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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

#81

Post by tptacek »

jasode wrote: post #20
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…

I don't think the Paypal story was "removed". That story is now on page 2. Yesterday, it stayed on the front page all day. It's decay from the 1st page to the 2nd page a day later seems comparable to other stories with ~200 comments. The author's meaning of "remove from the frontpage" means abruptly disappearing from the front page and you still don't see it in the subsequent 6 or more pages.

Right. Stories that get buried fall from the front page to, like, the 50th. Not to the 2nd.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#82

Post by unethical_ban »

tantanel wrote: post #78
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The debate is not really whether the algorithm should be made public or not, it's about the method used to try and keep it secure. If the algorithm can be reverse engineered then trying to suppress the knowledge that is already "out there" will only create an illusion of it being a secret, and the fewer people know about it the more damage they can potentially do (i.e they more they can financially benefit from their…

I think the difference is that one can make verifiably secure software. Can one make a verifiably ungameable ranking algocfor a news site?

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#83

Post by azrazalea »

ploggingdev wrote: post #71
stordoff wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the post does acknowledge that: > There are also a few articles that are thinly veiled affiliate spam. For example, the ShelfJoy links about books that Aaron Swartz and David Bowie loved fall into this category. They get called out in the comments for being very low-effort lists of Amazon affiliate links.

OP uses this story as an example of having "moderator fingerprints on them" i.e moderators censoring posts, which is not true. What happened was the opposite : the moderator uncensored a post flagged by the community.

Well, the author tried to account for that by saying that normal flagged posts don't go down near as fast.

If what is being said in other threads is true, high karma accounts clicking flag could push a post off the front page without showing the "flagged" tag, then that could be an explanation instead. Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#84

Post by unethical_ban »

icebraining wrote: post #34
rimliu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got my account (with 9+k point) banned. Which is, of course, annoying, but the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well. There was also a lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the guidelines, so… And while some of my comments might be harsh I sometimes wonder if overzealous moderation leads…

Why not indicate your previous account?

My 1k account got banned before this account was created. I don't mention its name because I don't know if the moderators would ban me.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#85

Post by Mithaldu »

brudgers wrote: post #56
Mithaldu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have show dead on since a long time. The things i mentioned have no UI to note them. Show dead only makes, well, "dead" posts render their text.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#87

Post by jonathanstrange »

I'm pretty happy with the way HackerNews handles posts and can only recommend to them to aggressively moderate in the future, too.

There are way to many toxic users, trolls, shills, astro-turfers, voting rings, paid advertising, political organisations, disinformation campaigns, and other 'special interest' parties on the Net to be able to do without strong moderation.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#89

Post by kdamken »

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.

It's sad but true. Everyone here likes to think they're an open minded intellectual, but when you see completely reasonable comments get downvoted for not fitting the narrative, it's hard to believe that.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#90

Post by lorenzhs »

logicallee wrote: post #79
minimaxir wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's not what flamebait means, you likely mean clickbait. There's nothing to disagree with there - all commenters agreed that lightweight sites are great. The title was also completely true. But you are right, it was inappropriate. My point is there were 43 upvotes in a matter of a few minutes (and more coming) but it was not generating good discussion. The top comment: >>hyperbovine 269 days ago [-] >>Loads instan…

I think flamebait is the correct word, because the discussion would have just ended in the usual "modern web" complaints interspersed with people saying that these things have legitimate uses, and so on and so on. They're never productive discussions, just full of ranting and flaming.
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