should be able as a community to discuss conterversial subjects somehow.
I also think this sort of thing invites flag brigades. Or better yet, a small batch of bad actor can easily start brigading and forcefully associate such flamewar expectations with any subject they don't like to drive it off HN.
Maybe worth reconsidering how you flag? You might be getting played. Or not, I really don't know. No obvious answers.
I don't know why they're dreadful, but they empirically are, and that's the end of the matter for me.
Empirically they are not. What you mean is that you don't like to be faced with the reality revealed by these stories and the comments.
But this attitude explains a lot of the abusive flagging that goes on here. Stories get flagged because they make people feel ick, and they feel ick because they previously took positions that were wrong. So they flag. And when asked, why do you flag, they say "I don't know, I just don't like it", forgetting that the site exists supposedly to help drive intellectual curiousity. You may not like these stories, but other people do find them useful and you should not interfere with them.
Comments like this really make me feel viscerally what we're missing out on by not having COVID fights on the front page more often. Thanks.
This isn't actually COVID specific. It's a nasty and frequent tactic on this forum, where someone makes strong assertions about one side of an argument whilst simultaneously claiming that the other side can't be allowed to speak because it would be "fighting", a "flamewar", a "trash fire", "not curious", "tedious" or whatever. It's an attempt to manipulate the site rules to suppress debate and is itself anti-curious.
Concrete examples from your comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32104731
"Given the weak sourcing, it feels like this article, in particular, flunks the "divisive subjects require more thought and substance" test."
(on a Bari Weiss article arguing that health authorities weren't really driven by science, something they now admit themselves was true).
In other comments you asserted that COVID vaccines can't possibly be dangerous but also said, "Convincing suspicious vaccine-skeptics of the value of vaccines is not the goal here. We're not a public health service; we're a forum for curious conversation. Tedious rehashes of antivax arguments aren't curious; they're just tedious."
If you don't like such discussions, ignore them! Nobody forces you to click through to the comments section. But this tactic of trying to define disagreement with your very strong opinions as not "curious" enough is tiresome. Other people do in fact want curious conversation, which will sometimes mean conversations about topics that you don't like. I'll say it again: leave those discussions alone. Stay away by all means, but don't interfere with other people's curiousity.
Hm. I think what I'm going to do instead is relentlessly flag them.
Check this out. It's barely on the front page, and has just 3 comments right now. How great is this post? How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235484
My son is a biochemist (interviewing for grad school slots right now, as in this actual evening, I'm living vicariously through him, wish him luck). I've been for years paying attention to bio/chem/biotech experts on HN, because I'm a biochem dad. We have lots of expertise about COVID here. None of it is on these COVID threads because all of them would apparently rather eat a bug than "truth it out" with people paraphrasing Bari Weiss. The verdict is in. You're on the wrong side of it!
But these have been useful data points for me, and I appreciate you offering them up. Have a great weekend!
Polls show trust in academia is collapsing rapidly, by the time your son graduates it will be much lower still. The verdict is in, but the Bari Weisses of the world are on the winning side. It's all taking a lot longer than it should though, partly due to the craven attempts to stop people exploring these topics.
You could respond to this situation by talking about it with your son openly, encouraging him to uphold the highest standards of scientific honesty and rigor, to try and stand out from the rest and blow the whistle if necessary. Be honest with him that grad school will be full of fraud and intellectual corruption. But by taking your current stance you're going to flee unpleasant information for years and both ended up be blindsided when you realize that biomedical grads are less trusted than journalists. You can't flag reality.
I don't think you understand the difference between a public health official and a biochemist. He cares what proteins think about his work, not what Bari Weiss does. It's not a persuasion job.
Anyways, my point is: we have subject matter experts on virology on HN. They tend not to participate in COVID threads, which are invariably overheated and Weiss-ian.
Congratulations on your son becoming a biochemist! A wonderful achievement.
Surely his middle school biology teachers had something to do with it. You should pay them a visit. Maybe ask them how many genders there are and see their faces contort in horror.
Please note that on this, covid, and whatever other such... things.. I offer no opinions of my own. I don't actually care very much about those topics and also, perhaps similarly to you, am put off by the far-(right|left) fanatics obsessed with them.
My peeve is with what it did to good public discourse and good people.
Perhaps if you see it on the faces of your sons teachers, who no doubt have had a rather increasingly stressful job in the not so many years since he left them, and to whom he owes at least a modicum of his no doubt bright future - you will understand my objection to your behavior of drumming out people in this fashion.
How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more
So do so! Nobody forces you to click on the Bari Weiss stuff. There is no doubt an evil twilight zone tptacek who flags the other way. And you both think you're great sheriffs clearing the joint from scum.
How much would I rather the thread you linked on daunting papers. How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than "you-are-wrong-about-my-sacred-cow, flagged!" remarks.
In my opinion you should just let people be wrong (see, no snarky air quotes from me! I hope you understand my tone and where I'm coming from) in the covid threads, leave each other alone and it won't boil over to more interesting threads. It's weird adults teach this in kindergarten but on a fancy I so smart forum we can't bring ourselves to rise above.
I think this sort of thing taken to the limit will cut every which way until eventually we run out of subjects and the overton window shrinks into an overton dot.
We've been running this system for something like a decade now, I think we know how it's going to converge.
I don't. I'd like to know however! Do tell!
It converges to the front page we have now, which, while imperfect, seems to be to the liking of the community, such that stories like this carry a bunch of comments about how happy they are about moderation here, and how about how few if any of the stories getting yeeted from the front page are things they even want to see on HN.
HN does not have to be a space for conversations about every important story. It is enough for it to be good at the conversations it is good at. There's a whole wide internet out there for the rest of the important conversations to take place on. Moreover: that has always been the premise of HN; it's not a principle we just sort of slipped into accidentally.
The risk that the quality of discourse on HN falls to Reddit leveles of shitposting seems a greater one to me. Having high volume of popular highly polarized discussions seems a great way to have an Eternal September[2] event, and there is no way to recover what makes a forum unique after that.
HN is a single place on the internet with clear moderation guidelines[1]. It doesn't have to cater to every form of speech. In fact, actively not doing so is probably the reason why HN's level of discourse is comparatively high.
People who want Reddit should go to Reddit, not drag HN with them through the mud.
Whether or not we’re able to discuss controversial subjects, a topic’s controversy doesn’t imply importance or relevance.
It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.
There are communities that are good for that kind of discussion, but that’s not what we come here to do. And for this place to stay good at what it does do, it can’t afford to drown out the signal with the noise of emotive bickering.
The site guidelines do, I think, an incredible job of articulating what sustains the tenor here.
But at the end of the day, how best to capture “the vibes” about whether we collectively think a topic is tired or doesn’t fit here? It seems like HN does it just like a good dinner party host would: Change the subject when your guests—that is, the people with a strong track record of positive contributions—indicate that they’re weary of it. After all, we’ve got plenty of things to talk about that we do agree would be fruitful.
It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.
The expertise on HN is indeed unrivaled.
If I want to learn about the quirks of a variational autoencoder in some neural network, I read the discussion between experts here on HN [1].
If I want to learn about protein folding, I can find relevant domain experts answering questions here on HN [2].
But why do you and so many others think that there is a covid-shaped hole in the expertise on HN? Do you really believe that out of all domain experts, the covid ones decided to stay away from here?
There's a lot of expertise about COVID here! The problem is, in a variational autoencoder discussion, that's mostly all there is, and in COVID threads there is lots of energy from non-COVID experts.
This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is. That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.
This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is.
I hardly see any covid threads here. I happened to see the one of this week. It got 8 comments before being flagged into oblivion.
That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.
You cannot have it both ways. Either you flag covid threads preemptively [1] along with a bunch of other users [2], or you try to learn from domain experts in these threads.
But making assumptions about what these experts would have thought of these threads, had they not been flagged down prematurely, is a weird leap of reasoning.
Sometimes the signal to noise ratio is so bad that I can't blame the experts for no longer engaging and/or me disengaging before I encounter an expert steering the discussion towards more fertile grounds
The dinner party analogy is perfect.
Sure. Thanksgiving dinner.
HN's guidelines have this relevant bit:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
An editorial that clearly does not embody that spirit is a poor starting point if you want the discussion to trend towards sanity.
Especially when the title itself violates—and ensures further violations of—this rule:
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
COVID stories are dreadful because there is a very low average level of applicable domain knowledge for COVID discussions.
In plain English, not enough people actually know what they are talking about to create an informative and educational discussion. So they all just end up as a pointless exercise in all the worst aspects of forum flame wars.
HN is at its best when people with lots of relevant experience and knowledge come into the discussion. Then the rest of us can learn new facts, tools, perspectives, etc.
There’s a long list of topics where that is just not available in the existing audience. So there are a lot of topics that, while interesting, are just not a good investment of everyone’s time here.
We should, but we don’t.
Some things just don't scale well conversationally.
I asked this exact question in an Ask HN post a couple of years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29532676
That thread actually changed my mind on the issue. You say "We should be able as a community to discuss conterversial subjects somehow." Well, guess what, we're not, or at least we're not without a great amount of care. Stories like the submitted one, which may be factually accurate but clearly have a political axe to grind are absolutely not going to lead to anything but a shitstorm of useless discussion.
They're dreadful because people are coming from opposite places and are unwilling to be convinced otherwise, so the conversations are repetitive and dull, with little new information. We really don't need to hear for the 100th time how Covid was or was not a lab leak when there's no new real evidence one way or the other, but every time Covid comes up, there's gonna be some unresolvable argument in the comments that's just dreadful and not worthy of this site's time. Hence the flag. With a infinitely more heavy handed moderation team (or LLM) to judge comments before they got posted, we might be able to have good discussions on such topics, but until then, you can turn on show dead in your profile to see what kind of low-quality comments certain topics attract.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
lots of people flag stories based on their experience of what the threads are like
IMHO story submissions should be judged based upon their own merits. Toxic commenters can be downvoted/banned but the story submitter shouldn't be punished for the misbehavior of others.
I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
You mean purely based on the expected awfulness of imagined future comments, instead of the actual comments? If so, with a precrime mindset like that, you're fanning the flames of controversy.
It's good to want things! We can just disagree.
There's not enough space on the front page for all the good things we want to read. I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation. The people most invested in these kinds of stories seem to be almost the least invested in HN's rubric of curious conversation.
I don't call any of the shots around here, but I think I speak for a bunch of different users who flag this way.
I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation.
I didn't ask you to expend effort in rescuing stories. I took issue with the way you expend effort in burying stories, even before the comment section turns out to go sideways:
I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
It takes very little effort at all to flag stories that I'm convinced are both colorably off-topic, or duplicative of other marginally topical stories that have run within the last year, and that I'm convinced will create nightmare threads. That's the purpose of the flagging system. That system is also monitored, so that people who abuse it as a super-downvote for stories they just don't like quietly lose flagging powers. So: I plan to keep on doing it.
Remember though: we're not having this conversation so you can persuade me to change how I use the site. I'm just one doofus here. Wha ye need tae worry about are the t'ousand doofuses standing behind me. (_The Devil's Own_, 1997, starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford).
It doesn't get less curious that "I try to bury discussion before it even happens and can't even explain why". You should be ashamed that you spend so much time here yet fundamentally do not get the rules.
I think reading the top comment on that post provides plenty of explanation why users would flag that post. Perhaps you're trying not to understand.
I think reading the top comment on that post provides plenty of explanation why users would flag that post.
That top comment complains that the HN title is WSJ's informative subheading instead of its clickbaity headline.
The top comment complains that the title submitted to HN is both not the original headline, and not an accurate characterization of the content of the article.
If there's no possible title to use for a submission that won't get it flagged, then clearly it's not a great article to be submitting.
And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules. (The paywall doesn't help its viability as an HN submission, either.)
The top comment complains that the title submitted to HN is both not the original headline, and not an accurate characterization of the content of the article.
What do you mean: "not an accurate characterization of the content of the article"? The title pretty accurately describes an admission by the former NIAID director in a House Select Subcommittee, according to the WSJ. That admission is the topic of the article.
And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules.
From HN's rules:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait;
I think using the clickbaity original title ("Anthony Fauci Fesses Up") would be flouting HN's rules.
Please don't cross into personal attack. It just makes everything worse, and you can make your substantive points without that.
That comment lined up pretty closely with one of my pet peeves. I apologize for overreacting and contributing negatively to what was already a busy day for you. Thank you for all your hard work and patience.
Oh believe me it lines up with my pet peeves as well (and I have a lot of them). Thanks for the kind reply.
Are you asserting that, if the title had remained "Anthony Fauchi [sic] Fesses Up" it would have remained, unflagged?
Maybe you should Submit it again with the original title, and see what happens.
If it had been submitted with that title, it would simply have been harder to pretend there's wasn't plenty of reason for the submission to be flagged.
What reasons would those be?
(Shrug) I don't require scientific proof of the inverse-square law. It's self-evident to the point of being axiomatic. Standing 6 feet away from a virus source will expose you to about 44% fewer virus particles than standing 5 feet away from one, while not imposing any real hardships in most public interaction scenarios. What's controversial about that?
If you demand precise scientific rigor in all aspects of everyday life, public health is probably not the career field for you.
The same with masks:
Put a water hose on mist and spray someone with it. Then put a cloth over the nozzle and try to spray them. It's self evident yet people just could not grasp it.
It's "self evident" yet a large Cochrane meta-analysis finds no benificial effect of masks whatsoever:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
You sure?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abs...
When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless. Also keep in the mind that the primary reason for studies showing masks not working is that people don't wear it correctly or at all.
You sure? >https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abs...
That's just one RCT. The Cochrane meta-analysis looked at a bunch of them.
When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless.
You're putting the cart before the horse. In an ideal world, guidelines for the medical field are based on scientific evidence. But there's always a delay.
You better consult the scientific evidence to make up your mind.
When it comes to covid and masking, policymakers will wait as long as possible before aknowledging the evidence, because they know the public hasn't forgotten the draconian masking of school kids yet.
If you read the study you would see that they addressed the issue of meta-studies on the topic.
You can find a meta-analysis to prove anything you want.
It is an extraordinary claim that wearing a mask properly does not reduce transmission of viral particles. You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously. Then you can point to studies whose results are explained by that hypothesis.
You can find a meta-analysis to prove anything you want.
I'm not trying to prove anything. I just rely on the judgement of domain experts.
In this thread I cited Cochrane, The Lancet, SciAm and Science Magazine. If you have more reputable sources, please share them here.
You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously.
It's only unintuitive if you stick to the droplet model. SARS-CoV-2 however spreads like smoke through the air, as I documented already extensively in this post:
Are you saying that face masks are not effective?
He's saying that someone else got to him first. He has a meta-analysis, don't you see.
Personally, I thought it was already pretty well established that the six-foot rule was based on poor science. I remember hearing about that years ago.
The thing is, you're not even wrong. The six foot rule was based on what the best understanding of the experts was at the time, and probably saved thousands of lives. Just like forced masking up probably saved tens of thousands of lives. Both were great examples of science, which readily admits to tuning when new evidence comes into play.
However, because there's a right wing cult around Donald Trump, whose fortunes were hurt by the pandemic, the six foot rule and masking and vaccines are set up as straw men and attacked by a gigantic and well funded and organized horde of proxies, including the #1 media network in the US. It goes something like this: because a particular individual got COVID, that's proof that vaccines are not 100% effective and so They Lied To Us For Nefarious Purposes. Or because this particular individual stood 6 feet away and still got COVID, that's evidence that Fauci Is In A Conspiracy With The Chinese. Or because this particular individual survived COVID, it's just a cold. Or because masks are not 100% effective when not worn securely, they are not effective. And on and on.
So it's not unreasonable or unlikely that you heard a thing about bad science and six feet of social distance or whatever. But hearing a thing, and the thing being true from foundational motivations of actual science, are very different right now.
The six foot rule was based on what the best understanding of the experts was at the time, and probably saved thousands of lives.
You can't just make up the beneficial effects of something as you go. Can you cite some randomized controlled trials that support your claim?
Just like forced masking up probably saved tens of thousands of lives.
One year ago, a huge Cochrane meta-analysis of the available RCTs regarding masking has put that idea to bed: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
literally quoting from that meta-analysis, which does not include many clinical trials that have demonstrated an impact:
"Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
Example very large study published in a reputable journal: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069?cookieSe...
literally quoting from that meta-analysis, which does not include many clinical trials that have demonstrated an impact:
Yes. To their credit, they only looked at randomized controlled trials.
"Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
In other words: the RCTs don't show an effect to a significant degree.
no, it literally says that they do not have a conclusion. You are trying to read it differently because you have an agenda. Please do science instead.
omg, even talking about the flagging is going to trigger the flamewar :)
I flagged that article, so I'll clearly explain why:
1. I think for anyone that has been on HN throughout pandemic knows it is extremely unlikely for topics like this to produce any sort of valuable discussion. I almost never see any sort of humility on the topic (to be clear, from many/all sides) that admits that people (individuals, experts, literally everyone) were doing what they thought best with the information they had available at the time. It always devolves into portraying the other side as evil. I'm tired of it, I don't want to see it on HN, there are literally pages and pages and pages of place on the Internet where you can have that debate if you're so inclined.
2. Are you honestly purporting that specific article is well tailored to "an overwhelmingly science-minded audience", as opposed to just having a particular political axe to grind, given the title is "Anthony Fauci Fesses Up"? Honestly, if the article was written with an intent to encourage an actual understanding about where the 6-foot rule came from, and about whether the evidence for it was lacking, I probably wouldn't have flagged it.
it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.
I think the mistake you are making there is thinking because a particular article is flagged by a lot of users that "an important topic like that is deemed untouchable." I can't speak for others, but for me that is absolutely not what I think, and it's not why I flagged this particular submission.
That isn't clear at all. You seem to be saying that if you anticipate that people might question other people's competence or motives, or in your view a discussion won't lead people to think the right thoughts ("encourage actual understanding") then you flag it to try to ensure nobody can discuss it.
But you also say that making it undiscussable is also not about making the topic untouchable. That's just playing with words, isn't it? It's exactly what you're trying to do and exactly why you're flagging it.
This particular case is really egregious. Fauci has said this draconian policy "just sort of appeared", yet you damn anyone questioning his competence or motives as lacking humility? What would it take for you to allow criticism of this guy?
Your response highlights the exact thing I'm talking about, as it ascribes motives to me that are totally foreign to me, and takes the tone that flagging an article means that I think I want to "ensure nobody can discuss it."
I could respond to some of your other sentences, but you've exactly proven my point, so thank you.
(I detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230689 for reasons explained below.)
The subthread your comment generated here already answers your question. (<-- not a criticism! just an observation.) People are flaming each other about the inverse square law, droplets vs. aerosols, who is refusing to face reality, and sundry other nastinesses in the comments below. It demonstrates what a shitshow a frontpage thread would have been.
It's not that the topic itself is "untouchable". HN had quite a few threads about the lab leak hypothesis for example. But these things are sensitive to initial conditions, and something about the way that headline frames the story feels doomed to me, from an HN point of view. The sweet spot for HN is substantive, thoughtful conversation driven by intellectual curiosity. That's what the site is for. We don't always get there by any means, but I only want to turn off user flags when the odds give us a fighting chance. I remember seeing that story get flagged and thinking: it'll never work.
Another aspect of this: like it or not, curiosity and repetition have an inverse relationship. After the mind has been hammered with the same hammer enough times, curiosity gets sick of it and goes "ugh, not that again". That means that on a topic like all-things-covid, which we all got hammered with, the majority of the audience, who don't care that much, check out at first mention of the topic. Who does that leave? The ones whose motive is more intense than mere curiosity.
From an HN point of view, that's a ticket to hell. Curiosity can only operate within a certain range of nervous system activation. If the needle sinks too low, the topic is 'bleh' and nobody cares; but if the needle goes into the red, people will care—my god will they care—but they'll no longer be functioning out of curiosity. That's a failure mode for HN.
When it comes to divisive, heavily-covered topics like that one, the thing to watch for is some kind of interesting new information that isn't entirely reducible to existing battle lines. The same forces driving the thread into flamewar will still be present—but at least you'll have some current running the other way.
Don’t the vast majority of these get removed via flags from users?
Edit: I’m not asking a rhetorical question. There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page. Can anyone attest to this?
This is accurate, per dang's comment on the Gary Tan thread the other day:
We didn't flag the post; users did. When it comes to submissions, that's nearly always the case - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
There are stories on this list that deserved to be seen, were popular, were important, and were not in fact dumpster fires in the comments - but a particular crowd with a particular bias decided to flag them.
Example 1: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39142094
Example 2: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39130652
Example 3: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39214844
Does this crowd think it's cool and normal that all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed, based on the opinion of a dedicated minority?
US tech giants are heavily implicated in this, so no one can seriously argue the topic isn't relevant. A World War could come from these "plausibly genocidal" actions, which are enabled in various ways by US tech giants.
There's a certain element that doesn't want to discuss politics at all, so I imagine these ran afoul of that crowd. This is a tech-oriented site, and we're not going to come up with a Middle East peace plan in the comments.
This is a tech-oriented site
Exactly. Big tech has been staggeringly complicit in these oh-so documented war crimes. For example, AI is being used to 'target' people, even in refugee camps and residential areas; even when hundreds of civilian casualties are predicted. This has been admitted - even boasted about.
As tech people, we can't just stick our heads in the sand and expect this not to come back on us. We're enabling this destruction in myriad ways, from funding to coercion to suppression of discussion [cough].
Genocide isn't just politics. We are legally bound as a nation, and morally obligated as humans, to prevent it. Instead, the US and many its tech companies are complicit.
If we can't even discuss the ICJ ruling that this may well be in fact a genocide, even when people are behaving and upvoting without breaking guidelines, then imo something very important has been broken.
"We are legally bound as a nation"
"We" ain't all americans. There are people here coming from opposing sides in various wars. And there are more wars and slaughtering going on, than in the middle east. And "we" are just tech people. Not better or worse by principle, which shows off very easily as there can be religious flame wars about software already. So it would be good, if we could debate all this in a nice way. But apparently we cannot. This is why many people want NO politics here at all. As there is usually nothing coming out of it, except more of the usual - and not interesting discussions.
"We" ain't all americans.
The vast majority of English speaking countries signed the Genocide Convention, if not all [0]
This is why many people want NO politics here at all.
They're not a majority, far from it. And the rules don't say "NO politics"; that would be absurd. Tech and politics overlap often - as they do here.
0 - https://www.statista.com/chart/22194/countries-that-havent-r...
The basic metric this site optimizes for is: "interesting discussion". So yes, sometimes there can be interesting discussion about political topics. But most of the times - not so much. And what you apparently want is activism, not discussion. Not to say your activism is bad - but this site is simply not made for activism of any kind. Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
what you apparently want is activism, not discussion
I'd call the flaggers colluding to spike stories with lively and non toxic discussions the 'activists'.
Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options. Suppressing anything with a whiff of controversy doesn't result in positive outcomes.
Besides; freedom of speech, and free exchange of ideas, are both decidedly in the "good hacker" wheelhouse.
"and non toxic discussions"
Have you seen one discussion about Gaza free of that? I haven't. (My main account is rate limited, because of a recent Gaza debate btw. Because I like heated discussions from time to time. But I can respect that it is not wanted here)
"So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options."
So one of those options are, you start your own forum, where you can have all that, instead of demanding that other people and places change to your liking. Just a suggestion.
Have you seen one discussion about Gaza free of that? I haven't.
I have. I linked them as examples above.
demanding that other people and places change to your liking
I haven't made any demands. I've said what I'd like to see improved.
On the whole I like this community, and I try to contribute to it positively. Making suggestions on how it could be run with less censorship and suppression is not an unreasonable thing to do, and it's odd you think it is tbh.
"I linked them as examples above."
In my opinion they were not free of that.
"ICJ orders Israel to stop genocide in Gaza"
And this one is really bad, as the ICJ did not do such a thing. The ICJ has not made any ruling, whether what happens in Gaza is genocide or not, so what good can come out of such a manipulative headline?
None of the is on-topic for HN.
The initial invasion was allowed due to the international significance, but to discuss subsequent events head to Reddit.
This is in the FAQ linked in the footer.
Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar will be on topic.
The ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has "international significance". It's by far the most significant development in months.
From the submission guidelines:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
People here were clearly finding those stories interesting, as measured by upvotes and comments.
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
US mainstream TV mostly declined to air South Africa's side of the case, as well as the actual verdict; opting instead to only air Israel's defense.
Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar will be on topic.
"Something with drones" = on topic, but a plausible genocide verdict from the ICJ is not of "international significance" and therefore off topic... This isn't computing for me, sorry.
ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has "international significance". It's by far the most significant development in months
The verdict had a thread with over fifteen hundred comments and was on the front page most of the day. Others were presumably down ranked as they were dupes.
The linked deleted thread was 90 minutes older than the thread that 'survived'.
Also, it was removed within a minute of hitting the front page (if I'm reading the graphs right). Doesn't quite line up with your presumption.
Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?
Besides - the point is this: Not all the stories that are in OP's list are spam, or unsuitable. Some topics hit a third rail.
They are easily removed by a small group of users, and then Daniel can come by months later and say, well, users flagged it [ie, 0]. It even happens to PG [1]. This isn't ideal, and pretending it isn't happening is uncool.
I'm not saying Dang doesn't do a great job. But there are some topics that are verboten, despite their impact/relevance on the tech community and our general interest. And this particular topic is too important to allow for such narrative control by a tiny group of flaggers.
I think some major newspapers are 'downvoted' by default, as so many off-topic articles from them are posted.
I think I read this from a comment from dang.
Yes, nearly all major media sites have a mild downweight, as do most of the tech sites that mostly recycle the same stories.
We don't ban these sites, because all of them occasionally produce solid original articles. But we downrank them because if we didn't, the frontpage would consist of little else—and many readers still feel they're over-represented, even with the downranking.
Doesn't quite line up with your presumption.
Presumably users flagged both posts almost immediately, and by the time mods decided that the topic was worth discussion the second thread had more engagement. The first thread was still a dupe despite being posted earlier.
Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?
While the verdict was a major event like you said, The Guardian's story was not. Users flagged it, like all posts on the topic, and the mods decided it was not different enough from previous discussions to justify a new flame war.
The ongoing wars are topics worthy of discussions, and they get discussed here. They don't need daily discussions. If you want daily discussions, there are plenty of places you can go to do that.
all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed
HN had an enormous thread about the ICJ decision:
ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043 - Jan 2024 (1397 comments)
The question here isn't whether the topic has been suppressed; it's how much of it HN can handle. This site is not designed for frequent repetition, especially of flamewar topics—it's designed for precisely the opposite. That makes the question of how to handle a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) a tricky one. HN has a reasonably well-defined approach to this, which has been stable for many years:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I addressed the big ICJ thread below. The suppressed threads were posted much earlier, and showed clear signs of being flagged as soon as they were visible.
Which is the point - a small crowd of partisans can flag third rail topics here, no matter how much interest or how much positive discussion is happening.
I remember, in particular, the time all the posts about a lead torturer from Abu Ghraib were suppressed. Although she destroyed Congressional evidence, she was promoted to a top position at at a top tech hirer. We should be able to talk about things like that.
Your response then was the same as now; to deflect responsibility to 'users'. I don't buy it. The same happened with Annie Altman's claims about her brother. The same has happened with quite a few Zionism related threads, recently and historically. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37953737, which clearly is squarely in our domain.
There is room for improvement here. A minority of strongly biased participants, on any issue, shouldn't be able to completely disappear whole sides of the story, as has been happening.
There are important differences between
(1) These stories feel incredibly important to me now!
-and-
(2) Complete strangers, all over the internet, and with no official duties or obligations regarding the subjects of these stories, should be required to pay attention to them!
The first one is fine. The second one suggests a somewhat immature worldview, or limited social skills.
Your comment was fine until the end, but that last sentence crosses into personal attack. Please don't do that—it just makes everything worse, and you can make your substantive points without it.
I don’t think these things, or even a lot or the other political topics are uninteresting. I’ll often still flag them, however, since I’m really very uninterested in what the HN crowd who responds to these sort of things have to say about it.
Part of this is because I’m European, and the whole “red vs blue” team sort or politics a lot of Americans seem to do these days is just silly, and often hateful. But part of it is also that we’re a bunch of people who know tech and business, but not international politics. I guess I could just ignore them, but I’d frankly rather they were kept to other places on the internet.
While those stories may be important, they are all off-topic for Hacker News. This is not a general news/discussion site, and there are other places on the internet to discuss those things. HN is explicitly set up to discourage stories which would incur flame-war-like political arguments.
Per the guidelines:
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The latter two stories are not new phenomenon (the war has been ongoing), and the former, literally being a decision by a political body, falls squarely under "politics", and is highly likely to lead to nonproductive flamewars.
Just to clarify one misunderstanding: most flags on submissions (nearly all actually) come from users, not mods. So if you see [flagged], it's almost always there because of users and in many cases the mods haven't even seen it yet.
But there are other ways besides flags for stories to fall suddenly off the front page: software penalties (e.g. the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector, various abuse detection systems, etc.) and moderation downweights. Users don't do either of those.
These points are covered in the FAQ although necessarily tersely. See "How are stories ranked?" and "What does [flagged] mean?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page. Can anyone attest to this?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
I don’t get the impression from that article that Daniel and Scott are curating the front page in the way the thanks in this thread suggest. I am still of the impression that the front page composition is decided by upvotes, downvotes, and flags. Contrary to the implication in this repos’ text.
What is that impression based on?
The article, the HN's guidelines and FAQ, Dang's accumulated comments, etc.
Scott hasn't been a mod for years.
Besides upvotes, downvotes, and flags, there are software penalties like the flamewar detector and various anti-abuse measures, and moderation downweights. We do a lot of the latter—I don't want to underemphasize this. The HN system is a combination of these three subsystems.
You're right that user flags do more than mods do, just because the numbers work that way: there are many orders of magnitude more users flagging things than there are mods.
Edit: 5 orders of magnitude more, in fact!
There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page.
IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.
Yes, there is dang, the single admin who posts publicly, and I guess it's possible/probable there are other HN admins who assist him. But 99.9% of the time when I hear people complaining about "the mods" or "power tripping mods" or "censorship", it's basically that other users saw what you had to say, and we just don't want to see it here.
It's also weird that occasionally people think there is some sort of "rule" about what can be flagged. There are obviously guidelines, but as this power is held by any normal user, it's basically whatever they want it to mean. For example, I frequently flag stories where I think the topic and article is totally valid, but where every single time I've seen the topic debated on HN it becomes a useless flamewar or is filled with the lowest quality commentary. At least for me, flagging isn't a value judgment on the "worthiness" of an article, it's simply about stuff I don't want to see on HN.
IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.
Partially, but I think these are all symptoms for a more fundamental root cause: HN is just comprised of too many emotional, passionate users with fundamentally differing beliefs.
The usual song and dance with flagging goes something like the following with cryptocurrency:
1. User posts cryptocurrency article
2. People who passionately hate cryptocurrency start adding in emotional comments about how they hate it.
3. People who want to fight this passionate hate respond in kind.
4. The thread turns into a giant argument where nobody is willing to concede anything and everyone is just shouting at each other.
5. Either the flamewar detector kicks in (as it should) or everyone not in the thread tires of the shouting and flags it.
That's fine but regrettable when limited to some topics like crypto. But it's happening with social media company earnings reports, layoff posts, RTO discussions, posts about Musk, autonomous vehicles, and on and on.
dang (and the mod team?) are doing great work, but this is despite the feeling I have that HN is barely being held together into a cohesive community, and I'm struggling to even use the word "community" here. I feel the temperature of discussions has gotten a lot hotter here than it used to be and some basic work I've done with sentiment classifiers on comments here mirrors my perspective.
I just don't think a single community can handle so many passionate, opposed groups. It bubbles up by proxy in these sorts of flagging wars where so many articles get bumped off the page due to the inability of the community to discuss it well. Maybe the solution is to just discuss software as some people really want, but even then you get massive flamewars over things like Rust async. Even with interesting topics like VR posts, the overall temperature of the comments here is high enough that I've stopped bothering to comment as much as I used to.
It has always been the case and is in fact the stated premise of the site that it's barely held together in a cohesive community. The original mission statement was "see how long we can fend off Eternal September". So that's not alarming; it's how things are supposed to be. I suppose a perfectly stabilized cohesive community would be worrying, a sign that the site is staling.
I agree that a stable, cohesive community is a sign that the site is failing but I think we've hewed too far to the side of "barely holding it together" on this spectrum. I feel that it dissuades new, quality contributors from joining and instead attracts contrarians and arguers.
I think it's just that the community is so big now. If 1% of 100 regular posters are likely to get into flamewars over crypto, then that may result in a dozen comments or so. If 1% of 10,000 regular posters are flamewarriors, well...
An interesting heuristic I've seen play out a few times now across different communities (and that HN is starting to suffer from now on more contentious topics) is that too many comments on a post means that it's low quality. A handful of comments on an old post means there's not a lot to say about a topic; too many comments means that there's not a lot to change your mind about
That's not what the application is measuring:
I don't have a problem with users building things like this because the principles by which HN works are all easy enough to explain and defend—just remember that anything this complex is inevitably a mess, so you need to have high tolerance for messiness if you want to understand it accurately.
However, it's important to correct inaccuracies like the one mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537. Robin89, can you please fix the text? I know it was just a mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.
Also, it would make it easier for me to respond to the questions here if you'd link the HN IDs on your page to the actual HN threads. Currently they link to social-protocols.org. Obviously you can link to whatever you want but I'm having trouble tracing the questions here. Everyone has their own list of "what happened to story X, Y, Z, and what about W and V and J too" and while I'm happy to answer all those in principle, there are physical limits on how many I can work through.
I'm going to be in meetings for most of the next few hours but I'll try to answer questions in this thread later, assuming I don't drown in it.
Robin89, can you please fix the text? know that was just a mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.
How can he/we verify it's wrong? The down-weighting you describe is not visible to users. Even OP won't know.
You can say that down-weighting happens, but we're asking to see where down-weighting happens.
Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story.
I’ve seen it happen when I’ve flagged stories so either there is a vast conspiracy of moderators that receive pages when I flag things so they can downrank… or maybe dang isn’t lying about something that should be super obvious as a community self policing mechanism.
Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story.
It's discussed in the link, and elsewhere [1]. Some mod actions on HN are transparent, some are not. You should not assume that, just because you see marks of some form of moderation, that you can see them all.
Undisclosed content moderation is like directly modifying your production database. It's faster, but always more troublesome. Nobody else knows what changed or why, etc.
If you want a site with a public mod log, there's Lobsters. If you want a site with a mod log that's cryptographically auditable by users, I'm sure blockchainia has something on offer. You're not going to get either of those things here, for reasons the community has dug into in the past and you can surface with the search bar.
I support transparent-to-the-author content moderation, and I suspect that is in the future for today's major platforms, whether they want it or not.
Sure, that could happen. And if it does, it will happen by way of people leaving sites like this one for sites moderated differently. I think we're all OK with letting the market decide.
I would prefer if the market decides, but there are a few non-trivial court cases coming up that may influence what happens.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...
[3] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...
I appreciate the accuracy in your comment but do please edit out swipes like "Wtf are you talking about"—those spread bad feeling, and when we're talking about the community itself it's even more important not to do that.
Additionally, just because it’s possible that this could happen doesn’t really give us an idea of how likely it is. Is it one of those theoretically possible, but it never actually happens events? there’s a huge difference between it impacting half of the stories that fall off that quickly, and it impacting 1 in 10,000 stories that fall off that quickly.
Communities would get a good sense for the frequency if forums would simply disclose content moderation to the submitting users. Offending users would learn what's not allowed and share that with the community.
But today's forums frequently do not disclose moderation to submitting users, and that is why we are now seeing major court cases over 230, government-led censorship, etc.
I don't know anything about other forums, but for the reasons why on HN we don't publish a full moderation log, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 as well as the past explanations linked from there.
You can, however, always get a question answered. That's basically our implicit contract with the community.
Full moderation logs are different than showing submitters how their posts have been moderated.
On HN, my understanding is that you (moderators) can penalize stories without the submitter's knowledge. But if HN instead disclosed that penalty to the story's submitter, that would help this community communicate better.
As for how it works elsewhere, if a YouTube channel removes your comment, you won't know [1]. Same thing on Reddit, Facebook, and X. So while HN is relatively small, the practice of withholding content moderation decisions from submitters/commenters is widespread.
I'm sorry, but I think that would have the effect of making what is already a difficult job impossible. Even if most submitters saw that information and went "oh! well I guess that's that then," the number who would instantly fire off emails of protest would overwhelm our capacity to answer them.
Every submitter thinks their story deserves to make HN's front page, if not #1. Actually, that's not entirely true—the cleverest and most tasteful submitters are often the most humble. We have to go out of our way to try to find what they post because they're the last people who would ever send an email demanding attention.
But I can tell you from experience (81,556 emails and counting) that there are far more people who think their blog post ought to be #1 on HN than I could ever answer, and I can tell you what happens if one tries: many come back with a list of objections that is 3x longer than the entire conversation so far. The problem grows the more you feed it.
I want people to be able to get answers to their questions. No one would love it more than me if we could find some automated way of reducing that load while still answering people's questions. But so far every suggestion of how to do this sets off so many alarms in my body that I wonder if I'll sleep that night.
I'm afraid that might come across dismissive and I apologize if it does. It's just that the status quo already involves so much pressure that if I try to explain, I come across as a deranged beach ball that's been pinned deep underwater for 10 years.
Your comment isn't dismissive, but I do think users have a right to know where they've been moderated.
There are several low-point, long-lived but highly ranked unnatural posts on the top page that appear to be manipulated. Such unnaturalness and opacity make users feel that the ranking is arbitrary and unfair, even if for good reasons. Can you display the manipulation that has been done on the ranking and other lists per post? For example, a reset of the submission time should be easily displayed.
There are several low-point, long-lived but highly ranked unnatural posts on the top page that appear to be manipulated.
Which are they? It's important to include links so that (a) we can say what's going on, and (b) so readers can make up their own minds.
You might be talking about stories that went in to the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which get a random placement on HN's front page.
If you don't know it could be a bug. Next time I find it, I will report it.
I have heard that sometimes the submission time is reset, such as when returning from the second chance pool. This could also create an unnatural ranking order, so the original time before the reset should be listed as well.
It could certainly be a bug! but it could also be a lot of other things.
Yes, the timestamp munging is artifact of HN's re-upping system, described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and links back from there. About the timestamps, there are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
The original times are always available because the modified time is used only on the frontpage and the article's /item page. If you find the article on /from or /submitted, for example, the timestamp will be the original. The two timestamps converge over time.
Can you also list the original times on the front page for consistency in rankings?
Sorry but I don't understand the question.
I use the downvote button for two reasons: overwhelmingly for rude, come-uppance, and similar type of comments; very rarely for comments spreading FUD for no particular reason. I just downvoted your comment for the second reason.
Demanding transparency is fine but you’ve got to provide proof with your claims. If there are stories which feel manipulated to you link them and let the audience see, maybe you’re right.
Dang explained here that it could happen.
I’m not saying you’re wrong I.e. manipulation probably does happen, my prior=0.4 bec. it happens inmost platforms so why not here (0.5) but AFAIk HN has strong anti manipulation tools&practices in places (-0.1). Show me examples so I can update my mental model.
While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
I am, so you can believe it. But: I don't flag things that I'm tired of.
If I could, I'd hibernate until such time as I didn't have to hear about generative AI anymore.
It took about 10 years for the crypto headline hysteria to taper but it might have been only because ai is now the big annoying thing to shoehorn into everything. Monkeys pawl will curl and you will emerge out of your hibernation to more disgust at whatever the next annoying thing will be.
I think the difference is that AI is definitely useful and here to stay.
Crypto was mostly scams or pie in the sky ideas that will never work. It will stick around for money laundering & buying drugs but that's about it.
Eh? I'm not pretending digital coins or dubious "tokens" were all particularly useful, but crypto (in the sense of cryptography) has been around for decades and is definitely here to stay...
The people who made coins and tokens bad for society are doing the same thing with GenAI...
Both are useful and both come with huge problems. Neither one is some panacea or a sustainable get-rich-quick scheme (obviously, both people in "crypto" and in "GenAI" are getting rich, but neither are going to lead to some sort of great societal good).
but crypto (in the sense of cryptography) has been around for decades and is definitely here to stay...
But that's not the sense under discussion. "Crypto"=cryptography lost the language war and was completely supplanted by "crypto"=cryptocurrency. I really wish the word could regain its original and useful meaning, but it's too late now.
Ironically, "I work in crypto" went from meaning something useful to society to meaning being a parasite on society, and you'd best not accidentally use the phrase expecting people to understand it to mean the original thing (cryptography).
(Yes, not all uses of cryptocurrency are a parasitic detriment. But if you happen to be working on actually useful stuff and we meet socially, then please be very quick about saying that you work at doing something with cryptocurrency or blockchain that is intended to provide actual benefit. If you just say "I work in crypto", I will excuse myself at the first opportunity.)
"Crypto"=cryptography lost the language war and was completely supplanted by "crypto"=cryptocurrency.
On the timescale of the past 4-5 years, you are correct about the popular usage.
However, if cryptocurrency continues to recede from the public eye, then in another 4-5 years I think "crypto" will no longer mean "cryptocurrency".
Understanding both the current lexicon and the "archaic" and "recently archaic" uses of the term I hold is both useful and pertinent to being able to communicate effectively. Which is why I immediately clarified, I'm talking about the 40+ year definition of the term, not the current whimsical linguistic fad.
Also, it's very clear from the messaging and breathless hype that the NFT grifters packed uo their stuff and moved over en masse to the GenAI space
Was at a networking event recently and "I was in the crypto/NFT space but I'm now pivoting to GenAI" was by far the most common way people introduced themselves.
At least it made it easy to figure out who I didn't need to talk to.
I agree, I don't find it very interesting.
I will occasionally flag things that will result in discussions that are always the same because I'm tired of them. Stories about tipping at restaurants or Trump or Biden, for example -- literally every argument for or against has been made and there's nothing new or interesting to say. But I'm more likely to hide them.
I would also include the periodic Monty Hall re-post (everything that ever comes up in the discussions can be found in the Monty Hall problem wikipedia page).
And also pretty much any article about inflation.
Why would one ever flag stories they believe will result in the same useless discussions rather than just hiding them?
I think I've only ever flagged one or two instances of spam personally.
it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news
For sure many are. This happens with every Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) and LLMs are way beyond a MOT [1]. The hivemind tires of repetition extremely quickly [2]. The trick is to try to separate wheat from chaff, where 'wheat' means the stories that bring Significant New Information (SNI) [3] and 'chaff' means the follow-up and copycat stories, which are legion [4].
It's important to understand are that there's a wide spectrum of opinion about this stuff. If you imagine a slider with "allow zero posts about $TOPIC" at one end, and "allow all posts about $TOPIC" at the other end, pretty much every user would slide it to a different position. This is true for every $TOPIC and especially for the biggest ones.
Frontpage space is the scarcest resource HN has [5] and every reader has a different 'signature' of preferences that they would like to see (or not see) there. This means not only that it's impossible to satisfy everybody, but that it's impossible to fully satisfy anybody—because nobody's 'signature' is perfectly matched on the front page, and (lest any of you be thinking of this quick riposte) certainly not the mods'!
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Have you ever considered writing a book about what you've learned about moderation and community?
You seem to have developed these concepts pretty extensively. Seeing you break down this terminology whets my appetite to hear from you in long form.
I'd be pretty miserable doing that, but one of these years I'd like to condense the past explanations into something a bit more definitive and put them up as sort of glosses on the site guidelines. I imagine most of those HN Search links I'm constantly posting could be replaced by a link to some sort of canonical paragraph on the topic.
There was some heavy handed moderation decision that moot made, can't remember what, but he enforced it by saying "One man's shitpost is another man's board culture". I think about that a lot when it comes to moderation because people tend to assume everyone in the community is just like them; and really only moderators have a gauge on how saturated certain can be.
It's also why I don't like the "free speech at all costs" meme that gets thrown around when $corporation bans $person_i_like. Every community needs moderation and it's often a thankless job that feels like nothing is being done at all when it's being done right.
Why does seeing moot quoted suddenly make me feel old.
I'm sick of LLM-related news. I'm fascinated by the technology and the progress, but for every one article about something novel, there are dozens rehashing the same points about social impact, bias, deepfakes, plagiarism, etc. These topics are of some interest to me, but the vast majority of the articles bring nothing new to the table and are reactionary responses to the latest infraction.
I believe that is close to what the median HN reader feels: interested by the significant new developments, fatigued by the endless incremental updates, and grossed out by the hypemeisters.
I make my money building things with LLMs and even I am tired of reading about them
LLMs are like crypto, where scams and scam-adjacents are everywhere.
I am the biggest local ML advocate you will find. My 3090 is either running Yi 34B queries or other experiments all day, my job is with local LLMS... But I am totally OK with heavy handed AI-related moderation. I dont want the sea of AI grifters to have a single second on the HN front page.
Yeah me too and I also wouldn't flag them. I flag things that are false or misleading or just especially stupid.
The assumption is that a Story cannot go from the top 30 to a position higher than 90 in a single minute, without having been explicitly removed.
That's wrong. Both the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and user flags do that, and there are other software mechanisms that do it too. For example, if a story has been on the front page for more than (IIRC) 18 hours, it gets an automatic downweight unless we manually override it.
Also, keep in mind that user flags affect a submission's rank long before the [flagged] marker appears.
keep in mind that user flags affect a submission's rank long before the [flagged] marker appears
What kinds of user flags are there and why are they not public? People should know. Shadowbanning belongs in the 2010s.
It's just the flagging you already have access to (as you have more than 30 karma). It's the flag option. There's nothing special otherwise that I'm aware of (at least at 2500 karma)
At some point you get the option to vouch for flagged posts as well.
30 karma, same as flagging: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...
okay, looked into it, my bad!
In your profile settings there is an option to show flagged topics and posts.
That's not an excuse. Most people won't see that.
How do you keep user flags from being used as a way to squash articles on a particular topic before they have had the chance to be exposed to the wider HN community?
Meaning if someone were to theoretically get a real time feed of HN submissions, and flagged articles that they didn't want seen as well as messaging a group of friends to do the same thing. Do you have protections for this type of behavior that would prevent this person from having undue influence on what can and cannot have a chance at being seen by others?
What you’re asking about is referred to as “voting ring detection” and it’s something social networks keep very secret.
Yes, I know they do some form of detection on this for up/down votes, but flagging is supposed to be for content that violates rules, so I am curious if they handle it similarly. It doesn't really help you boost content, but can sure be used to suppress content if not tracked as flagging seems to significantly reduce visibility of a post.
I don't have any proprietary knowledge of how HN does voting ring detection, but to offer an intuition about how it might work in the scenario proposed by GP, this voting ring would be detectable because their flags are highly correlated and clustered together in time. The more stories they attempt to flag down (successfully or otherwise), the more obvious the pattern will be.
I'm sure you're already thinking of ways to bypass that, and yes what you're thinking will probably work, it's a game of cat and mouse and no one technique will be sufficient or work forever. (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing) )
I just posted about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235382. The relevant part is in the middle of that rather, er, wallish text, but if you read it (assuming you find it!) and have a question I didn't answer, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Just wanted to say thanks for the clarity of how this is handled and what to do if a submitter disagrees. Really appreciate all the work you do.
While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
I think the answer to this is... go set up your our LLM News web site and build a community. I really love HN but I wanted more retro computing and gaming news so I created by own site (https://twostopbits.com/) using the HN source code. It's not hard. Go build the thing you want and moderate it.
I've been in various online communities for over 35 years and I can tell you that by far the best moderated and longest successfully running community is HN (for a while The Well was amazing).
I hadn't see this before, but that is exactly what I've been wanting more of - thanks for setting that up John! I'm curious, do you feel like lower traffic communities like yours serves up the content mix you were hoping for when you started it?
I have no idea. I created it as an experiment. It's fairly active despite being a few months old. We'll see what happens.
I have bookmarked and will post something if I get my Everdrive64 ordered.
Thank you! Hope you enjoy the site.
It's not hard. Go build the thing you want and moderate it.
Does the source code include moderating tools, or is it just a bare bones aggregator with a default ranking algo?
There are moderation tools. I can do things like kill a story, ban a domain, ban a user, alter the score on a story, mark a story as dead, lock a story so no one else can edit it, see how many sock puppets voted for the story, edit any aspect of a story.
I modified the default source to have a concept of tags on a story because I wanted people to be able to filter stories by their areas of interest (e.g. everything Commodore 64: https://twostopbits.com/tag?q=c64). All my changes are open and here: https://github.com/jgrahamc/twostopbits
alter the score on a story
It's cool that you set up your own instance, but do you see no problem with covertly altering the score of a story?
Such secrecy leads to oversized, over-trusted forums, and is what this post seeks to address.
Wow very cool love the retro angle. Assuming you are using Workers for this?
No, I use a lot of Cloudflare products (the domain is registered through Cloudflare, the site is proxied and protected by Cloudflare, I use Cloudflare's free Web Analytics), but I am not using Workers for this.
The HN source base is a monolithic Arc program and Arc is in Racket/Scheme. To use Workers I would have had to get Racket working on Wasm which I simply haven't tried. Also news.arc does a bunch of file system access and I'd have to rewrite that to use Workers KV or something. So, I decided to use lots of Cloudflare and run the Arc code on a VPS I've had for many years. The whole thing is running in a screen session which I can hop into and be in the REPL when I want.
I sent an email to the moderator. @dang, who was very kind and quick in his response, explained to me that the Story had been flagged by users even without being explicitly [flagged], and that he could therefore only hypothesize the causes of the flag.
Maybe this is a consequence of Hacker News not having a way to downvote stories?
I only flag stories that are blatant violation of HN's guidelines: SPAM, politics, racist... Otherwise, if I don't like a story I don't do anything.
Maybe I'll start flagging stories that I don't like?
Yea, I suspect a sizable number of people use "flag" as a mega-downvote for things they passionately don't like, rather than for policy violations and spam.
For anyone that is concerned about over flagging, please consider turning on showdead and vouching responsibly!
If as many people thoughtfully vouched as maliciously flagged it may be less of an issue.
Wait, how do you vouch for something that has been flagged? I don't see that option, even with showdead turned on.
You may have to click into the comment directly.
For recent dead comments, click on the time ("31 minutes ago") to bring up the comment's own page where there's a "vouch" option next to the other comment options if you have enough karma.
For dead stories in the "new" queue, I see a "vouch" option already without going to the story's own page.
Where do you see that quote in the OP? I searched for it and didn't find it.
"WHY? Feel free to skip this part or click to expand"
looks like you didn't feel free.
Yeah, like you I would have never thought to use the flag unless it was violations etc but turns out it's a weird behaviour of many users. Not sure why or when it originated but seems like its been driving the up/downs of a number of topics/posts for years now. Still use with moderation.
The assumption is that a Story cannot go from the top 30 to a position higher than 90 in a single minute, without having been explicitly removed.
I'm not sure this is a valid assumption. https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39094387 looks to be a story that dropped to the thirties pretty quickly. Maybe due to other suddenly popular content?
Looking at the 13 stories listed for Monday, January 22, 2024 only 3 seem to have been removed from HN. The other 10 stories still exist.
The HP story, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39087776, was likely kicked from the front page due to being a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39060793
The Ford story, https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39089599, seems to be incorrectly detected.
Honestly only 3 or 4 out of 13 look like possible moderation to me. And they don't seem bad. Does a story about razor wire in Texas belong on hacker news? I'm in Texas so the story is of interest to me but I'd expect to hear about it elsewhere, not on HN.
Overall it just makes me think HN is doing a good job at moderation.
Does a story about razor wire in Texas belong on hacker news? I'm in Texas so the story is of interest to me but I'd expect to hear about it elsewhere, not on HN.
Perhaps in TX you don't realize it, but it's a big national story, implicating the Constitution, federal authority, even the Civil War.
It's political, for sure; but it's not local.
HN is present in more than just the US
I dont understand what "explicit" means here.
If it gets algorithmically deranked for user flags, but but not hidden, is that explicit?
I assume "explicit" means manual moderator intervention, but I don't really see anything that suggests that.
I assume "explicit" means manual moderator intervention, but I don't really see anything that suggests that
Because there is no visible indication when moderator intervention happens. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
It's not a valid assumption. I'd better post about this at the top level: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537.
"While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news."
If you believe that HN is a hive mind and all users must believe in the exact same things, then yes, this is probably hard to believe.
I however, am tired of LLM news, but I just simply ignore them as I'm well aware that many people here are very much interested in them. So at least an anecdotal response of one that some HN users are tired of LLM related news.
You might also be surprised that not all HN users like social media while some do. Some are very privacy conscious while others will freely post all of their everythings to anywhere. You might find it hard to believe that some lean left while others lean right with some even landing straight in the middle. Why you would think anything is hard to believe in this day and age is very strange to me.
That "While I have no reason" line has been quoted in six top-level comments so far, obviously it struck a nerve here.
It would be ultra-cool to have rough topic filters here, so I could just go to settings and hit a checkbox to ignore all the LLM-this and AI-that articles. Easier said than done, I'm sure.
Any time you paint with a broad brush with comments like that, you're going to miss some of the details. Looking at the time stamps of those comments shows they were pretty much at the same time. I use the phrase "group think" a lot, but intentionally do it to in part rabble rouse, but also to get those in the group think to maybe think and take a second to question if it truly is group think behind their current position.
I think this is an unnecessarily uncharitable reading, that the author assumes HN is a hive mind.
Replace "HN users" with "most HN users" (it's common to use general language when one's intention is to point out a trend in a population) and, as another person tired of AI/LLM news, I would also be surprised given how much popularity (upvotes, comments) HN users tended to give to those stories.
You might find it hard to believe that some lean left while others lean right
And then you get those of us who are simultaneously left-of-left and right-of-right...
This is an interesting dataset. I suspect the main things that get removed are A) politics B) duplicates.
I'm echoing others, but the article on rust async/await seems good.
You may or may not agree with the conclusions of the post, but its a technical topic with at least some specific exploration of the (performance/code writing) issues, that links to quite a few further topics for exploration.
https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html
That said, I noted more than a few typos in the article, so I wonder if there is generally a spell check filter for article quality.
https://trunk.io/blog/git-commit-messages-are-useless
I also found this one interesting. I don't agree with the article, but its an interesting viewpoint and I learned a bit about what some people are doing with git. I couldn't tell you why it dropped (unpopular)?
Which is where its possible that this (new) tool falls short, it can't actually tell what was censored, just what wasn't popular.
Unpopular things sometimes are so because they fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but aren't actually wrong or invaluable, which might be the real value of this tool.
but the article on rust async/await seems good.
It is really not. It is a rant that produced no good discussion anywhere else on the internet. It has no novel insight and is dressed up in a really ugly way. I'm not saying HN should have removed it, but I don't mind that it got flagged.
I wrote a whole thing about that one in case it's useful:
HN would be a much better place if they banned domains like the guardian, nytimes etc entirely. There's way too much journospam.
The problem is that while the major media sites generate a lot of noise, they also publish solid original articles from time to time, and we don't want to miss those. For that reason, they're downweighted, but not banned.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I ran my own client side script to strip out links to such articles. New computer, didn't copy the script over, and now I'm engaged in passive aggressive discussions over some guardian article. It's my own weakness of course, but I am definitely not the only one.
I know that happens and I suppose we could look into tightening the screws a bit, but it feels to me like a step too far to exclude those sites from HN.
Some of the opinion sections get extra downweight - that might be helping a little.
Using the official HN API, the service fetches 90 Top Stories every minute and makes a comparison with the first 30 Top Stories (i.e. the Front Page) fetched the previous minute. It logs all missing Stories here. The assumption is that a Story cannot go from the top 30 to a position higher than 90 in a single minute, without having been explicitly removed.
The OP's hypothesis is that, if rank drops from top-30 to below top-90 (I think "higher than 90" is a typo?), in less than a minute, then it must be due to moderator action.
Is that true?
No, it's not true. I have many times been the person who hits "flag" and then refreshed the page to find the story disappeared as [flagged]. When that happens the story is completely gone, off at least the first 3 pages (which is what OP is measuring).
It's definitely not true, as lolinder has pointed out. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537 for more.
This is a good thing to be able to see, but I'm much more interested in identifying the soft censorship in comment sections.
This is obviously harder, because vote totals aren't publicly available for comment sections, but it is much more important as a tool. What topics are on the front page is much more clearly the legitimate domain of moderation than what commentary is made about them, especially when moderation of those comments contradicts the vote mechanism.
It's more boring than you'd expect. The comments that get most heavily upvoted tend to be either (1) indignantly rhetorical, or (2) generic. Mostly what we do is downweight those when they're at the top of the thread. The "algorithm" is about as simple as:
(1) if the top comment is indignantly rhetorical or generic, downweight it; otherwise go look at another thread;
(2) refresh the page;
(3) goto (1).
If I'm feeling diligent, I might do this for the top few subthreads, but that's about it.
This simple intervention turns out to be the highest-leverage thing we've figured out in recent years:
ttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20highest%20leverage&sort=byDate&type=comment
If it's truly a service that's being provided by your superdownvotes, I wonder what would happen if you let people opt out of it.
I would rather see the highest voted comments, and I'm pretty happy to just scroll down myself if I find the top comment to be useless.
Long overdue transparency. Sometimes these are innocuous or warranted removals, but there is also an element of protectionism at play. And that may not even be due to mod actions, but blocks of users who all flag articles to get them pushed to no mans land.
There are companies who if you submit a negative post about, within short order the post is pushed out of view of the top pages.
blocks of users who all flag articles to get them pushed to no mans land
This is just another way of saying that a critical numeric threshold of users didn't like something. Framing the opinions/actions of groups of people on the internet as conspiring or dog-piling is a fallacy. E.g. if a person Tweets something that a million people read and a hundred of them reply to disagree, you'll often see that person follow up with something like, "wow, now all these people are attacking me", even though everybody acted in complete isolation and did nothing strange or harmful individually. Nobody rang a bell in the town square and handed out pitchforks. The internet breaks human psychology.
Except when it's not. If you don't think groups within organizations all message each other to quickly flag posts that are negative towards them, then you may be looking through this with an idealistic lens that hasn't been shattered yet.
I'm not denying your premise that yes sometimes independent people with no coordination, all flag an article. That is how the system should work. But there are also articles that will quickly get flagged through coordination of interested parties.
Hacker News has a lot more power than many think in terms of tastemaking in the tech industry. So there is a lot of motivation and benefit for people to manipulate its functionality to either boost or protect their business.
I wrote a program that tracked the changes in story titles on Hacker News a while ago. Some of them were really quite strange. I can't understand some of the policies, like why the words "How" and "Why" are stripped from the front of titles (eg "How I rewrote my app" would be changed to "I rewrote my app"). Some very small proportion of the title changes could definitely have been construed as politically motivated but overwhelmingly they were benign.
did you write up your findings anywhere? I'd love to read about them!
I didn't, mainly because the findings were so mundane! I still have the data, so perhaps I will some day.
Imagine this itself getting removed... :)
"literally the first rule of HN moderation is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved"
That rule does not generally apply to HN meta debates, which this is, so it's a bit of a corner case. If there was a duplicate of this story on the front page tomorrow, I'd expect HN to honor the user flags on it.
It'd be interesting to see removed vs flagged, if you can scrape flag kills.
The flagging system is a great utility, but certain things (e.g. anything pro-Musk) get mass flagged for emotional reasons.
certain things (e.g. anything pro-Musk) get mass flagged for emotional reasons.
Lots of Musk stuff, including positive stuff, on the front page. Yesterday there was a story about petabytes of data on the Starlink laser network, based only on Starlink PR afaict.
I really don't like Musk but I don't flag things Musk related. I frequently upvote them because I'm interested in the discussion.
Unfortunately those stories often turn into flamewars. That's probably why people are flagging them.
I don't think it's wise to draw so many inferences about why people vote the way they do. Frequently I see comments where someone makes a reasonable point, but also drops a bunch of flamebait, and when they're inevitably flagged they edit their comment to claim that the flags prove their point and that the problem who disagree with them are overly sensitive and censorious. But in reality a lot of the people flagging them probably agree with them, but don't want them to start a flamewars. I flag a lot of comments like that, even when I am agree with their overall point. (I actually did that with a comment just now.)
It's a form of self fulfilling prophecy and further entrenches you into your position, which is antithetical to curious discussion.
this post in now at the top, I wonder wether it will be removed ;)
Is there any reason why you would assume this in such a snarky conspiracy-esque tone?
Like someone above pointed out, a rule of moderation on HN literally is, that stories about HN or ycombinator companies itself are moderated less [0].
[0] - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Probably because if they bring that tone to enough topics, eventually they will be right. Though also probably not for the reasons they think (e.g. they say a post will be removed because it discusses a controversial topic when in reality it was removed because it was just plain garbage content).
I went to check if the story I submitted today (Breathing 101 — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39227295) was present in the list, and it was indeed! I don't know how it reached the front page and why it got removed.
I would have downvoted that for a number of reasons. I guess people flagged it, since there's no downvote. I don't flag unless it's something egregious (racism, spam, etc). But since this thread is all about the topic of why stories might not make the cut here, this is why I would have downvoted it if I could:
1. "Breathing 101" is an uninformative headline. I correctly guessed that it was literally referring to the human act of breathing, but it's still a bad title (I know it's not your title, and that HN encourages using the original source's title; it just sucks).
2. You submitted the link with no comment or context about what the article was or why it might be interesting. If a headline grabs my eye, I always click on the "N comments" link and the article link to open two tabs, and I look for additional descriptive text from the submitter, or a comment from them about what they found interesting. Sometimes I read the actual article first, but if the title is ambiguous or the topic is contentious, I'll usually start with the comments tab and see if I'm going to be wasting my time before I read an article. This alone wouldn't be a reason to downvote, but if I was leaning that way, it would factor in.
3. The word "wellness" in the link's domain is a huge red flag. To me it means "this is going to be a bunch of hippie crap". Not a primary factor, but seeing that would be enough to make me dig farther and find evidence so that I could Angry Downvote something I don't want to see on HN ever, if we could downvote. Yes, this is petty.
4. The very top of the linked article says "Click here to make an appointment". This indicates spam.
5. The article is just bad. There's not much information. It's not scientific. It touches lightly on some potentially interesting things but doesn't dive into them at all, or link to better sources, and it ends with what appears to be advice and encouragement to incorporate breathing exercises, but without much information about how or what the benefit is.
It looks like spam. It's the kind of clickbait that floods my Facebook feed.
This story has close to 500 up votes as of 2:19PM Pacific and is no longer on the front page. Why flag an article that is simply trying to show how HN can potentially be improved?
It got flagged by users. We turned that off per https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... The story has been on the front page for 9 hours now and is still there.
In the case of the first, the Story was among the first on the Front Page, until its title was changed from "Stable Diffusion Turbo on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 generates an image in 29 minutes" to "OnnxStream: Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 Base on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2". This effectively "killed" the Story.
In the case of the second, the Story was in third place on the Front Page, less than an hour after the submission. In this case it was simply removed from the Front Page.
With repeatedly getting flagged articles like this, at some point you have to begin to wonder if you are not simply spamming the community by trying to promote your links.
I get that people want to promote their stuff but the community has preferences too. The community can get tired of LLM articles reaching the front page everyday! The community can refuse to be spammed and the community can flag articles!
While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
Denial? Why is it so hard to believe that HN users would get tired LLM-related news. I get tired of it myself but I don't have flagging privilege. I find it very believable that HN users who have the flagging privilege might want to flag LLM-related news.
I don't have flagging privilege
Looks like you should? Is https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re... wrong? You need to be on a comment's page; click its timestamp to get there.
I've always assumed that when a story rapidly drops past the first three pages (e.g. >90) it is because it has been flagged some indicative, disproportionate number of times[1] by users with flag functionality. The submission seems to presume that such drops are only the result of Daniel or whoever manually doing it.
Which is true?
[1] - Notably the majority of the "removed" stories have pretty tiny number of upvotes, so if flags are weighted proportionately it wouldn't take many.
Mostly flags, yes, but also software penalties and moderation downweights. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237446.
I love HN and I think the moderators are doing a great job. But could one of the mods explain the logic with some examples from the Github repo?
just trying to see what makes the moderation good :)
I spent all day posting 70 or so comments in this thread trying to explain exactly that.
If there are specific examples I haven't addressed yet, post links and I'll take a look!
I think it would be really interesting to get a tracker for the ones that hit the front page, then fall off, and then surge back in 30-60 mins. I wonder what's going on with those ones.
Most probably that's us turning off the flamewar detector.
If you see examples you're welcome to ask us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Only saw one Gary tan link removed. I thought I'd see more. Maybe it was only removed because it was a dupe? I'm referring to the "Gary tan tupac lyrics" one.
There was a bunch of Gary Tan links -- you can see in my comments I was arguing with a bunch of HNers today about whether he's right or wrong on that "Die Slow" tweet. Probably dang removed it because it's a dupe story.
He could have phrased it a little better but the people calling for his removal from YC are just plain silly.
I’ve wanted something like this for years. My top requests would be to offer this as a standalone separate site, with sorting in reverse chron order, and an easy way to click into the comments for each story. Right now I can click into the info for the link, and to the outlink, but there doesn’t appear to be a one-click path to the HN comments themselves.
I'm honestly not sure if that's a bad thing. To an extent, it seems like reddit's "sort by controversial". If you're looking for a flamewar, here you go.
It's interesting to see the comments sometimes, but since part of the reason these things get removed is because of the flamewar detector, I feel like I can't be that surprised or edified when I open the bag labeled "manure" to find it is full of shit.
i feel like every news source, forum, link aggregator, ... has its own target audience and scope of topics that make for productive discussion, its own biases and predispositions, its own trolls and need for pruning and moderation.
i feel like yes of course there are many things i disagree with on this site. but ultimately i value the information shared and the discussion enough to keep coming back. any relationship where people always agree there is probably only one person doing the actual thinking.
i have learned so much about tech here, i have learned about many best practices and projects that i would have never heard of, i have made no bones about my thoughts on various subjects that could easily be classified as touchy, i have really enjoyed the discourse. for the time being i definitely plan and hope to continue doing so.
(so while this site is an interesting artifact, and maybe it is good that someone is taking a look and keeping a record, i personally won't bother unless/until i see a pressing need. at which point i will maybe just move on instead tbh.)
I think you're going to see people start leaving Reddit as the IPO approaches and many will be coming to HN or other reddit-clones.
Half the comments on Reddit really do seem to be made by bots, you can easily tell when you look at their post history.
The first two links I clicked on were week old stories. I think you should filter the results by date posted.
i think it's just sorted in the wrong order
Thank you. Already saw one I would like to read.
What is criteria to remove some of these.
I've read the 'terms' for submitting. sometimes the removed ones don't appear to violate anything.
The key word there is "appear". For example: sometimes the story is fine except that it has already had a big discussion recently.
I started collecting the /news feed something like 7 years ago in a script, I think it's still running. It's fascinating watching stories get dropped or auto-killed and then running stats to find out what the algorithm is trimming. I think I started it because there'd be things changed or removed and you couldn't tell unless you had looked at it before it was culled. At some point I'll kill the linode it's running on, maybe move it to a Lambda, push the database to GitHub.
It's fascinating watching stories get dropped or auto-killed and then running stats to find out what the algorithm is trimming.
So what did you learn ??
Who's going to make this into a training data set for dang-bot?
Reddit used to have a similar thing (r/RedditMinusMods). Eventually when it got to the point that 48-50 out of the top 50 posts were removed every 12 hours, reddit banned the sub for unspecified reasons.
http://web.archive.org/web/20221110043732/https://old.reddit...
Essentially because users are tired of some topic that threatens them (LLMs or AI) we censor it.
I think this is the beginning of HN becoming irrelevant in its old age. It starts to ignore realities it doesn’t like.
* 96% of U.S. temperature stations fail to meet what NOAA considers "acceptable" [pdf] ? why remove
Good moderation is exactly why I check HN every day and not so much other places. Thanks mods!
man I would love some sort functionality here
It looks like some of these are cases of duplicate threads being migrated, which isn't completely obvious when looking at this Github page.
For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219568 was just a dupe. Maybe that's the case for some of the more technical stories that are removed.
Fine with me! I keep coming back here because the site is relatively un-cluttered. Thanks mods!
While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
I consider myself very optimistic and often naive, but even I would not be surprised by this kind of HN user reaction :D
I am more interested in the mechanics of how something like this works, especially over time.
All kinds of tools related to HN content generate front page interest even for days but then once that passes things that cost money or use unreliable free resources start to disappear at an ever more rapid pace.
When they don't, the UI can become unmanageable... I'm not sure how this content will be organized over time but updating the README won't be tenable for long!
Can we have it sorted in descending order by date?
While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
If you can't fathom people being tired of LLM-related news, have I got an NFT for you!
Hmm most seem to be idiotic, spam or off topic for HN.
I wonder if a useful application for these "AI"s could be to pull interesting - to someone - stories from what the hive minds rejected ;)
Just to be clear, this is stories that got completely removed off the front page and does not include whatever is still available 4 pages behind but got overtaken by other stuff?
Sometimes I see an interesting heading but skip it, and when i reload it's gone. I doubt they were all flagged into oblivion.
Are there HN metrics available that include voting behavior and viewing behavior?
For example, is it more commonplace lately to comment without upvoting, than it used to be? (Upvoting the post and/or the parent comment.)
And how has the comments-to-pageviews ratio changed over time?
the front page has definitely become less general interest and more niche tech in the last couple months.
it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
You find it hard to believe that users are fatigued by a subject that is posted ad nauseam? People have been tired for over a year.
Saved one more time. The whole internet will judge.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240203104237/https://news.ycom...
While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
I don't know about everyone else, but I sure am, and I work on them for my PhD.
it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news
I know there are already a handful of comments about this line, but wow! It bears repeating: My eyebrows almost shot off the top of my head when I read this. What kinds of things does the author find easy to believe??
While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news
Surprise! Yes, We are!
It's great that they offer the source code so you can modify it and run the program on your own hardware to make sure stories aren't being removed from the stories removed from the Hacker News front page list.
While the above is me joking, I appreciate the extreme transparency that showing code and explaining methodology provides. This adds more credibility than any other single thing the author could have done.
Interesting service. I think it would benefit from further improvement. Many stories are actually dupes, self-promotion, etc… It would be nice to see a much smaller list of stories that were actually censored by the moderators or self-censored by the community.
How to do this? One idea is to write an appropriate prompt for GPT-4. Something along the lines of “if you were HN moderator or HN community, would you censor this story? Please give numerical score.” Then post a much smaller list with top scores. That would be useful I think.
I did something with a similar idea. Rather than looking at deleted stories, I historicize the stories and display them as a graph. You can see which stories have a second life (they were created several days ago, but the score doesn't increase until several days later). https://y-combinator-news-trends.vercel.app/
You can see your story!
The github isn't open source because the project isn't really finished (the page is ugly, by the way).
I have to say that I'm not relying on the api but on scraping the front page. The reason was to migrate code I had from python to typescript (I'm better at the later...)
When I had more downtime I’d spend a lot of time browsing /new.
There’s a wealth of great blogposts that show up there which don’t always make it to the front page (understandable; we only have so much attention to give).
What I will say is that there is a ton of cruft that spams the board. Thinking of spammed blog posts from one or more accounts, sensationalist news, etc which wouldn’t provide much value here.
Flagging really helps on /new IME. It’s worth spending time there if you haven’t tried HN other than via the front page
Yesterday I posted a link that was flagged off the front page. I can see that your tool is driving traffic to it and appreciate that.
Not everyone wants to discuss political topics on HN. They say there are other places to discuss such topics. I like to hear the opinions of the HN audience on a wide variety of topics. Maybe this tool will help those of us who value the HN community in this way by facilitating discussions on topics deemed inappropriate for the official front page.
RSS feed?
I wrote something similar, it's a simple Python tool that estimates what a story's rank should be based on the score, and compares it to the actual rank. It's rough and only tested on Win 10 so far:
https://github.com/calibas/hacker-newd/blob/main/hacker-newd...
I wish we had meta-moderation and voting and flagging reasons like on Slashdot. Flagging as a super-downvote seems user-hostile and passive-aggressive for a site like HN, but I’ve seen it tacitly acknowledged as allowed as okay on HN by dang, which seems counter to the spirit of the guidelines.
While I understand why "Secret Plan against Germany" - a story about Germany's far right planning "remigration" of even citizens - was removed, I still would've liked to see the part of the discussion that wouldn't have been arguing about the semantics of the term "nazi". This is the article that sparked a never seen before mobilization of demonstrators against these planners and their party in Germany.
Some feedback by the way: might want to sort the dates in reverse chronological order so the newest removed stories show up first :D
I thought of creating something similar for flagged comments, way too many people are flagging things because it doesn't suit their narrative
I demand to know why "Men are going to brutal boot camps to reclaim their masculinity" was removed from the front page!</s>
Looks like good moderators sitting and managing
this is an excellent project, which highlights what a stellar job the moderators are doing
While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
I am. Completely sick of it! Thanks dang for your diligent moderation.
Spammer wonders why stories are being "removed".
How can you complain about your submissions getting hundreds of upvotes and a bunch of discussion over the last 4 months only. That's a decent amount of eyeballs.
Other than the blatant offtopic/spam ones, most of them are just ones that have drifted away and are old news, or flagged, or dupes. It's driven by the flow of the site and its users.
Can we please have this in reverse chronological order - later dates at the top? Also, another request -- can we change this to TABLES instead of the plain Markdown list. I believe this is where a tabular display will be much easier to browse.
Thanks.
At a quick glance, I found several that don't match that criteria you mention, here are a few:
Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds
https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/
Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost
https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html
(Perhaps that last one could be renamed to be less hyperbolic, but the content was still an interesting opinion piece)
I don't think this is being done by the mods, by the way. It's more likely some spam filter with false positives, report brigading, or an anti upvote ring mechanism.
The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector. The last one was downranked by users. Admins didn't touch any of them.
Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of people's questions.
Just some feedback that I've found a number of articles fall off the FP due to the flamewar detector that I've felt were good articles/discussions. In fact, I think some of the more valuable discussions tend to have a lot of back and forth discussions relative to the votes.
But I also recognize that flamewars can also look a lot like that.
So I'm wondering if it may be worth revisiting the algorithm for this, and maybe having it factor in a few other things vs. simply the vote:comment ratio (which is what I'm understanding it currently is, but correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't think it necessarily needs to be a lot more complex, maybe simply add to it some standard deviation of upvotes/downvotes (or just a simple ratio), if that's not already part of it.
But I've seen some discussions fall off that I don't remember seeing a particularly toxic discussion happening (e.g. relatively little to no downvoted comments).
Again, happy to see flamewars fall off, but just hoping to see some more interesting/helpful discussions not get caught in the crossfire.
Absolutely. We review the list of stories that set off that software penalty and restore the ones that are clearly not flamewars. No doubt we miss a few, and also - not everyone interprets these things the same way. But if you (or anyone) notice a case of a good thread plummeting off the front page, you can always get us to take a look by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
There should be some way of doing language detection to detect the relative quality of 'flaming' going on.
So the highest quality 'flame wars' can remain untouched, but downranking everything else below that bar probably makes sense.
Yes, the carrot of automation would be so much easier than the stick of manual review. I haven't seen any system that works well enough yet though.
The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a go—and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd certainly like to see it. As would the entire community I'm sure!
You don’t really need a state-of-the-art anything here. People get too distracted with building the perfect system when it comes to use cases like this because they are paralysed thinking about the avoidance of false positives and make a bunch of sub-optimal decisions on that basis. False positives are much less of a problem with a human in the loop, and putting a human in the loop doesn’t require moderator effort.
You can probably put a big dent in the number of low-quality comments by just showing a “hey, are you really sure you want to post this?” confirmation prompt and display the site guidelines when you detect a low-quality comment. That way you can have a much more relaxed threshold and stop worrying about false positives. Sure, some people will ignore the gentle reminder, but then you can be more decisive with flags and followup behaviour because anything low quality that has been posted will by definition already have had one warning.
You're right about one thing: I didn't need to say "state of the art". A system that works at all would be great!
I don't think a confirmation prompt will help because people tune such things out after they've seen them a few times.
I hate myself for saying it, because of all of the buzz/hype, but LLMs can assist here.
You get better intent assessment than with NLP/ regex/whatever.
Plus HN is entirely in English, so you never have to worry about lexical resource gaps.
There is no off the shelf solution - afaik. In addition I have no idea how expensive running costs will be.
But something serviceable can be built.
Source: mod /t&s person dealing with these things
Even a bad implementation isn’t going to be showing this warning to people often enough to desensitise them. And if they make a habit of ignoring the warning to post flamewar stuff… that’s solved with moderation by a human. The intent is to add friction for knee-jerk low-quality comments, not solve for people who persistently, intentionally post low-quality comments after a warning.
I asked for a showdead feed to make it easier to train an LLM on for this purpose but got denied.
Not sure what you're referring to, but you don't need a showdead feed to train an LLM for this purpose. Only 2% of comments are dead, and the number of bad comments that aren't dead is certainly higher than 2%. That's the problem, in fact!
I have a compliant : sometimes there a proliferation of anti-scientific posts, in example I can mention those related to the "50 years nuclear battery", I remember particularly one from techradar.com that was especially misleading and anti-scientific and more similar to a PR campaign then scientific information, they was stating che you can power a smartphone or a drone with a betavoltaic battery (millionth of Ampere ). This is only an example, I noticed similar article , often related to green energy with the same anti-scientific cut and sometimes anti-scientific is a euphemism. Could nice to have a way to report them , even for occasional readers like me. Often the same articles have approval posts that IMHO are bot made. we live in times where scientific fraud amplified by the media is becoming a serious problem and I think everyone should do more to stop the phenomenon.
Trying to assess what's scientific vs. anti-scientific is outside the scope of what mods can do. I have my opinions just like you do, but hashing these things out is a community process, not a moderation issue. We could put our fingers on the scale, I suppose, but nothing good would come of that, so we don't.
Here's one from last week:
"Ring will no longer allow police to request users' doorbell camera footage" (npr.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138423
I posted an on-topic supporting quote to explain why this item was newsworthy and got one unhelpful one-word response and my comment got inexplicably flagged (not the commenter) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138481
How did that slip past detection? How do I get the abusive flag on my comment reversed? This behavior seems to have managed to push an important story off the frontpage quickly. (yes there was a badly-worded dupe headline, but that's a separate thing)
If I understand correctly, you have three concerns here: (1) the story was downranked off the front page; (2) your comment was flagged; (3) a comment that replied to you was not flagged. I'll try to respond to these in turn:
(1) the story was downranked off the front page because the topic had already been discussed a bunch—for example in these threads, two days earlier:
Amazon's Ring to stop letting police request doorbell video from users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39119387 - Jan 2024 (141 comments)
Ring steps back from sharing video with police – mostly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39120892 - Jan 2024 (15 comments)
Culling repetition from the front page is one of the most important things HN's systems need to do. Actually, it's probably the single most important thing. Certainly it's best if we can link to the previous discussions so people can know where to find them—but we can only do that some of the time. Users help out a ton by posting links to earlier threads. Ultimately we need better software support for dealing with this, but that's not done yet.
(2) Your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138481 was flagged by users. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I'm pretty sure I know why: comments that do nothing but quote from the article, or try to summarize the article, are considered too formulaic by readers here. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but please do it in your own words and share your own thinking. To simply paste a quote from the article is too superficial. On HN the convention is to assume that readers are smart enough to evaluate an article for themselves.
(3) The reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138536, which only said "and?", was definitely an unsubstantive comment that deserved to be flagged (and killed) even more than yours did. The reason it escaped detection was simple, albeit unsatisfying: pure randomness. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here—there's far too much. I've flagged it now.
How can users downrank headlines? I only have an option to upvote them. While it's not too frequent, there are things that make it to the front page that I'd like to express my disapproval of.
User flags, once they've accumulated above a certain threshold, have a downranking effect. Pretty sure this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
I'm curious why there's no actual downvote for submissions. Was that ever discussed on here? I did a quick search for prior discussions on the topic but didn't find anything.
To me, "flag" means "this is a serious violation that requires moderator attention". Something I'd want you to see and deal with because it's bigoted, illegal, spam, etc. I wouldn't flag something simply because I didn't think HN was the right audience, or because I personally dislike the topic. You seem to be encouraging me to use it simply as a downvote.
I'm not going to start flagging things, nor do I feel that strongly about the lack of a downvote, but if flags are effectively downvotes behind the scenes, and if that's how users are treating flags (which they obviously are, from other comments on this thread), I think the UI should have a downvote button.
I assume there's been discussion about this before and I'm curious about the thought process behind the decision. I don't find the FAQ to be informative about this.
The only person who could answer that is pg because that design choice was part of the embryo of HN.
He must have been thinking something though, because Reddit was originally his conception and he was an influence on the earliest development of Reddit as well (edit: and Reddit does have story downvoting - forgot to mention that bit).
It's good that this is in this thread, as I bet a ton of power users (I check HN multiple times a day for years but likely only a time or two have glossed over the FAQ), did not know FLAG could be used as a downvote tool. Interesting choice by PG, I agree with the previous comment, we have all come to know FLAG as a violation tool on most platforms. Now we know.
I'm surprised by this thread too.
I never flag anything because it's recorded on my profile, and I don't want stuff recorded on my profile that isn't useful to me. I only upvote submissions and comments that I intend to refer back to in the future. Upvotes are simply bookmarks to me, so my only tool for voting on the quality of conversation is downvotes. Which, apparently, I can't do for articles without spamming up my profile.
Actually I just checked my profile and saw several flags that must have appeared on a mis-click, just like how sometimes upvotes appear on a mis-click. Fortunately, unlike mis-clicked upvotes, you can still remove these.
Do you happen to remember if the misclicks were on mobile or not? I'm planning to add a confirmation screen to cut down on flags-by-misclick, but the current intention is to make it mobile-only.
I've ran into this a few times, not just with flagging but with hiding too. It would be really helpful to have a confirmation dialog and/or a banner on the screen after the action was taken that would let you undo it. To answer your question: I think most of mine were on mobile but it would be nice to be able to have it in all environments if possible.
Almost certainly they were on mobile, where the small font and use of touch screen to scroll makes mis-clicks much more likely. I'd be happy with a confirmation screen because I rarely or never intend to flag, but by the sounds of it there are a lot of liberal flaggers who could find the extra step annoying.
Not the original poster, but in my case it's always mobile.
Thank you for your tireless work. HN is a breath of fresh air compared with the rest of the internet thanks to it.
Tbh if you just upvote what you like and do not vote what you don't like it's almost the same thing.
The one exception is if some group organizes to upvote something that fits their agenda / business plan. But in this case it's generally something worth flagging and it gets flagged?
Why don’t you make the system transparent? This will save you a lot of effort answering questions.
"Transparent" means different things to people, but if you mean a full moderation log: I think most likely it would produce more questions and effort, for no clear gain. I've written about this over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Here's how I look at it: if trust is present, then we don't need to publish a full log, as long as we answer questions when people ask them. That degree of transparency has been available here for many years. If, on the other hand, trust isn't present, a moderation log won't create it. It will just generate more data for distrust to work with—and distrust always finds something.
Thus our focus is on building trust with the community and maintaining it. That happens through lots of individual and group interactions, answering questions whenever we get them, in the threads or by email. That's what I spend most of my time doing.
We're never going to take the community's trust for granted because it's what gives HN the only real value it has, and it would be all too easy to lose. But I would tentatively say that this approach has proven to work reasonably well for the bulk of the community. If people learn they can always get a question answered, that's a powerful trust-building factor.
Equally clear is that it does not work for everybody; but that's always going to be the case no matter what we do. I don't mean that we dismiss such users' concerns—quite the contrary, I make extra efforts to answer them. I'm just not under any illusion that we can satisfy everybody. It's satisfying enough if a few people can occasionally be won over in this way—which does happen sometimes!
Envision an airline withholding safety records, a car manufacturer keeping crash test results private, a restaurant refusing to provide health inspection logs, or a government refusing to disclose details of its budget allocation — all claiming that transparency would only complicate matters and provide "more data for distrust". In each case, the flawed nature of your core argument becomes obviously evident.
I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change (unless forced), but just wanted to point out that your argument against transparency is a cop-out and that you're on the wrong side of history here.
I think the fundamental difference is that an airline or government is working according to objective rules and regulations, while HN is not. HN is trying to build a community, and I think that communities need subjective rules rather than objective
I don't think you can reasonably compare the importance of transparency in your examples to that of editorial decisions in a private moderated community.
In the first set, the stakes are far higher, which is why the collection of objective data is legally mandated in the first place.
In the second set, you have only the subjective opinions of people who have an explicit goal to cultivate a specific variety of community. As members of that community, we select into the cultivation regime under which we participate. Not everyone will share the same preferences, and that's OK.
I have to admit, I laughed when I realized you are using a throwaway account, making this a strange work of performance art.
That's interesting! But I don't think the "flawed nature of my core argument" is obviously evident—and I don't think the community would consider that obvious either.
It could be fun to look into it together, but the fun stops at "I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change". Why dance if someone wants to kick you in the shins?
While you argue against transparency, keep in mind that you are doing it in full public view.
People will game it. We don't need a transparent algorithm when we have transparent results, e.g. enable `showdead`, or the OP's project.
If you have nothing to hide, why not make all story and comment removal history publicly visible, like Wikipedia edits.
Wikipedia can and does vaporize edits.
I don't think revdel can actually fully delete a revision, there's always at least a revision entry left, perhaps with no user name or summary.
Just enable showdead if you want to see all of that. It's 99% botspam.
That would create one more thing for people here to complain about. People here would just accuse the mods of faking the mod log to hide their "real agenda" whatever that is.
That would create a bureaucratic nightmare for no significant gain.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 for a longer answer; and also krapp's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232795, which makes a similar point.
HN ID? I don't see that in the FAQ, maybe it's defined elsewhere?
edit: oh duh. thanks all, answer was 'right under my nose'!
The url for this page is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513 so the id is 39230513
I changed my comment to say 'link' instead of 'ID' so everyone can follow the same links.
Thanks _kst_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232594
Presumably its the id parameter in the URL?
Most likely in the URL, id=3923
The flags on the last item don't seem to be made in good faith. This looks like abuse of the flag system to me. Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
I assume you mean this one:
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 - Jan 2024 (62 comments)
I can make an argument either way there. The argument in favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this much-discussed topic; its title was flamebait and arguably misleading as well since the article seems more about async in general; and generally it was more of a drama submission on a classic flamewar topic than an interesting technical piece. I'm not saying all that is fair but it's easy to imagine good-faith users flagging for such reasons.
I checked the flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases where a user had previously flagged a different article about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4] below. A few of those might be borderline calls but I don't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags are legit if the story has had a large amount of discussion recently. Otherwise HN would consist of the same few discussions over and over, and we have enough of that as it is!
There are some software protections in place against that, but like all such protections, they don't catch all the bad cases and they have false positives as well.
We review the flags and turn flags off sometimes. I would not say it's perfect because although we try to look over all the flagged stories, it has to be done hastily (or one wouldn't get much else done). That makes it easy to miss things. However, users often email us at hn@ycombinator.com when they think a story has been unfairly flagged, and in those cases we always take a closer look. I don't know what percentage of the time we turn flags off in such cases, but it's not a low number. So if we include "users sending emails" as part of "the system", then yes, there's a system for monitoring flag abuse.
Last point: this is a pretty typical case. I'd say it's borderline but in the end I probably agree with the flaggers. If the topic of Rust (and async Rust in particular) weren't already so thoroughly covered, and/or if the flamewar aspect hadn't been there, then I'd probably disagree with the flaggers.
---
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061839 - the word 'async' appears over 200 times in that thread!
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] You Don't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 - Feb 2024 (21 comments)
Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 - Jan 2024 (151 comments)
New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire wear shocks some drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 - Jan 2024 (64 comments)
Google layoffs: Tech giant to cut down 30k jobs, says report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791297 - Dec 2023 (6 comments)
Code will make me rich and famous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336699 - Nov 2023 (2 comments)
The NSA Invented Bitcoin? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37599194 - Sept 2023 (61 comments)
Leaving the Web3 cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803267 - July 2023 (47 comments)
How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105 - June 2023 (97 comments)
Alphabet plans to announce its new general-use LLM called PaLM 2 at Google I/O - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866435 - May 2023 (5 comments)
Is your husband/ boyfriend gay? LGBTQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 - April 2023 (0 comments)
dang, thanks for taking the time for such a thoughtful response. I didn't know about the policy regarding topics that have been on a lot lately, that makes sense. I've not been around as much lately and hadn't noticed that this topic was well-trodden.
By "the last item" you're referring to "Avoid Async Rust at All Cost", right? Personally I don't think that's abuse; I would have flagged that post if I'd seen it. That's despite the fact that I agree with a lot of what's in the post. The title is just too inflammatory. And there are more inflammatory bits in the post, such as saying the feature is "objectively bad", and saying that a community member's post "gracefully omits" some information (where the word "gracefully" sounds like an accusation that they were being disingenuous). Totally unnecessary. Chop off the inflammatory bits and you'd have a perfectly good blog post making an interesting point, but as-is that post was not going to lead to a productive discussion.
Of course, it's only inflammatory because async is a darling to more than half of HN :)
But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war detection.
I don't necessarily want to dissect every little story, but this post was a funny edge case:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39203106
a tame story that got some discussion, but was marked as a dupe. But I didn't see any other posts linked in the comments as expected. I search for other submissions and see two other posts... with 0 comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190710
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39186297
I don't really have a critique or solution here, I imagine false negatives are an inevitability. Just sharing.
We try to, and often users help by, posting links to the previous discussions in the thread. But there isn't enough time to do that in all of them.
In this case, you can see from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... that there had been a lot of submissions, and from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... the ones that got comments.
Of those, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165981 had been just a few days earlier. And it turns out that there actually was a link to it in the later thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39204186, but this comment was flagkilled, probably because of the personal swipe in it. (You can still see it but only if you turn on 'showdead' in your profile.)
I could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
Ahh, that would explain it. Showdead is off on my account and I guess I didn't find every result on my end. That's a shame. But thank you!
Yeah, i imagine if I went down every tiny rabbit hole it'd be a full time job. I'll leave that to the professionals haha.
Or include the URL rather than just the HN ID so readers can follow the links.
yes! good point. Edit: I changed my GP comment to say "link" instead of "ID".
Thanks for replying with added context, didn't really mean to add more to your plate with this!
No problem! I see these threads as opportunities to explain things to the entire community so I try to make the explanations as thorough as possible, and to answer every question that I see. (though I'm sure I don't see them all - if anyone has (or sees) a question that didn't get answered, you can always let me know at hn@ycombinator.com)
I don't agree with the GP at all. Most seem normal for the front page or the intellectual curiosity standard (I mean, personally I'd like a much higher standard, but I'm basing it on what HN already has).
All from only one day:
* Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-scr...
* Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germany about a far-right planning meeting): https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-...
* Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development: https://vxdev.pages.dev/
* Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds: https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/
What these are is evidence of your parent comment's point that this isn't direct moderator action, rather a combination of algorithms and user flags.
Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's overblown.
I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people because they're tired of LLM stories (as repeatedly attested in this thread).
Based on the ratio of comments to upvotes, I suspect the Open Source Builds and Ford discussions ran afoul of the overheated discussion detector. Usually when the ratio gets too lopsided the software automatically drops the post off the front page, because that's an indicator that a lot of people are arguing in the thread without actually reading or enjoying the article.
There ought to be a time-based flagging limit, so that people don't abuse the system. I've already raised this earlier.
If Company A makes a killer product announcement, rival Company B could simply get its employees to spam down votes on and flag that post. Company A gets less visibility, and dang won't be able to come on time to stop it.
This is an easily plausible hypothetical, which may already be happening.
Flagging requires high HN karma. You get that by being a positive member of the community. Most such people, if a company even has one, would find it against their personal ethics to do that. And dang can see the karma ratio and unflag any actually worthwhile announcements.
I think as people have become more and more aware that flag negatively weights items for rankings, and isn't just a "hey have the mods look at this rule breaking thing", more people have started using it as a downvote button. It was my understanding that HN originally didn't have a downvote feature to avoid the kind of issues that the flag usage is now causing.
Even the highest karma users can lose their flagging privileges, temporarily or perhaps even permanently, if they do it enough times within a time window or if abuse is detected. So from what I understand that issue should be taken care of.
I think you're probably generally correct, but "blaming the algorithm" sure smells to me like a whole lot of camouflage for censorship, which we ought to know by now has as much to do with 'quality' as it does 'shaping the narrative'
Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in successful community moderation, but you have to wonder 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost entirely at the behest of big tech.
The simple solution would be to display a log of all removed/flagged/shadowbanned posts and comments, like Wikipedia does.
Preventing the site from being taken over by incessant meta debates is one of the moderation goals of the site.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(In many places there, obviously a lot of that is about Meta the company).
Periodic threads like this one are, I think, allowed as a sort of escape valve for pent up meta energy. Emph. on "periodic".
If you want a site that makes the opposite call here, Lobsters has a public mod log. You might like that system better!
Enable showdead in your profile if you want to see dead posts. You can't see deleted posts as the author deaded or asked HN to delete the post. See the HN FAQ [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Does that mean stories about LLMs or by LLMs?
Serious question.
I am one of the (few? many?) people (devs) who haven't look into LLMs or even tried out ChatGPT yet :), except to make jokes about it here once in a while.
I think generally it works well- when there are actual major events like early COVID or Ukraine - HN managed to inform we way ahead of mass media with various interesting sources. But I’m happy to have a “news” thing pop up only a few times a year. You’re gonna have someone be mad about every instance when you moderate
Not sure why both submissions about work preferences were flagged:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103328
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103483
Users flagged them. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case it might have been the desire to avoid gender flamewar hell, which is mostly always the same and which HN has had more than enough of. Also, one of the submissions was paywalled (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39104886), while the other was just the tweet of a graphic.
We sometimes turn flags off on such submissions, assuming that the article is substantive enough to have a chance at supporting a thoughtful discussion; and also assuming that the topic hasn't been discussed recently. But neither of those particular submissions was likely to be such a solid foundation.
It doesn't look like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00169862231175831, the paper, has been submitted yet. That one might work, if you or someone wants to try submitting it.
Ok, I'm finally getting to this - sorry for taking so long! First let's find the actual HN submissions... here they are:
Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39089599 - Jan 2024 (78 comments)
Secret Plan Against Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39092116 - Jan 2024 (5 comments)
Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39091819 - Jan 2024 (34 comments)
Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387 - Jan 2024 (68 comments)
Of those 4, the Ford one and the open-source builds one set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector); the Germany one was flagged; and the Show HN one got moderated down. Let's look at what happened in that order.
The Ford one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is easy to understand: hatred for modern car UIs is one of the most popular topics on HN these days and always gets people going (me too! but never mind)...which no doubt is one reason why the media sites keep playing it up. We wouldn't turn the penalty off in such a case. The discussion might not have been a flamewar but it was nearly entirely generic - for example the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090622. Given how over-discussed this topic already is, I'd say this is a case of HN's software working as intended.
The open-source one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is also unsurprising as open source stuff is also highly discussed and also gets people going. In this case I could make a case for turning off the penalty, but in the end would probably decide against it, because the article isn't very deep, the discussion is rather generic, HN has a surplus of such discussion already, and nothing here really clears the quality bar. But it's more of a borderline call; I can see how others could interpret it differently.
"Secret plan against Germany" was flagged by users. That's a political story with a baity title, so the default would be for it to get flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on such stories but I don't know that this one clears the bar. It's more current-events than deeply-interesting, the ideological material is inflammatory and nobody is going to approach it with curiosity. The thread was already showing clear signs of turning into a flamewar. Even then, we might still turn off the flags, but only if the story were intrinsically of great significance—the sort of thing it just wouldn't make sense not to discuss at all. I doubt this clears that bar.
The Show HN, we moderated down because "star for free trial" is not a valid thing to do in a Show HN and is something the community here would strongly oppose (see the top comment). Here's what I emailed the submitter: "We downweighted the post after getting complaints from users. 'Star repo for free trial' is way too much of a hard sales tactic for HN, and even more so for Show HN, which implies that users can try out the product (see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Asking them to star your repo first may be an ok tactic in other communities, but in the HN context it comes across as manipulative and is not in your interest at all."
---
I guess the summary here is that this list is a mix of clear calls and borderline calls, but defensible ones. Anyone is free to disagree of course! No two readers, including mods, would ever make all the same calls. But if you do disagree, please keep two things in mind:
(1) You have to take each decision in larger context. A perfectly good story can be a bad fit for HN's front page if, for example, the story has already had a lot of discussion; and
(2) If we moderated cases like the above ones significantly differently, the consequence would be letting a lot more stories onto the front page that are significantly more repetitive and/or sensational than the median front page story is today. I doubt that most readers would want that. You can't think of this in terms of particular submissions or topics; there needs to be some principle according to which the decision would be made differently. Given HN's mandate, we're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity. If there's a way to do that better, I'd certainly like to know what it is; but given the mandate, that's the only kind of change it would make sense to implement.
dang - thanks for taking the time to respond in detail. You really go above and beyond. I imagine this whole discussion landing like a concrete block on your plate (but hey, maybe you dig this part of the job).
I have/had no objection to the moderation on these posts. In fact, if I were monarch of HN and the Internet, I'd want an order of magnitude higher standard for the quality of posts, comments, and conduct. I want to spend my time and on the actual very best intellectual content and discussion possible - it would probably be mostly the very best books and papers from journals if I had my way. (Not that I think HN should serve my personal preference, I'm just demonstrating that I am far away from criticizing the moderation.)
My GP comment and my other one that you responded to [0] were trying to recenter at least part of the discusson on a factual basis, which I find much more interesting than the (completely unintersting) conspiracy theory aspect. That is, if we explore it factually, objectively, intelligently, how does it work? how does it work out? For example, I imagine there are some interesting emergent properties which would tell us about the HN population, emergent properties of algorithms, and the interaction of both.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
The second one is both sensationalist clickbait[1] and politics. It was rightly removed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not as if the internet is lacking in places where this can be discussed freely.
[1]: As in you have to click the link to see what it is about, and to decide if it is interesting or relevant to read.
The second story is evidence of a new phenomenon: The far right political movements thinking about an anti-constitutional policy, a new step on the ladder of escalation.
There's a reason it's a big deal in German politics and already had some fallout (and thankfully multiple dozens of counter-demonstration of ten of thousands of people all over Germany.)
The things you see on HN are not purely decided by the community. Mods can and do "freeze" the vote count on comments and posts, and do other non-obvious things too. You will notice the effect after participating for a while.
Exactly, the front page is heavily moderated. Almost every day you'll see posts with 50+ upvotes falling of the front page within an hour or two when some article about LISP with < 10 upvotes will remain here for a whole day.
It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.
The "force" is actually one or two people. It's hard to prove and impossible to change. No one will believe you, either.
Could you make your accusation more clearly? Are you saying it's 'dang' and 'pg'? One or two regular users abusing the flagging system? Or a couple dark and shadowy figures who have no public presence?
I don't mean to make accusations or invent "shadowy figures". HN has a very small number of moderators and their actions are not transparent, that's all.
Thanks for clarifying. I think part of my confusion was that HN only has one moderator at this point. Also, I'd probably say "not always obvious" rather than "not transparent". While there is no public record of moderation, at least for me Dan has been excellent about answering questions when asked.
Yes. I will use the words you want me to use, and not my own words. Thanks for helping me out.
I think you've misinterpreted my tone. I was not trying to tell you how to speak, but rather how I view the issue. You are welcome to share your own view.
If it works..
There are a billion forums with less stringent moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN good and not so game-able like most sites
I’m sure the HN codebase has some secret creed to make lisp more popular
The code is written in Lisp, but it doesn't know that and has no way (edit: that I know of) to expand its empire.
Yes, HN is a moderated/curated site and always has been. Here's 10 years' worth of me explaining that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
What people maybe don't realize is how many constraints there are on HN's system. There aren't many degrees of freedom for us to change things that wouldn't lead to a massively different site, and most of those outcomes would be worse, because most of them would be closer to internet default.
It's easy imagine "HN, but without the things that I personally find annoying". But try to generalize that for a moment and the problem quickly becomes intractable.
We don't freeze vote counts. What made you think that we did?
Comments on frontpage posts that go up quickly but then suddenly don't receive any votes in any direction makes me think you do freeze vote counts.
We definitely don't. But I'd love to see any links to posts where you've seen that—or if you see it in the future. It's an unusual case that I've never heard of before!
The reason I say we definitely don't is that we'd have to write code to do that, and I'd remember writing such code.
Thanks dang, I appreciate your efforts. I have no reason to doubt your word, and I may have imagined a pattern. I apologize for the accusation.
YMMV. I don't want to see Altman's fearmongering and hyperbolic statements.
At this point he's indistinguishable from a bitcoin advocate or a tv preacher.
It's dubious that HN mods think that way of Altman though.
s/mods/users? everyone can flag stories.
It's not flags (or not sufficient to remove the story):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
Flags are sufficient. I just posted a comment on the comment you linked to: I have many times been the person who pressed "flag" on a story and then watched it immediately disappear.
I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.
I like Sam, but "$celebrity says $thing about $common-topic" is almost never a good basis for a frontpage thread on HN.
It's vital to HN that user flags and/or software like the flamewar detector clear most such submissions off the front page. They tend to attract a lot of upvotes because that's what sensational (and especially indignant-sensational) stories do. Without countervailing mechanisms, HN would be completely taken over by those stories.
His statement wasn't even hyperbolic or fearmongering.....?
He just extrapolated based on current amounts of compute and estimated a possible model size that could be equivalent to AGI (based on current architecture).
Training a model of that size would require too much electricity.
That was his point.
The Altman story was likely a dupe (or triplicate)
Why not redirect to the original story?
Dupes generally drop off the front page, whether or not someone links up the previous stories in the thread. The whole point is not to let the duplicate story crowd out other stories on the front page. Redirecting would defeat the purpose.
Is that possible?
moderators are not omnipresent, and some times the users are faster to react than the mods.
We do redirect to earlier posts that had the exact same URL. But most dupes, in the sense of repeated posts about the same story, don't have the exact same URL. What do you do then? That's a hard problem. It would be great to have an automated solution to that but I don't know of one.
Two out of three currently aren't removed. There's no moderator comment on the third, but a fair number of upvotes and user comments; I think it was flagged by users.
Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387
Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost (flagged)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078
There's a difference between removed and removed from the front page.
IIRC: Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on the front page.
That's a big change?
How can you tell? Those are from a week and a half ago. The OP's definition of 'removed' is (if I understand correctly) 'dropped from the top-30 to below the top-90 in 1 minute'.
HN is a leftist echo chamber, so “flagged by users” is still a relevant and interesting metric here (that I think would also prove my point).
Sam Altman led invests in a nuclear fusion company, Helion. Guessing the potential conflict of interest is why the 2nd article drew vote controversy.
https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-500-million...
This is the kind of explanation that makes sense when the association happens to come to mind—in this case, something like: HN -> YC -> Sam -> Helios -> nuclear -> obvious conflict of interest -> QED. But such chains of associations rarely have anything to do with what happened to a story on HN. The explanation is almost certainly much simpler.
In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738, it just set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. We sometimes turn that penalty off, but in a case like this we wouldn't do that because "$Celebrity says $thing about $common-subject" is almost never a substantial story. It's essential to HN to clear such stories off the front page in order to make room for more interesting, less sensational things. If we didn't, the front page would consist of little else.
Possibly dups too.
The last story is so full of outdated and misinformation that I tried to find out whether it was written a few years ago (though it would have still been full of misinformation back then).
I suspect that it has been flagged for that reason by multiple people.
I witnessed a recent front page link silently get changed to point to a parody video, then silently changed back later, with the top comment that remarked on the change silently removed.
That told me all I needed to know about the moderation of this site.
Thankfully someone captured a screenshot: https://merveilles.town/@cancel/111834048502040552
Dang explained it was a mod error: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39182625, which links to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39170137
huppeldepup's comment in the screenshot is collapsed on p2 of the comments (after it was no longer relevant) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39157010&p=2, and is also accessible as the parent of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39170137.
What did you think he was going to say? Explain that it was in fact a big HN conspiracy?
I mean yeah it probably was just a mistake but what do you expect somebody to say?
I expected a matter-of-fact explanation of a simple error, and a comment thread that was collapsed - exactly what I found. reductum implied there wasn't an explanation and that the complaining comment thread had been deleted without comment, both of which were hard to believe, so I went looking.
You just need to move your game theory to a different level. The expected value of lying about such things is super negative and the expected value of telling the truth is super positive.
I'm sure there's a model in which lying some of the time but not too often has marginally higher expected value, but it's also going to have significantly higher risk and that's not worth it, plus you have to be disciplined enough to actually apply such a strategy. One slip and you're dead! I'm too lazy for that.
In that case you drew a general conclusion from a freak accident so rare that I doubt it had happened in the 17 years this site has been around. (Edit: 17 years this month in fact! https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...)
If what you require from an internet forum is that the moderators under no circumstances will ever commit a copy/paste error, HN is definitely below your standards.
Edit: the mods would like to share that they weren't drunk when they made that mistake, just rushed and watching a rather gripping tennis final.
That prompted me to check other dates in the archive: apparently the "Startup News" title lasted for around six months before changing to "Hacker News". I was pretty sure the change was before I made my account, but I didn't realize the "Startup News" period had been so short.
pg got bored of startup news and switched it in August of that year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
Edit: here's the last copy of Startup News that archive.org has—from 2007-07-13:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070713212949/http://news.ycomb...
and here's the first copy of Hacker News they have, from 2007-08-30:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070830111558/http://news.ycomb...
They missed an entire 6 weeks there, but bless them for having anything at all—who among us preserves our own history?
Garry Tan seems to benefit from this system as well. Nothing sensationalist about tracking his awful behavior.
We haven't touched those stories except reduce the penalties on them (user flags mostly) and moderate them less than we normally would (per https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). I put one back on the front page last night despite this contradicting every principle HN stands for—every other principle, that is, than the first one, which is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of a story.
I posted detailed explanations in those other threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39224560
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210947
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045
If you (or anyone) read those explanations and still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is. These practices have been in place for many years and haven't changed.
@dang Thank you for the info.
One questions I do have–I would guess posts critical of HN/YC are going to get a log of flags and have not the best discussion. This has a side affect of biasing the home page to not have posts critical of HN/YC. Do you see this as a problem?
You can take this with a grain of salt as I'm obviously not the most neutral observer, but from everything I've seen (which at least is a lot!), yes they get a lot of flags, but they get even more upvotes. It's hard to say which side wins out in the tug-of-war. The tendency towards negativity that jsnell's comment describes is very real, and it's on the upvote side in these cases.
Most probably the tug of war goes one way some of the time and the other way the rest of the time. The funny thing is that as mods, we have to have a regulating influence either way. What I mean is that if a rage story hits the top of the front page, we'll downweight it (though not necessarily all the way off the front page); but if a rage story about YC gets too many flags, we'll reduce those or remove them altogether. The recent shitfest is a good example; let me dig up some links for you... Edit: oh wait, I already mentioned those links in the GP. Sorry, I'm getting a bit tired here!
Did I answer your question?
@dang You did–thank you. I hope my question didn't come across as accusatory. This is a hard problem and, unfortunately for you, many of us enjoy discussion of difficult problems. What many of us may not see is you having to have the _same_ conversation over and over. Thanks again for your work. I don't envy your position.
Oh you're welcome, thanks for the kind reply. One thing I've learned from this thread is how much misunderstanding there is around follow-up or duplicate articles that get moderated because they're repetitive, not because they're off-topic in themselves.
The home page already has a massive bias in favor for pretty much any kind of negativity, but doubly so for anything involving a tech company. It doesn't matter whether the stories are untrue, unverified, repetitive, etc, they'll still get voted up, and the comment threads will half full of low quality complaints repeated from past discussion, often only tangentially related to the submission.
And it creates a very visible feedback loop, as users start to think that this is what HN is supposed to be. They're probably the biggest quality problem of HN.
dang has been doing a fantastic job for years now. How big is his team? What kind of tools are they using? Would love to read a writeup sometime, but I guess there are good reasons to keep this secret.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Tldr the answer is “2”. Not sure how posting a link where this info is buried is helpful.
The answer to OP’s first question, but there was a second one:
Then downvote it, that's what the button is for! The other commenter said they were interested in a write up with more information than that one question. But hey, can't please everyone.
sctb stopped working on HN in fall 2019, alas!
https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/nasa-system-pred...
Really? A NASA report, on the official .gov site? Maybe the comments were horrible but that seems right in the middle of what HN is interested in.
You're talking about this submission:
NASA System Predicts Impact of a Small Asteroid over Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39126705 - Jan 2024 (18 comments)
It was downweighted because it was a dupe (or quasidupe) of this:
Scientists discover near-Earth asteroid hours before it exploded over Berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103412 - Jan 2024 (46 comments)
That's the system functioning as intended. We work hard to try to prevent repetition from taking over the site, because repetition is the enemy of curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
One thing I've learned today, after 11 hours of posting in this thread, is that it's easy to look at an article in isolation and say "Really? That got moderated?" - when in fact if you know the larger context there's nearly always a straightforward explanation.
One can certainly argue that 86 points and 46 comments is too low a threshold to treat the repost as a dupe, but that's a different question, no?
The effort is appreciated by some if not most.
It wasn't 11 hours straight by any means. But thanks! It's nice of you to say that.
When I get tired I start to complain. It's a bad habit.
Props to the mods for keeping the post quality high.
However, I do see a few decent posts in this list that probably warrant a second chance.
Happy to look at specific links if you want to mention any!
The moderators are mainly the users. Flags are what kills a story quickly
You're right, but I'd like to add that we do turn off flags sometimes when we think a story (a) has a good (if not high) chance at a substantive discussion and (b) hasn't had much discussion previously. If anyone notices such a case, they're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look.
Agree, and to be clear, that's why I upvoted this submission -- it really is an endorsement of the algorithm and moderation we see here. I know the person who wrote the article did it from a place of skepticism, but it functions as a nice gold-star transparency report.
plural ?
Another way to look at this is that the mods have the same biases you do. Depending on how you’re feeling on a given day, you could call that an echo chamber.
Yeah this list seems to be pretty low quality stuff. There's a couple economic/political links that I think are interesting but I can totally see why they would be removed as off-topic or likely to produce a flamewar.
It's pretty clear to me that any online forum needs good moderation to be healthy long term. HN has been good about this with a strong community providing upvotes/downvotes and a moderation team that seems pretty light handed but not afraid to say no when necessary. Please keep doing what you're doing.
It really is impressive how HN has been such a quality community for so long. I can’t think of any of many other online communities that I have been using for 10+ years. So definitely much gratitude to the mods from me for the work they do.