That doesn't explain other submissions on the same topic floating up and remaining on the front page. It also doesn't explain the Blizzard story being/was very active and is now only on the second page (for me) at this moment.
I wouldn't put it that way. It has more to do with avoiding too much repetition and making sure the front page isn't completely dominated by hot controversies, which would defeat the purpose of the site. (I hope everyone remembers what the purpose is: intellectual curiosity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
Here are some recent explanations I've written about this:
HN has been flooded with China-related stories in the last couple months and most especially the last few days. They have been the dominant topic recently, understandably, as they are some of the leading events in current affairs right now. Important as these stories are, HN's core value being intellectual curiosity requires going easy on repetition—any repetition about anything.
There's a power-law dropoff in curiosity as a thing gets repeated. Other emotions—such as indignation—work the opposite way, so this is an existential issue for this site: the more repetition we have, the more HN's purpose gets drowned out and replaced by something that is inimical to it. This is the explanation of hamandcheese's conundrum upthread, about how a story about the ongoing struggle in Hong Kong, with lots of upvotes, can possibly be ranked lower than something called "The Origin of the Foot Rail". The answer is that indignation is by far the most powerful force on the internet, and as moderators our main job is literally to moderate that, so quieter, odder, less important but more curious stories have a chance to flourish.
If we didn't do that, HN would simply become a political outrage site like most other places. The front page would always be the top 30 outrages in the world, or more likely the top 5 outrages repeated 6 times each. That's the default, so if you want to run a site for intellectual curiosity, you need countervailing mechanisms. Here the countervailing mechanisms are software and moderators. But software+moderators also get many of these calls wrong, and we rely on users to let us know about those cases.
I know that users who feel strongly about these stories still feel like they're under-represented. But it always feels that way about any topic on HN that you feel strongly about. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource here, and there's never enough to go around. Even if your story is the most-covered story on HN, if you feel strongly about it, you will probably feel like it's being unfairly suppressed. As I've said too many times already: even Rust hackers probably feel that way.
If you read about the significant-new-information test in the first link above, the best way to help us with this is to let us know which stories have the most significant new information, relative to which are the follow-ups and copycat pieces. Then we can downweight the latter and help attention focus on what's significant. hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to let us know things; if you try to tell us things in the comments, odds are we won't see it.
I greatly appreciate the amount of thought that goes into HN moderation. This is one of the very few places where popularity doesn't equal lowest common denominator content.
I think when the story is a suppression campaign, where you see the world's most powerful company do an about-face twice in three days because of political pressure, you should think carefully about the implications of your own decision to suppress coverage and discussion of the event (which I understand is done from unrelated motives).
By your own logic, if China (god forbid) invades Hong Kong, there would be even more China/tech coverage, and therefore Hacker News will be even less likely to cover it, in favor of stories about ancient Albanian cartography or whatever else is novel and not divisive.
I urge you to reflect more on the way your "downvote stuff we talked about already" interacts with escalating crises, particularly around the topic of online censorship. I know you already reflect a lot!
The point you're making about escalating crises seems to me to be covered by the 'significant new information' test that I've described elsewhere (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In the case of the current story, we're not suppressing coverage of it or discussion of it; it's the other way around. What is true, though, is that it sometimes takes time to figure out, from the flurry of stories, which are the submissions that best represent new developments. My first impression on this one was "oh, another HKMap.live story"; because there had already been a prominent thread about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159872), it seemed to go in the follow-up bucket. This is a good example of how moderation is guesswork and we often guess wrong. Closer inspection revealed otherwise. User feedback, especially from users who know about the situation, helps us a lot to make better calls. But I think the principle itself is solid.
By the way we came up with the significant-new-information thing after the Snowden avalanche of summer 2013, when users legitimately complained that too many stories on HN's front page were only repeating what had already been said before, rather than reporting anything new. Discussion quality tends to get worse on such stories, too, which makes sense because there isn't new information to sink mind-teeth into. In any case, our goal is not to suppress coverage of these important stories (as anyone who's been reading HN in the last week should know). It's to keep the proportions balanced. Unfortunately for us, one consequence of the proportions being balanced is that nobody's happy with them. C'est le HN.
If there's something I'm still missing, I'd be happy to hear about it and do more reflecting. It will have to be tomorrow though (here) as I'm getting mushy.
Everyone sees stories they prefer getting flagged really fast and stories they dislike hanging around. This is a mechanical consequence of HN's frontpage space being so limited, combined with the human tendency to pay more attention to negatives.
Yes, we've manually set this as an exception. The problem is that we can't set every story as exception, or even every important story. So the complaint—"why is X, which is important, off the front page with massive points while Y, which is trivial, is on the front page with pathetic points?"—will ever be with us.
Its not really a political topic, its an alarm clock that went off. With the big tech firms openly collaborating with regimes that dont shy away from military solutions to democratic self determination the future of the internet looks rather bleak. Its one step further to no longer being able to share information on the internet that powerful regimes dont want to be found. That your ability to share information is at will in a lot of platforms should interest the users here. Its the core problem we are facing if we want to keep any free software ideas alive in todays internet.
Differently put, this news is about Apple and the state of the internet, not the CCP.
It doesn't appear there's much battling here. It seems to be nearly unanimous opposition to Apple's decision. Ideological battle seems to imply two competing and popular opinions.
We rarely classify things that are bi-partisan as political. And Blizzard (which carries a substantially analogous version of events) has been condemned for their actions from Democrats and Republicans alike.
HN is pretty much a mono-ideological site, from what I've witnessed. Any topic which triggers ideological discussion could be good for HN in my opinion.
If I had to guess, the mods are bending the scoring to avoid controversial topics again. They’ve done it before with US politics. Lately there’s been a slew of China news and some of the comments have been incredibly vitriolic.
I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment.
> I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment.
As long as the insanity is technology or hacker-related it is fine for you? Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is. It is also dishonest (because politics is everywhere). In fact, the very thing I quote from you is a political statement by itself.
Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
> Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is.
That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News.
> Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
This is coincidentally how you deal with spam without a spam filter. At some point, it's not very productive to have to wade through a content stream that's 50% chaff.
> That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News.
They decided that not only they do not want to see it on HN; they don't want anyone to see it on HN.
> You're free to use a website which uses an API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila.
It is a practical solution which does not require third party tools. Also, it is about more than you; it allows you to cast your vote, thereby taking part of the community.
You're free to use a website which uses HN API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila, problem solved for you. Because of the sheer amount of volume, this approach (which is easy to make with a blacklist) works quite well with RSS in general.
I've answered your question as part of a longer post—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211658.
These articles are sent lower in the ranking because the mods feel they aren't very constructive
That doesn't explain other submissions on the same topic floating up and remaining on the front page. It also doesn't explain the Blizzard story being/was very active and is now only on the second page (for me) at this moment.
There's no "the" Blizzard story—there has been a blizzard of them. The main one was the #1 story on HN yesterday by quite a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08. As I explained upthread, we tend to downweight follow-up stories unless they contain significant new information. More explanation on that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I wouldn't put it that way. It has more to do with avoiding too much repetition and making sure the front page isn't completely dominated by hot controversies, which would defeat the purpose of the site. (I hope everyone remembers what the purpose is: intellectual curiosity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)
Here are some recent explanations I've written about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208169
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199248
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771
HN has been flooded with China-related stories in the last couple months and most especially the last few days. They have been the dominant topic recently, understandably, as they are some of the leading events in current affairs right now. Important as these stories are, HN's core value being intellectual curiosity requires going easy on repetition—any repetition about anything.
There's a power-law dropoff in curiosity as a thing gets repeated. Other emotions—such as indignation—work the opposite way, so this is an existential issue for this site: the more repetition we have, the more HN's purpose gets drowned out and replaced by something that is inimical to it. This is the explanation of hamandcheese's conundrum upthread, about how a story about the ongoing struggle in Hong Kong, with lots of upvotes, can possibly be ranked lower than something called "The Origin of the Foot Rail". The answer is that indignation is by far the most powerful force on the internet, and as moderators our main job is literally to moderate that, so quieter, odder, less important but more curious stories have a chance to flourish.
If we didn't do that, HN would simply become a political outrage site like most other places. The front page would always be the top 30 outrages in the world, or more likely the top 5 outrages repeated 6 times each. That's the default, so if you want to run a site for intellectual curiosity, you need countervailing mechanisms. Here the countervailing mechanisms are software and moderators. But software+moderators also get many of these calls wrong, and we rely on users to let us know about those cases.
I know that users who feel strongly about these stories still feel like they're under-represented. But it always feels that way about any topic on HN that you feel strongly about. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource here, and there's never enough to go around. Even if your story is the most-covered story on HN, if you feel strongly about it, you will probably feel like it's being unfairly suppressed. As I've said too many times already: even Rust hackers probably feel that way.
If you read about the significant-new-information test in the first link above, the best way to help us with this is to let us know which stories have the most significant new information, relative to which are the follow-ups and copycat pieces. Then we can downweight the latter and help attention focus on what's significant. hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to let us know things; if you try to tell us things in the comments, odds are we won't see it.
I greatly appreciate the amount of thought that goes into HN moderation. This is one of the very few places where popularity doesn't equal lowest common denominator content.
I think when the story is a suppression campaign, where you see the world's most powerful company do an about-face twice in three days because of political pressure, you should think carefully about the implications of your own decision to suppress coverage and discussion of the event (which I understand is done from unrelated motives).
By your own logic, if China (god forbid) invades Hong Kong, there would be even more China/tech coverage, and therefore Hacker News will be even less likely to cover it, in favor of stories about ancient Albanian cartography or whatever else is novel and not divisive.
I urge you to reflect more on the way your "downvote stuff we talked about already" interacts with escalating crises, particularly around the topic of online censorship. I know you already reflect a lot!
I appreciate the good faith in your comment!
The point you're making about escalating crises seems to me to be covered by the 'significant new information' test that I've described elsewhere (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In the case of the current story, we're not suppressing coverage of it or discussion of it; it's the other way around. What is true, though, is that it sometimes takes time to figure out, from the flurry of stories, which are the submissions that best represent new developments. My first impression on this one was "oh, another HKMap.live story"; because there had already been a prominent thread about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159872), it seemed to go in the follow-up bucket. This is a good example of how moderation is guesswork and we often guess wrong. Closer inspection revealed otherwise. User feedback, especially from users who know about the situation, helps us a lot to make better calls. But I think the principle itself is solid.
By the way we came up with the significant-new-information thing after the Snowden avalanche of summer 2013, when users legitimately complained that too many stories on HN's front page were only repeating what had already been said before, rather than reporting anything new. Discussion quality tends to get worse on such stories, too, which makes sense because there isn't new information to sink mind-teeth into. In any case, our goal is not to suppress coverage of these important stories (as anyone who's been reading HN in the last week should know). It's to keep the proportions balanced. Unfortunately for us, one consequence of the proportions being balanced is that nobody's happy with them. C'est le HN.
If there's something I'm still missing, I'd be happy to hear about it and do more reflecting. It will have to be tomorrow though (here) as I'm getting mushy.
It sounds like you're understaffed, honestly.
Probably 1. flagged by a number of Chinese users and 2. auto-detected as “controversial” which often are more noise than signal.
I hope this is manually set as an exception. This is an extremely important topic in the tech world and needs to be discussed.
Could be Apple fans flagging it too, but usually I see negative Google stories get flagged off really fast.
Everyone sees stories they prefer getting flagged really fast and stories they dislike hanging around. This is a mechanical consequence of HN's frontpage space being so limited, combined with the human tendency to pay more attention to negatives.
Yes, we've manually set this as an exception. The problem is that we can't set every story as exception, or even every important story. So the complaint—"why is X, which is important, off the front page with massive points while Y, which is trivial, is on the front page with pathetic points?"—will ever be with us.
Totally agree with the rule of thumb and deeply appreciate the decision to make an exception in this case.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, the value of the site.
Its not really a political topic, its an alarm clock that went off. With the big tech firms openly collaborating with regimes that dont shy away from military solutions to democratic self determination the future of the internet looks rather bleak. Its one step further to no longer being able to share information on the internet that powerful regimes dont want to be found. That your ability to share information is at will in a lot of platforms should interest the users here. Its the core problem we are facing if we want to keep any free software ideas alive in todays internet.
Differently put, this news is about Apple and the state of the internet, not the CCP.
It doesn't appear there's much battling here. It seems to be nearly unanimous opposition to Apple's decision. Ideological battle seems to imply two competing and popular opinions.
We rarely classify things that are bi-partisan as political. And Blizzard (which carries a substantially analogous version of events) has been condemned for their actions from Democrats and Republicans alike.
HN is pretty much a mono-ideological site, from what I've witnessed. Any topic which triggers ideological discussion could be good for HN in my opinion.
If I had to guess, the mods are bending the scoring to avoid controversial topics again. They’ve done it before with US politics. Lately there’s been a slew of China news and some of the comments have been incredibly vitriolic.
I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment.
The Blizzard equivalent of this article is on Page 2 (currently #42):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207057
That's a follow-up. The primary Blizzard story was the #1 story on HN yesterday.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08
> I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment.
As long as the insanity is technology or hacker-related it is fine for you? Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is. It is also dishonest (because politics is everywhere). In fact, the very thing I quote from you is a political statement by itself.
Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
> Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is.
That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News.
> Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
This is coincidentally how you deal with spam without a spam filter. At some point, it's not very productive to have to wade through a content stream that's 50% chaff.
> That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News.
They decided that not only they do not want to see it on HN; they don't want anyone to see it on HN.
> You're free to use a website which uses an API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila.
It is a practical solution which does not require third party tools. Also, it is about more than you; it allows you to cast your vote, thereby taking part of the community.
You're free to use a website which uses HN API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila, problem solved for you. Because of the sheer amount of volume, this approach (which is easy to make with a blacklist) works quite well with RSS in general.
> They decided that not only they do not want to see it on HN; they don't want anyone to see it on HN.
Right, which as far as I can tell is essentially the Kacker News guidelines in what to submit.
> Right, which as far as I can tell is essentially the Kacker News guidelines in what to submit.
Or perhaps your (wishful) interpretation of the guidelines?
Quoting [1]:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, the value of the site.
(Emphasis mine.) This is also my last post on this subject with you. Have a good one.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html