Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

sangaline.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 327 posts

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#201

Post by M_Grey »

walterbell wrote: post #190
M_Grey wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll just create competing teams of brigades. Better to just go to a moderator and say, "I think my submission was brigaded, help!"

Doesn't flagging trigger moderator review? If not, should it be called something stronger, like "killing"?

I honestly don't know, but I'd guess that there are only so many mods, and a lot more users/posts that demand their attention. To be honest though, I base this on experiences moderating communities in the past, not particular experiences here.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#202

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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?

When you get banned I'm pretty sure you get banned. So that account/accounts is/are closed but the person is banned. Clearly it's not enforceable but indicating a new account of a banned person would surely have that account removed?

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#203

Post by TuringNYC »

dang wrote: post #179
david927 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flagging should be much less effective. There's no reason why a few people clicking 'flag' should ruin the experience for everyone else.

The experience wouldn't exist without flagging in the first place. They're an integral part of HN's system, without which it would be overrun with spam, sensationalism, and other kinds of posts that don't belong here. It's true that the effect of flags isn't perfect in every way, but we have to evaluate this on a whole-system level. I'm not aware of any way to make the whole system work significantly better (otherwis…

Suggestion: Make anonymized graph data available on submissions and flaggers so we can spot flag/upvote cartels. This would make for a great final project for some college course.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#204

Post by minimaxir »

david927 wrote: post #200
dang wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experience wouldn't exist without flagging in the first place. They're an integral part of HN's system, without which it would be overrun with spam, sensationalism, and other kinds of posts that don't belong here. It's true that the effect of flags isn't perfect in every way, but we have to evaluate this on a whole-system level. I'm not aware of any way to make the whole system work significantly better (otherwis…

Just change it to be less effective as it becomes more popular. There's no reason to have a 'flag' link once a story hits the main page, for example.

Then people would just submit clickbait titles such that their submission gets quick upvotes for flag immunity.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#205

Post by moomin »

belorn wrote: post #109
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.

Why would it be abuse if people flag it as being off-topic for HN? The article is about some community code of conduct text which the article author comments on by adding their own interpretations to it. It look political and it uses inflammatory language. The tug of war between upvotes and flags, as commented by dang, seems a strong sign that the article is very much political in nature. The question is if it also g…

I'd say tech culture is 100% fair game for Hacker News. In fact, it's been the subject of a fair number of front page articles recently (look at the Fowler stories, for instance). The flagging suggests to me that they didn't like what was being said, rather than they thought it was off-topic.

A good test for this that the moderators could run is to see if those that flagged this article flagged any other articles about LambdaConf's policies and if so, which.

Another one is to compare its performance to other, similarly political articles by the same author (e.g. his free software posts) and see how they performed.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#206

Post by 91bananas »

falcolas wrote: post #99

Obligatory pimping of a tool I use (not mine, though): http://hckrnews.com/ Shows stories which have hit the front page ever, in the order of their posting. If it's currently on the front page, the link is orange. If it's not, it's black. It's very interesting to watch how frequently highly upvoted and commented posts turn black, while their temporal peers remain. Anecdotally, there appears to be trend of positive/ne…

This is super cool. Thanks.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#207

Post by kordless »

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…

> I want to illustrate the point that we intervene less, not more, when judgments about ourselves are involved.

Given "ourselves" is all of us here, a way to illustrate that in a trustworthy way would be to expose the meta data around the story. Which articles were flagged and removed, who flagged, how much it mattered, etc. If not in real time, due to possible exploitation for ranking tweaks, then perhaps in an acceptable offset of time.

I also recommend implementing a cost of suffering flag type for articles which use negative emotional responses to spread the information in the article, especially when it is dissonant and viral in nature. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc for context.

This article seems reasonable, but here's one indication it's flirting with recursive irrational behavior:

> I have to admit that I found it a bit comforting that I wasn’t the only one who thought this all seemed a bit fishy.

Confirmation bias is still a bias. Making an argument with bias prevents exploring other explanations, such as errors in HN code, activity periods (lunch for example) and sharing of stories within other aggregates which elicit a negative response (a large company monitoring the comments may not agree with post, and consensus there effectively moderates it down).

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#208

Post by foob »

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 post is completely wrong

I take a little bit of offense to this statement. The article identifies stories that had sudden extreme drops in position and then speculates that this could be caused by a hidden flagging threshold and/or moderator intervention. I strongly suspected that moderation was responsible in some of the cases but I also emphasized that this was because I didn't expect those stories to get heavily flagged and that we couldn't know for sure. All of these stories were effectively removed from the front page whether it was due to a hidden threshold or a moderator. I thought it was interesting to look at which stories were removed even if we could only speculate on the mechanism in each case.

You've confirmed that there are hidden thresholds in place that severely penalize stories and that the moderators make manual adjustments. I don't think that that makes the post completely wrong even if the moderator adjustments tend to be smaller and all of the stories I looked at were affected by automated means.

Do you have any thoughts on whether any of the listed stories are appropriate for the front page? As I said before, a few of these stories seem like "bad" posts but most of them appear fairly typical to me. Flagging is obviously necessary but maybe there is an issue with the user-specific weighting or how one of these thresholds kicks in if there seems to be a high percentage of collateral damage? I'm sure that you've spent a lot more time thinking about this than I have so I'm genuinely very curious to hear your opinion.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#209

Post by et-al »

dang wrote: post #175
ollyoxalls wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good question! I will check. Edit: ok, I think I know what happened now. A moderator put 2010 on the title by mistake. I haven't checked the timestamps on the user flags, but it's possible that people flagged the article because they thought it was old, in which case the title change would have acted as a moderation penalty even though obviously we didn't mean it that way. I was wrong to say "moderators never saw it"…

Would there be a way to be a bit more specific about flags? E.g. "inaccurate title", "duplicate post", "advertising"?

There's been times when an older article is posted and adding the year in the title might give better perspective. Or other times where it's clearly a PR post for a company and we just want it off the front page.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#210

Post by koolba »

ethbro wrote: post #153
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…

If you don't mind answering, is there a reason [flagged] doesn't show as soon as it starts to downweight?

The same reason that you can't see the number of votes for comments. If you see [flagged], you're more likely to flag.
Post reply on HN