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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

#161

Post by lightedman »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #87

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.

"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."

That you worry about these things on the internet instead of real life (like the ones in our government) is rather telling.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#162

Post by epimetheus »

Fjolsvith wrote: post #126
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.

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.

My comments were like this, and found out I had been shadowbanned. I talked to a Mod, and they told me my shadowban was reversed, but I still don't get any responses from my comments and rarely see them as a guest. Is it possible you have a shadowbanned? I have my settings turned on so I see dead comments (not sure if that's the same thing or not)

Edit: this comment is not showing up when not logged in either, so guess my shadowban was not reversed or something else is going on.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#163

Post by phpnode »

c3534l wrote: post #139
mirimir wrote: post #127

Conversely, 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 :)

Protip: every post hits the front page. Some posts just stay there longer.

* if it receives at least 4 upvotes before falling off the "new" page.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#164

Post by gus_massa »

c3534l wrote: post #139
mirimir wrote: post #127

Conversely, 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 :)

Protip: every post hits the front page. Some posts just stay there longer.

Not every story. But some stories are cherrypicked by the mods to be shown for a short time in the front page. It's like a second chance for some good submissions.

Old explanation by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#165

Post by minimaxir »

Analog24 wrote: post #150
minimaxir wrote: post #15

Historically, the mods have not killed a post for discussing Hacker News meta, although on occasion they apply a penalty to meta submissions. (the original post only had 32 upvotes, which is enough to get swallowed) Indeed, HN recently allowed a post that advocated gaming the system because it encouraged debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362 A conspiracy theory, even backed by data, is not the best ap…

Presenting the facts out of context isn't helpful. The original post might have "only had 32 upvotes" but, as mentioned in this article, it received about 20 in less than an hour. More than enough to get to the front page, where it was steadily receiving more upvotes until it just vanished. The post was not "swallowed".

"20 in less than an hour" is not a fast velocity.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#166

Post by brudgers »

ethbro wrote: post #106
brudgers wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the |contact| link to ask the moderators directly about anything that looks nefarious.

I think the perspective some people are taking here is that if it's invisible in the UI, then how would they ever know to ask? Short of running a continuous scraper and then compiling statistics as article did. I'd be all for tagging a generic "Downvoted by moderation" onto any article this happened to. The poster will probably still be annoyed, but I imagine most would agree with moderation most of the time. And if…

I agree that running a continuous scraper and compiling statistics sounds like a hack.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#167

Post by gus_massa »

Jerry2 wrote: post #103

Interesting. Another aspect of HN that I've noticed are stories that are not censored but actually promoted. Some time ago, I've noticed that some stories were few hours old and had 4 votes yet they were in top 15 position on HN. I never understood how that's possible without some kind of manipulation. I've collected some of these anomalies. Peruse them and analyze them in this album: https://imgur.com/a/6OvnE Maybe…

Some stories are cherrypicked by the mods to be shown for a short time in the front page. It's like a second chance for some good submissions.

Old explanation by dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#168

Post by jsnell »

dang wrote: post #149

The story the OP is complaining about was flagged by users. Moderators never saw it (edit: wrong, we put 2010 on the title by mistake, see downthread [1]). Had we seen it, we would have turned off the flags. There's a long tradition of people looking at HN data and posting about it. Edit #2: since the 2010 thing was our mistake (an accident of sleep deprivation by the looks of it!) I've invited foob to repost the ori…

Could "vouch" be made available if there are any flags, even before the full flagging threshold is reached?

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#169

Post by ollyoxalls »

dang wrote: post #149

The story the OP is complaining about was flagged by users. Moderators never saw it (edit: wrong, we put 2010 on the title by mistake, see downthread [1]). Had we seen it, we would have turned off the flags. There's a long tradition of people looking at HN data and posting about it. Edit #2: since the 2010 thing was our mistake (an accident of sleep deprivation by the looks of it!) I've invited foob to repost the ori…

The other post incorrectly had "2010" in the title and I made a comment about how this should be corrected. The "2010" was then removed.

If, like you say, the moderators never saw the story then who made these changes? I find it hard to believe that foob would put the wrong year in the title of his own post.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#170

Post by throwaway743824 »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #98
throwaway743824 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always find reasons why something has to be a certain way. But at the end of the day, you can't expect to attract and retain curious hackers/entrepreneurs in this way. The author presumably spent some time compiling the original story, the math symbols and graphs are quite nice for instance, just to have it removed without explanation. It's not a very good way to treat people.

There is no proof it has been removed by different means other than those mechanisms all stories are subject to. I myself am not convinced at all.

Does it matter? The author seems representative of exactly the type of users you want in a community like this. Long standing user account, high karma, produces decent comments and great content (the visualizations in the Swype article is another example [0]) and even puts HN comments on the blog. Whatever mechanism that ends up discouraging people like this in favor of trigger happy flaggers is broken. Fortunately for the community the author didn't go "fuck it", but instead wrote another sensible blog post which makes them an even better community member.

[0] http://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout...

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