There was a previous unrelated discussion about this just a few hours ago which was climbing to the top of the front page when I saw it. And then just vanished: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264
It's not flagged, it just went from #13 on the front page to invisible. In a single refresh. How does that work? Looking at the votes and age, it should be in the top 5 of both Ask and the front page. What's the metric or decision that made it disappear?
@dang might be worth commenting on this? Moderation is fine, opaque removal of content with no explanation, not so much. I fully believe @dang has the best interests of the community in mind, so please give us a clear explanation of what's going on here.
It was flagged by users and set off the flamewar detector. We review those, but not while asleep.
The site guidelines specifically ask you not to post like this, but to send such questions to hn@ycombinator.com instead. Would you please review them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? The reason we ask that is that such comments routinely spark completely speculative subthreads that range from completely off topic (at the high end!) to outrage mobs. They're extremely repetitive and they basically act like a drug and not a nice one.
We're always happy to answer questions—it just takes time to deal with the firehose. Yes, you have to wait for an email reply, but you've had to wait for a reply to this comment too, and if you'd sent an email you wouldn't have damaged HN. This digression (I'll use a nice word) was the #1 subthread on the #1 story of HN when I saw it.
You can't compute a post's rank from its timestamp and score. The software is more complicated than that, plus user flags affect things, plus moderator action. The "why is this post at rank N when given the score X and the timestamp Y my mental algorithm tells me it should be at rank Z?" question is an HN classic, but people grossly overweight moderator action, or rather sinister-moderator-misdeeds in the answers they give themselves.
I mean, think about it you guys. Do you really think we're suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase "communist bandits" from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.
It seems like my comment was also vanished from the top of the thread? I don't see what guidelines I came even close to breaking. Help me out here? No one's going to see your reply, my comment is detached from the submission. But I do want to understand what's going on here.
For what its worth, I was also shocked to see your entire comment thread, with over 110 children I believe, deleted from the thread without mention. Before this, I thought HN handled deletion with graying out, [flagged] or [dead] etc.
I only found it again by checking @dang's profile.
I've also emailed HN support strongly objecting to this complete deletion.
I didn't delete it; I downweighted it. You're running into the pagination problem (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184485), which is that you've confused the first page of comments with the entire thread. Click More at the bottom and you'll find it perfectly intact, just lower.
We don't delete things outright on HN unless the author asks us to. The most we ever do is 'kill' a post, meaning it's still visible to anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile, and even that's rare. Beyond that, we'd never kill an entire subthread with dozens of replies. We might downweight it or we might auto-collapse it. That's all. By the way, if I had actually deleted that thread, you'd not have been able to find it via my profile. I'm not sure whether to be more hurt by your assuming I'm such an evil censor or such a bad programmer. (<-- that is an attempt at a joke)
It's routine HN moderation to downweight off-topic subthreads, especially when they're at the top of the page, and especially when they're indignant+offtopic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Thank you for clarifying - you can disregard my email! I don't think I've ever seen/clicked the More on comments and was unaware of that feature. I appreciate you taking the time to explain!
You're welcome! I understand the shock of it seeming like something has completely disappeared, which is one reason I want to get rid of that pagination, as soon as our software can handle that load.
Of course I marked it off topic. It's the most off topic thing you could possibly have posted.
Guideline: "Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's a bit disingenuous isn't it? You're saying that the actual beef (vanishing Ask thread about google censorship) is okay to mention, and the reason my comment was silently nuked is because I happened to address the HN team? That's a bit strange.
I really do believe you have the best interests of the community in mind, but this chain of events is making it difficult. Using 'off topic' as an arbitrarily broad mechanism to remove high SnR content doesn't have the best optics, especially when a lot of the child discussion was pointing out seemingly inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of HN guidelines.
Again, help me out here. You're acting in good faith. Maybe a more clear and specific set of guidelines would help?
You're not going to tell me with a straight face that the highest upvoted comment on that submission and the origin of some healthy debate was 'off topic' when the top 3 comments of most front page submissions are far less related to TFA, are you?
I'm saying that what you posted was completely off topic, you shouldn't have posted it, and you should have emailed us instead (as indeed other users did). It's not that your comment was so bad in itself; it's the upvotes and replies that it attracted. They turned it into the worst subthread I've seen at the top of a high-ranked HN story in a long time.
If you think a subthread about "inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of HN guidelines", or rather people's feverish imaginations about that, doesn't qualify for being downweighted as off-topic, I'm not sure what to add. A subthread like that sitting at #1 on the #1 story of HN is a three-alarm fire from a moderation point of view. Smart readers don't come to HN to read that.
We routinely downweight this sort of thing because if we didn't, most threads would consist of nothing but. Do you think that HN discussions stay on topic (to the extent they do) by themselves? That would be a self-driving-cars-level achievement.
HN users will happily comment all day about HN, moderation, and their imaginings about these things. There's no stronger force on the site, but unfortunately it's an addictive process that burns all the oxygen from actual discussion and ends up asphyxiating it. A forum becoming self-referential like that is the road to death. If a smart new user showed up here, wanting to read about interesting topics, and ran into endless reams of insider bickering, they'd close the tab and never come back.
We 100% see where you're coming from. Would it be crazy to request that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions? I feel like HN could squash 90% of these concerns with that simple feature.
The troubling issue here seems to be HN asking users to "keep it quiet" by sending an email rather than commenting publicly about valid concerns. But I get your point that those concerns are technically "off-topic" from the underlying thread itself.
See my reply to your first question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228145
Hey, dang. I've sent a letter to hn@ycombinator.com 5 hours ago, questioning why my AskHN submission "Self-censorship on HN" has been flagged and blocked for further replies. Have you seen it by any chance? I'm really concerned about the issue.
> Do you really think we're suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase "communist bandits" from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.
Also, can the suppression of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264 (which missosoup is asking about) be connected with my "HN censorship" related comment in it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221622 ?
I have not seen it yet. If you saw the inbox you'd understand why. I'll get to it as soon as I can.
Edit: One not-so-obvious reason why subthreads like this are so disastrous for HN is that they suck up all the moderation resources. I haven't had a chance to even look at the rest of the HN front page yet, let alone the emails.
Thanks for the reply. If subthreads like this happen at all (let alone, as you put it, are so disastrous), then it might be a good idea to revisit the moderation mechanisms, don't you think so? Ideally, with a public discussion.
What I'd personally be happy to see being discussed:
- abandoning downvoting of comments completely
- introducing a compensation mechanism for flagging of comments (debatable)
- displaying all flagged submissions in a separate page with a link in the header (like "new", "ask", etc.)
No, because subthreads like this are eternal and no effort to prevent them can succeed. They can only be somewhat contained sometimes. If moderation mechanisms need to be changed, it needs to be for more substantial reasons.
Each generation of internet users thinks they're the first to come up with these things, and in a way they are, it's just that every previous generation was also the first to come up with them. It's an eternal cycle of internet forum life. The points you raise have been raised on HN for over a decade (HN Search is your friend!) and if they weren't those points they'd be others.
That probably sounds too dismissive. I don't mean that we're uninterested in hearing from users, getting suggestions, and answering questions. We do that all the time, and it's welcome. But making meta-posts to HN is not the best way to do it, especially in any inflammatory context, where they are almost guaranteed to blow up like the gas station in Zoolander—and then consume all our limited resources for the day, which ought to be going into making the site better.
I completely understand that it's an eternal issue. That does not automatically mean that it does not merit a yet another discussion. Downvote hell is real. Targeted censorship by (possibly coordinated) flagging is real (I presume so). I would love to read HN users' opinion on Bill Gates driving the world into a nightmarish dystopia, but can't do so, because some of the users think, that it's conspiracy bullshit (even if backed up by facts to some degree)? Might very well be so, but the fact, that we can't have such a discussion at all, has far-reaching implications, given the status of HN in the eye of the Internet crowd. It would be different, if all politics related subjects were outlawed here, but that is not the case. Rather, only some subjects are selectively and very opaquely (for the majority of users, who don't even get to see, that such a subject has been brought into their attention) dismissed as flamebait/propaganda/conspiracy/whatever. Why is that necessary?
Could not agree more, HN is taking the "we know best, so we ask that you blindly listen to us" highbrow approach. I lost 20% of my karma because I took a non-popular stance within a single thread lol. My stance was backed up by references/facts/data, but none of that mattered.
In a comment above, I mentioned the possible solution (to the issue discussed in above thread) that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions. I feel like HN could squash 90% of these concerns with that simple feature.
> that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions
totally agree overall (implementation details are debatable)
The question is whether it would squash 90% of those concerns or blow them up 900x. I don't know the answer to that, but I fear the latter. Everything we do as moderators is defensible—it's our core principle not to do things that we can't defend to the community, with confidence that the majority would support it. But that doesn't mean that everything we do explains itself, and therefore that a moderation log would be a good thing. On the contrary: it's all prone to misinterpretation, accusations of sinister manipulation, secret communist or nazi sympathies—I mean, you name it, we get accused of it. The bottom of that barrel is large, and at any moment there are hundreds if not thousands of readers raring to go there. Posting explanations as I've been doing in this thread is by far the highest-energy-expending thing that we have to do. We don't have the capacity to do significantly more—that's a recipe for burnout.
Moreover, the litigious sort of users who would post most of the meta complaints are also the least likely to ever be satisfied by the explanations. Why would it be a good idea to give them more material to work with and a single place to go get it? If, on the other hand, the goal is to keep the majority of the community satisfied—well, the majority of the community is already satisfied: the clear majority, and clearly so. If that weren't the case, believe me, we'd know it, and we'd already have adjusted. That's how we keep the community satisfied in the first place.
This doesn't mean we don't want to be transparent. But we take an ad hoc approach to that by answering questions as they come up. There's no specific question you can't get an answer to.
I understand being a moderator isn't easy. Definitely agree this conversation is mentally draining...I'm doing it because I care about what the underlying topic represents.
> Why would it be a good idea to give them more material to work with and a single place to go get it?
It's one thing to not make it easier to acquire, it's another thing entirely when it isn't possible to acquire.
> There's no specific question you can't get an answer to.
Until HN decides they don't want to answer it. Or until they play the "lost in my inbox" game, like used in this thread multiple times.
It is possible to acquire in any specific case simply by asking.
> Until HN decides they don't want to answer it.
Sure, there's always a risk that the people operating the site will ruin it.
> Or until they play the "lost in my inbox" game, like used in this thread multiple times.
A swipe like that deserves no response, but in case anybody actually thinks we might do that: I have 44 emails waiting for replies right now (edit: 45, while writing this. edit: 47). I spend hours every day answering HN emails, but haven't had a chance to do much today because I've been busy providing explanations to the commenters in this thread, as well as trying to do the normal workflow of HN moderation, which itself has been set behind by several hours. If I'm lucky, I'll spend my evening working through those emails. It's a point of conscience to try to give everyone who writes to us a meaningful reply, it's not a game, and I don't lie to the community—that would be not only wrong but stupid.
You're underestimating the extent to which these things have been repeated ad nauseum already. This is a site for curiosity, and curiosity and repetition don't go together (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
On the question of political topics on HN, I've written about this at length in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... If you take a look at those and still have a question I haven't addressed there, I'd be interested to know what it is. Just be sure you've familiarized yourself with past explanations, because if the idea is something like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why that won't work.
I honestly visited the links and read some of your comments. I still fail to see why downvoting and flagging are necessary. Am I overlloking something?
Downvoting and flagging are vital for preventing HN from becoming overrun with much lower-quality threads. There is a lot of that on the internet, including here, and we need countervailing mechanisms to address it. Upvotes alone can't cut it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
Basically, they are the immune system of the forum, and we need those white blood cells. There's a downside, of course—HN certainly gets bad downvotes and flags. But there are mechanisms to address those, like corrective upvotes (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and vouching (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and as a last resort you can always email hn@ycombinator.com. Meanwhile the downside of having no immune system would be much worse.
I saw this question downvotes (casting doubt on the value of it) then I saw this request on another forum for bringing them back: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/bring-forum-upvotedo...
It is an endless tussle of how people want to be moderated. I definitely see the value of flagging given many if not all forums, commenting blocks and social media sites have that. It seems highly suspect to cast doubt on the value of it. Adding a low friction way to say "why" would give a way to add priority.
Second, downvotes are community driven and very useful where the participants use it to bring up quality content. Of course it can be used unfairly as well.
Definitely agree it's not sustainable to moderate these issues individually. But maybe it's a red flag that HN needs to change their approach to this issue? It feels like a "guilty until proven innocent" setup.
A few years ago, I reverse-engineered the HN ranking algorithm [1]. Basic ranking is based on votes vs age, but there are numerous other factors. Penalties are applied based on words in the title or the domain. Posts with too many comments got penalized as controversial. A "voting ring detector" triggers other automatic penalties.
HN ranking has probably become more complex since I looked at it. Manual moderation also impacts ranking.
[1] http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
Interesting.
I suspect the formula is changing if only because the sheer volume of spammy type stuff skyrocketing to the top seems to have subsided.
There was a short run where a lot of nearly raw spam type posts were quickly rising to the top, and sticking a long time despite almost / all the comments being about how terrible the spam is.
That's why software should be open source.
Ironically the article about google censorship ended up discussing whether there is hn censorship or whether it just magic ranking.
With open source everybody could check whether there was censorship outside of any smart ranking algorithm.
No, you cannot open source a fraud prevention mechanism. You want to keep it secret.
That sounds suspiciously like what used to be said of encryption.
If you have perfect fraud prevention rules that can't be gamed, then you can open-source them. It's just that nobody has ever found or invented them.
Encryption seems to be by design not able to be manipulated.
Not sure pagerank, moderation and similar systems have that built in.
So how do you cheat the bitcoin blockchain?
Good analysis, but - obviously - outdated and besides, the biggest input and wildcard is 'what are the penalties' and without knowing those the analysis is not super useful even if it is accurate to a rough approximation.
Keeping the spammers out is already quite a bit of work so I'm perfectly OK with the secret sauce staying secret.
Some users tend to flag stories about China and censorship because they generate a lot of nationalistic and hot headed comments and very little actual intelligent discussion. Just look at the comments attached to this submission.
The submission I linked is not flagged (at least as far as I can see from my account?). Either there's some non-intuitive stuff going on with the way submissions stay on the front page, or HN soft-nuked it. Either way I think we deserve an explanation and a clear understanding of the underlying rules.
Does HN always tell you when someone flags it? Or just a critical number of users or something like that?
I see the flagged indicator now and then, but I see it somewhat less frequently than I would THINK things get flagged, admittedly that's all conjecture.
If something is memory holed quickly enough after being flagged, perhaps combined with an automated algorithm that considers certain keywords, then the likelihood of people noticing flagged posts can be kept very low.
Of course this is all speculation, the truth of censorship on various platforms will likely never be known.
If a story gets moderately flagged, it gets deranked but don't show up as "flagged"
It takes some amount of people flagging it before it shows up as [flagged] but flagging submissions affect rankings before it reaches that point. On top of that "Ask HN" posts also have some modifier on them that makes them drop quicker, these two effects seem to be cumulative, explaining why it dropped so quickly
In addition, I believe HN deranks submissions with a high comment-to-vote ratio, also as a signal of controversy.
Yeah I've seen what looks like the same pattern.
I'm not sure this is a behind the scenes Snidely Whiplash situation or ... just mass flagging by users with a specific POV.
It so happens that we've entered a period where technology, morality, ideology, etc. are converging - to censor those who wish to talk about these connections would seem very antithetical to a culture of inspiring bright minds, innovation, and technological advancement for the good of mankind.
I for one have never shied away from a "hot headed" argument. Imho, I feel that as adults it is our responsibility to voice our opinions even in times when that opinion will contrast with another. In fact, sometimes it is crucial to do so as often times the most important arguments to be had are the most heated.
I believe the HN esk counter-point would be that HN is not the proper forum for those kinds of discussion. Imho, there is no "proper" forum for these kinds of discussions. They simply need to be had, more now than ever in my lifetime, on every street corner, and in every shop.
> They simply need to be had, more now than ever in my lifetime, on every street corner, and in every shop.
Turns out, even the literal street-corner soapbox guys can be effectively shut out of their venue.
the best and surest way to have your account deleted from facebook is to post porn.
the best and surest way to delete an inconvenient discussion from hn is to spam it with a political flame war.
i don't have proof that this is the case here but i wouldn't be surprised that such threads are actively heated up and/or gaslighted by nation state sponsored censors.
Or ideologues.
you missed the point. these people are targets.
I don't understand what point I've missed.
If "I wouldn't be surprised that such threads are actively heated up and/or gaslighted by nation state sponsored censors" is possibly true, can it not also be possibly true that ideologues do the same thing (consciously or not), knowing that so-called flamewars can (and often does) lead to censorship?
oh they surely do, that isn't the point. the point is to help them notice the thread and get them going enough for moderators to delist the story.
Oh for sure...it's a symbiotic relationship, kind of like a non-coordinated conspiracy, something that is a lot easier to pull off than most people think. It's funny how many people seem to only be able to recognize the obvious herd-like behavior of people under certain topics of conversation, but if you change the topic then it is ~"literally impossible".
Might it be because threads like these often cause toxic, rude, unproductive, and generally tribal discourse in the comments?
Looking around the comment threads, I certainly don't see a lot of intellectual curiosity being stimulated or minds being expanded. I see a lot of dogmatic accusations, hyperbolic bemoaning-the-downfall-of-civilization, and general "how could you possibly believe that?!"-toned rudeness. Not our finest hour.
Yeah pretty much all of HN's lines about how it's much better than other communities go out the window.
Perhaps such conversations can be had productively, but I've yet to see it.
I challenge you to find an on-line community whose average is better than HN's worst.
I really do. I might start visiting it; we lack civilized places on the Internet.
Do you have show dead on or ever check the bottom page/new posts?
I do, and the kind of stuff that I see greyed out at the bottom is usually something I see floating around the middle of the page in other popular communities.
YCombinator has a financial incentive to support the Chinese regime.
Hacker news and dang in particular has a very good track record of even handed and well thought of moderation. They have definitely earned benefit of the doubt from me. Let's wait a little before bringing the torches.
I would think that having more transparency (eg: moderation/removal log) is much more appropriate than "he looks good to me".
I've already seen a few times where content demeaning YC companies mysteriously got disappeared... and then summarily blamed on automated removal. Who's right? No clue. But being able to see that log as it happens would be a significant good faith action.
This leads to am interesting security question: how to achieve real transparency?
I mean HN could publish a ranking algorithm and claim that that is what they use. But then we still wouldn't know
(1) if that is really what's running in the background,
(2) if that is really receiving user inputs that lead to the observed outcome.
I'm guessing for most people here the programming assignment "create a fake log including these real inputs so that this story is suddenly dropped according to the ranking algorithm" isn't that hard.
I think that in the end, you end up trusting something. (Eg. Is the log fake or real?) IF that is so, you might as well design the system around a predetermined root of trust... here, the moderators.
I also think that "real transparency" is something one can approach. Just because complete transparency is nigh impossible doesn't mean the steps towards it is worthless. And there is always a lower layer one can point at that is opaque... right down to the silicon.
Perhaps both are correct. You can automatically remove "content demeaning YC companies".
And how exactly did you determine this track record? It's not as if there's a log or appeals process...
The log is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The appeals process is to write to hn@ycombinator.com (Contact link in the footer.)
That's not a log, not even close. It's a link to dang's comment history, not a list of every comment/submission that has been deleted by the moderation team.
Go ahead and downvote me, doesn't make what I'm saying wrong.
AKA you want a tool that can be used by spammers to game the system.
If you don't like the moderation, apply to be a moderator.. or start your own forum.
I have: https://plebia.io
The moderation is 100% transparent and you can see a log of every comment/submission that a moderator has removed. Furthermore, each subforum can control their own moderation team through a voting system. Moderators should serve their users, not rule over them as dictators.
Can you think of any popular services with a moderation team which publishes such a log? I definitely can't.
https://lobste.rs/about#transparency
Good to be aware of that.
It does? What incentive?
YC wound down YC China, but still committed to funding Chinese companies[0], in a blog post carefully written to avoid explaining YC's motivations. And beyond that - how much Chinese money is invested in YC startups? How many YC companies have exited by bringing Chinese money to YC's coffers?
[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/an-update-on-yc-china/
I have absolutely no idea, but I'd bet it's extremely little because I've never heard of anything. In any case, this strikes me as weak sauce. You can make up purity tests to accuse anybody of anything, and if you choose to read that blog post as signifying "support for the Chinese regime", that is entirely your fantasy.
In any case, this has zero effect on HN moderation. It had zero effect while YC China was being set up, zero effect while YC China was being wound down, and zero effect regardless of whatever "Chinese money" you're referring to, which you seem to know more about than I do. The only effect any of this has on HN moderation is people making up dark insinuations about it and posting them to HN. I expect that kind of thing from trolls but it's pretty weird to see you stoop to it.
I respect you as a moderator and I think that on the whole, you do a good job - but ultimately, the YC logo is up there on the top left of every HN page. You have earned the presumption of goodwill in almost all of your moderation actions, but when incentives favor YC, you need to (and will always need to) go out of your way to prove that you're addressing these issues without bias.
I saw your comment earlier about this particular case - the flamewar detector went off. This would be a good thing to bubble up somewhere for transparency. I've mentioned many times that a public moderation log for HN would be a very good idea, and it would avoid scenarios like this entirely.
Again, I have a lot of respect for you as a moderator, but that is dependent on being able to push back when HN moderation fails. I've gone to bat for you before; it's only fair that I get to criticise you, too. Maybe this was a bit of a low blow, and I apologise for that, but it highlights places where HN moderation can be improved all the same. I don't think that pushing to have all of these discussions in private is going to be acceptable.
Same thing happened to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20863498. I meant to email dang to ask about it but never got around to it.
I also experienced this on numerous Chinese government-related posts in the past, where front page articles were not flagged, but quickly disappeared. Don't really have an explanation. Would be great if @dang can look into this.
I seriously doubt that there’s anything to “look into” from @dang’s perspective. A huge share of his moderation lately is focused on “nationalistic flamewar”, and from his perspective, it’s probably easier for any thread that might tend towards that to just quietly sink off the front page.
While not all comment-wars are flame-wars I know what you mean. I've been involved in a few. Trouble is, if the chinese trolls cause enough trouble that the mods are happy to let the thread vanish[1], the trolls have won. Scratch that, china has won, because there's a strong reek of high-level organisation behind it.
[1] Assuming that's what is occurring; I don't know.
Unfortunately it's nowhere near that easy. Some of the stories that overlap with nationalistic flamewar are well on topic for HN. This is one. The recent TSMC stories come to mind. Really there are many of them.
Not the first time I see something like this, would have I not been using hckrnews.com I would have missed it.
I always assumed the activity in comments might affect how long the submission stays on the front page.
I don’t know this for sure and this is just a guess. It would be great to know the details, waiting to learn more seems best.
I had a similar thing happen to my post [1] a month or so ago — one minute it was #1, then after a refresh, it vanished. No flag (that I know of), no explanation.
When things happen like this, explanations are helpful to the submitter and/or the commenters, whichever was causing the problems.
I suppose this opens things up for debate, but not sure a silent removal of content is great for the community either.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633570
Seems like a child comment has been detached from this thread and moved into a separate top-level thread, that is currently at the top (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223772), while its' former parent (comment that I'm currently responding to) has been moved to the bottom (2nd page). QED.
Seems like your comment has also been detached. I'm seriously confused right now.
If we're downweighting an off-topic subthread A, but it has a subthread B which is actually on-topic, we sometimes detach B so that it doesn't get pulled down by its parent. This is a good example. In this case A and B were almost completely unrelated.
"I fully believe @dang has the best interests of the community in mind" -- which community? Censorship, I mean moderation, is preferential.
I've participated in several active, somewhat neutral threads here that have disappeared entirely from the site with no indication that they have. Unable to find by browsing backwards by new or backwards from front page.
The one in question was that new Michael Moore documentary. There was a lively discussion, but obviously didn't fit the established narrative here, and it was disappeared.
If this is true, follow the money. HN is run by a Venture Capital firm. What are their incentives? Who does the business have to keep happy?
> If this is true, follow the money
Isn't it more likely it was flagged off the front page by overly-enthusiastic users?
I'll also admit that this link, to a support thread, is more compelling than the Ask HN, where half the comments were questioning whether the phenomenon was actually happening.
Yes. I believe some topics get removed by sufficient community flagging alone, no intervention by mods. If true, then this feature can be abused by users with agendas.
It was not flagged. It was on FP in top 10, then instantly moved to 3rd page without "[flagged]" appearing in the title.
Flagging has impacts other than the binary "flagged" state.
This does not explain an instant move of a submission made 1 hour ago from top 10 to 3rd page, where there are submissions made 1 DAY ago.
That depends on how many users flagged the post.
Yes, and within how short of a time span all those flags came in!
A post that's regularly being flagged by 0.0X% of logged-in users will have different behavior than one that gets fairly few flags for many hours and then suddenly gets 30 within a five minute period.
Is that more likely? Should it be that easy for a user to flag an article that's trending so far upward?
If it is that easy, maybe we should discuss the flagging system because it gives the ILLUSION that it was taken down because there's a conflict of interest.
> Isn't it more likely it was flagged off the front page by overly-enthusiastic users?
I for one wouldn't mind knowing if a large fraction of those overly enthusiastic users happened to be coordinated in some way.
> Isn't it more likely it was flagged off the front page by overly-enthusiastic users?
It's a wild guess either way.
Increased transparency like mandatory reason for flagging, and anonymized stats on flagging per userid including not just aggregate numbers, but also flagged post titles (so ideological patterns could be observed per topic) would improve trustworthiness that HN is an impartial platform, and there are no technical limitations in doing this, although it would require a bit of one-time work. It would be interesting to know why we have some stats here, but not others.
But unless this greater transparency is provided some day, we will have to run on faith, just as other religious people have faith as the basis of trust in their God of choice. Everyone has faith in their axioms, it just doesn't seem that way, in no small part because the mind tends to not let you think in that manner, even if you try.
This is where I draw my line. I will not be using HN anymore
Earlier today, a post linking to this article vanished: https://wmbriggs.com/post/30833/. It was generating upvotes and discussion.
Perception is reality. If you control what portions of reality the public is allowed to see, you can control their minds and their behavior.
The primary behaviors that need controlling are adherence to authoritarian dictates, and voting.
Perhaps there is an innocent explanation? Or are HN users not smart enough to decide for themselves and indeed tear apart controversial views on the burning topic of the day should the arguments presented warrant such treatment?
That one was flag-killed by users (I've turned that off now). Moderators didn't see it.
The combination of taking an extreme contrarian position and presenting it in a grandiose and inflammatory way is pretty reliably fatal. I'm of two minds about that. On the one hand, I don't like to see minority views get killed for being contrarian. On the other hand, if the initial conditions of a thread are that inflammatory, we're guaranteed to get a flamewar, which is bad for this site.
This is very worrisome. If we cannot as computing professionals raise the alarm about censorship and tech abuses on a primary forum for computing professionals, what options are left? Ethics is an important part of what we do for a living. We cannot back down from that now or ever.
HN is extremely corrupt in that way, but don't worry, my reply to you will be flagged and people will continue to ignore HN's extreme biases, and ideological agenda.
Just out of curiosity: what ideological agenda?