Ask HN: Why are “Google memo” links being flagged and hidden? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why are “Google memo” links being flagged and hidden?

#21

Post by tnone » Sat, Aug 12, 2017, 4:50 AM UTC

This is a long standing pattern. Whenever a thread about a social justice topic gets too far away from the orthodoxy, it gets flagged and hidden. In some cases I've seen a thread without any noticable flags and with a high score nevertheless drop hundreds of places so it sits between week old content. The official response to the LambdaConf controversy was the most glaring example.

At this point the HN moderators are either incompetently letting the system get gamed for obvious political purposes by one particular camp, or they are quietly looking the other way when it goes down. Either way, it's a pretty open secret by now.

Re: Ask HN: Why are “Google memo” links being flagged and hidden?

#22

Post by mathzthrowaway6 » Sat, Aug 12, 2017, 9:25 AM UTC

So, it turns our mathematically that discussion of the factual points (sharing data) can make the world a worse place (keep reading). I flag some of these articles for this reason. If you have approximately two hours and are a talented mathematician you can come to the same conclusion I have by following my derivation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967445

I find most of the people in most of these discussions are wrong, or do not rigorously derive the correct conclusion, even if they name it.

So I flag some of these articles because they make the world a worse place.

(By the way I apologize if the reasoning and derivation in the above mathematical comment are difficult to follow - I realize it is highly technical.)

Other people might flag them for what are ultimately equivalent reasons, but without being able to name exactly why.

Re: Ask HN: Why are “Google memo” links being flagged and hidden?

#23

Post by ratsmack » Sat, Aug 12, 2017, 3:03 PM UTC

notliketherest wrote: post #10

mtmail wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird indeed. That makes it the only flagged story in the top 100 https://news.ycombinator.com/best list. A lot, like hundreds, of users must have flagged it. (I don't know how ranking works, I just assume that there must be a ratio of upvotes vs flagging and the more upvotes the harder it is to flag).

Yeah, and I think it also has to do with weight of the user (more points = higher weight). That's why I'm asking this question because we give an outsized weight to higher karma users who effectively have censor power (which is a good thing when used against spam). But I'm worried we're curating our own "echo chamber" here.

This is especially true when people down vote on disagreement rather than quality.

Re: Ask HN: Why are “Google memo” links being flagged and hidden?

#24

Post by thomasahle » Sat, Aug 12, 2017, 4:02 PM UTC

mtmail wrote: post #5

I see the "Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14990494 from 5 hours ago with comments from 2 hours ago, so flagged within an hour doesn't match. 400+ comments. "Why I Was Fired by Google (wsj.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14993683 isn't flagged. Or maybe it was and now no longer is. Personally I get tired of yet more opinion pieces on the same topic. After…

This explains why the first 4 or so comments on the wsj article all focused on pointing out it had new information. Perhaps hacker news needs a separate "meta" discussion page, so we can have that debate aside from the normal discussion.

Re: Ask HN: Why are “Google memo” links being flagged and hidden?

#25

Post by dang » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 8:09 PM UTC

ratsmack wrote: post #2

Is Hacker News deeply rooted in Silicon Valley, and isn't it well known that Silicon Valley do not share conservative views? I think the answer can be derived herein.

This is a common misperception, but no, the overwhelming majority of the HN community is located nowhere near Silicon Valley, and the flags are coming from HN users, not admins. So what you're seeing is (a) community behavior and (b) not particularly SV-related.