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.
Including this very comment.
Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
51–60 of 327 posts
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#52Was it critical of Google or one of the other mega corps? I've noticed oftentimes info that is disappears quickly on here.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I thought the write-up was fair and reasonably level headed. If something popular (and surely by definition of being on the front page it is) is suddenly removed, people are bound to be interested in the reason why? Was the source discredited? Was it just a copyright issue? A simple filter for spiked stories would be good, just with a note on the reason why. Of course HN don't have to implement this, but it…
But the answer is always going to be "users flagged it", or "the flamewar detector was triggered", or "the vote ring detector was triggered". And advice is always going to be "if you notice something unusual email the mods to discuss it, because they can fix it if you send them an email; they might not see it if you leave a comment in a thread".
My point is you don't notice every post that gets removed and there is currently no transparancy on the reason why.
HN doesn't have to be transparent, it's just a site with it's own agenda (by that I don't mean evil agenda, but it is there for a reason) but if you want to grow the community, I think clearly identifying why things were removed is a reasonable thing to ask. If every one it marked "flagged by users" I'd worry that there is no manual intervention.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#54Don'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…
HN has flags for comments. Click the timestamp of the comment and the flag option will appear.
I think there's a small karma threshold for flagging - something like 30 or 50 karma.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#55Don'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…
> Does HN actually suffer this?
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
A user can see those things by turning on "Show Dead" in their profile.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#57Could it be that moderators see things we can't, eg vote manipulation and astro-turfing?
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#58This is called "burying" and it is unremarkable. (This story is likely to be buried.) The stories that are buried are not appropriate for the front page. The reason you come to Hacker News is because it has a better front page, with better comments under it, than other places. You experience the benefit of this editorial intervention each and every day. I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very…
> I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very quickly: this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431
I would have flagged that submission if I saw it since it's flamebait.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#59A useful data point missing from the article would have been the moderator's response to an email inquiring as to the story's history.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#60I find this sort of conspiratorial meta complaint boring and (IMHO) off topic. I didn't flag it, but I'd understand if others did.
It seems to me that it's healthy if we as a community are able to discuss issues with how the community is policed. Some may find it boring, but I'd argue that it's useful.
I did an Ask HN one time something along the lines of "how would you game the HN ranking algorithm?". It seems like good security practice IMO to have a discussion on what is publicly known / discernible about the ranking algorithm.
This was during the time of the election so I was thinking along the lines of political astroturfing, but also to guard against companies unfairly promoting their products or suppressing posts related to a rival company. For instance, if someone really wanted to keep a discussion off HN, all it would take is to tangentially start a flame war over some sensitive issue and watch the ranking algorithm punish the ensuing vitriol.