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Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

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Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#41

Post by DanBC »

Mithaldu wrote: post #39
DanBC wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front Mods (as far as I know, I'm not one) never forcibly remove things from the front page. These are almost always the result of user flagging.

Those are marked first "flagged" as a warning, and then "dead" when the user flags reach a high enough level. This article however is about stories that disappear without receiving either.

When does the flag label appear though?

Here's an example of a submission that does not include the [flagged] label, but which has a moderator saying it got flagged, and that the flags are the reason it's not on the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#42

Post by minimaxir »

iplaw wrote: post #11

I didn't understand why the guy's PayPal story was removed from the front page -- the one about PayPal seizing a $40k USD balance without warning, allegedly due to a 2% chargeback rate over several years of doing business and hundreds of thousands of dollars in successful transactions. I thought that the point of HN was auto-moderation? Perhaps now that HN has seen great increases in popularity, the quality of conten…

In addition to what jasode said, Ask HNs/self-posts have an additional penalty. (which is something I disagree with)

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#43

Post by Mithaldu »

DanBC wrote: post #26
laurent123456 wrote: post #12

As much as I like HN, I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc. I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]". Some websites manage to fi…

> I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc. This feels pretty transparent: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb

The problem with that is that they have various tools like adjusting things off the frontpage or banning comment threads to the bottom of the list; but the UI itself does not provide information on those. If the mods do any of these things but don't also leave a human comment on them, then it's unlikely people will notice.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#45

Post by icebraining »

codr4life wrote: post #33

Hacker News is nothing but a censored echo chamber, pretending otherwise at this point is pure ignorance. Anything that doesn't fit the narrative will be beaten down or removed.

If it's ignorance, then it's not pretense :)

In any case, I don't necessarily disagree, but I've yet to see good evidence of the shadowy cabal, rather than user-directed flagging. I mean, just look at the list in the article: does it point to any kind of "beating down stuff that doesn't fit the narrative"?

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#46

Post by douche »

Mithaldu wrote: post #39
DanBC wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front Mods (as far as I know, I'm not one) never forcibly remove things from the front page. These are almost always the result of user flagging.

Those are marked first "flagged" as a warning, and then "dead" when the user flags reach a high enough level. This article however is about stories that disappear without receiving either.

Flags seem to apply downward pressure before they build enough to get the "flagged" label.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#47

Post by willvarfar »

moomin wrote: post #13

It's very interesting to note the number one pulled story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276 . If you take a look at the comments, it's theorized there that the story got pulled not because of moderator action, but because people abused the flagging mechanism. Given the content, and given the principal person under discussion, this seems pretty likely to me.

In the comments you link to, dang is the moderator, so he isn't theorizing when he says:

> It is the usual tug of war between upvotes and flags

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#48

Post by minimaxir »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #37
hardwaresofton wrote: post #6

The site is being crushed by traffic right now -- but without reading the article, I've also found that some stories that I thought were important that were scrubbed from HN's front page just about as soon as I saw it (when I doubled back to read the comments)... While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated. Maybe it could even be automatic, whenever a mod removed something…

> Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it. Obscuring an algorithm or making it more tedious to reverse may not make it perfectly secure, but that's not the goal. It's not like actual information security, where loss of the encryption keys means your product is broken or your database is on the Internet. You're just t…

See also, a discussion a couple weeks ago about how people can "buy" upvotes on HN and how HN takes steps against that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#49

Post by Shivetya »

laktak wrote: post #17

Don't forget that HN tries to detect vote fraud. So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.

Does HN actually suffer this? I know its done on Reddit and by who in one case; just having a family member active in politics gets you good insight how many sites they try to manipulate.

I was hoping that HN's flag system would sufficient for the community to self censor. Perhaps we need a flag on comments too, something you can't see. I would also prefer that posts don't transition through the lighter grays as they get down voted but disappear completely once the dead threshold is met. That would prevent some piling on that does happen

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