Good writeup. Ironic that this story is #1 on the front page now.
Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
121–130 of 327 posts
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#122This blog suggest that moderator action must have been necessary, but seems to say that flags are unimportant. I disagree. Just a few flags can cause a story to drop off the front page.
HN is like reddit where the 'downvotes' on a story outweigh the upvotes 30 to one or so.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#123Does anyone know why some posts have a rel="nofollow" in the link? (not just these no-comment ycombinator promotional posts) I asked this before and a mod said I should ask again via mail, but never got a response from hn@ycombinator.com.
At some time, the post with few upvotes (perhaps Probably the mods don't want to disclose the complete criteria, because it may change constantly without warning. Try to send again an email again, but I guess you will get in the reply only a general idea of the system. If you see something horribly misclassified, try sending an email to the mods.
Thanks, that's reasonable and makes sense!
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#124The 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…
"While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated."
No, as a community we are all owed a public explanation.
And if stcb and dang can't provide it, they need to step down and make room for someone who can.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#125The main problem I have with this is that similar to Reddit, HN is advertised as open-minded, free-talking place by the team themselves.
When you then secretly censor stuff, because it doesn't fit your agenda, be it politically or financially, it makes you look even more like a hypocrite.
Branding yourself liberal while employing fascist methods (censoring and banning) seems to be a trend, not only on the internet.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#126The 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…
> 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.
I am of the mind that Mods can also prevent submissions from an account from ever being displayed in the page rankings.
Many months ago, I had several submissions that were visible when I was logged in, and yet when I accessed HN as a guest, they were not in the submission ranking.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#127Conversely, I've wondered how some stories (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857880) hit the top of the front page with only a few points.
Edit: Thanks all. I get it now :)
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#128The 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…
The naive thing is coming up with 17 complicated theories about this instead of just emailing the mods and asking. They're very responsive.
No, the naive thing is keeping this kind of crap in private messages instead of in public where we the community are owed an explanation.
I wonder how responsive the mods will be when I publish just how hackable the YC infrastructure is next week.
To heck with responsible disclosure since HN mods apparently don't believe in such a thing.
It's fair game, boys. This is how the mods want to treat us, the users can respond in kind.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#129As 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
What's more transparent is their personal info, which I just so happen to have and I'm tempted to make public.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The naive thing is coming up with 17 complicated theories about this instead of just emailing the mods and asking. They're very responsive.
No, the naive thing is keeping this kind of crap in private messages instead of in public where we the community are owed an explanation. I wonder how responsive the mods will be when I publish just how hackable the YC infrastructure is next week. To heck with responsible disclosure since HN mods apparently don't believe in such a thing. It's fair game, boys. This is how the mods want to treat us, the users can respo…
You do know this is a nerd message board on the internet not a re-enactment of '300', right?