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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

#211

Post by pc86 »

M_Grey wrote: post #189
walterbell wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good idea. If a flagging brigade is active, early independent vouching would either stop the brigade, or make it easier to detect the brigade.

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

How does one "go to a moderator" on HN?

And besides, if a submission is flagged off the front page by that point I would think the damage is done short of resetting the gravity of the post to allow it to be in the same position on the front that it "should" have been. I'm not even sure if this is something they can do.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#212

Post by dang »

foob wrote: post #208
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 hea…

You're right, and I wrote that in haste, so I've taken out "It should really be lower than that because the article is completely wrong" and replaced it with "It should probably be lower".

Edit: I took a look at your list and don't see any pattern in those stories. Some belong on HN and indeed got a lot of time on the front page. Others clearly don't belong on HN. In a few cases moderators intervened to penalize the story or turn penalties off, but in a solid majority moderators didn't intervene at all. In a few cases a bunch of points were dropped by the anti-voting ring software so the 'real' score wasn't as high as it seemed.

To me all this shows, and the reason I described it as 'completely wrong', is that you can't reconstruct what's going on from timestamps, point totals, and story rank. There's simply too much data that isn't public. I know that's frustrating to the large section of HN's userbase who love to know what's going on and figure things out. But I don't believe making it all public would be helpful, so here's the balance we've arrived at over the years: we make public the the principles of how the system works, including moderator intervention, and we answer specific questions about specific cases.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#213

Post by dang »

md224 wrote: post #188
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…

> Meta is basically crack, so we routinely downweight such posts Interesting that you make a drug analogy. What's wrong with letting HN users have their crack? Unlike actual crack, there's no danger of side effects, dependency, withdrawal, etc. Maybe the "upvoting trance" is the expression of a sincere communal desire? It's not like it's "trashy" content... meta is simply self-reflection. Why penalize it? Maybe the f…

I call it 'crack' semi-facetiously and semi-affectionately, but it's an interesting analogy to play with.

> Unlike actual crack, there's no danger of side effects

There's a big danger of side effects to HN itself. When taken excessively—the natural tendency—it makes the site less intellectually interesting, which alienates the best kinds of user (and attracts the less best kinds). Maybe if we could be like David Cross and just do crack once each...

> one or two meta posts couldn't hurt. I think self-consciousness is a positive attribute for a community

This I agree with but HN is extremely well-resourced in this area. The intention behind penalizing such stories, as I tried to explain above, is not to suppress them but to countervail.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#215

Post by foob »

dang wrote: post #182
jsnell wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We've been toying with doing something like this. The original intent of vouching was to rescue good posts that happen to be [dead] (e.g. because a banned user posted them) which is why we didn't implement it that way at the time.

I think that this is a great idea. I imagine that it's very difficult to differentiate between users flagging things that really don't belong on the site and flagging things that they dislike for more personal reasons. Showing a "vouch" link to high-karma users on stories that are being flagged would make it easier to separate the two cases.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#216

Post by probably_wrong »

Apparently I'm going to go against the flow to say that I'm perfectly fine with the way HN is moderated. In fact, I think the moderation is probably the reason why I come here. If magazines, TV shows, and journals have editors, it seems completely natural to me that a quality website should have one too.

More often than not, keeping a community from turning into 4chan requires some heavy moderation (reddit's AskHistorians comes to mind, with entire threads nuked at once), and it's often a thankless job. I'm happy that HN managed to keep it's overall spirit, and I thank the mod team for that.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#217

Post by ihuman »

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…

This might be slightly off-topic, but is flagging supposed to be more like downvoting or reporting a post? The guidelines say it is for when a, "story is spam or off-topic," but that doesn't say what flagging means, just when to use it.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#218

Post by nol13 »

icebraining wrote: post #45
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.

If it's ignorance, then it's not pretense :) In any case, I don't necessarily disagree, but I've yet to see good evidence of the shadowy cabal, rather than user-directed flagging. I mean, just look at the list in the article: does it point to any kind of "beating down stuff that doesn't fit the narrative"?

I mean at some level, completely understandable/expected that the community at news.ycombinator.com will have the corporate/VC dick up its ass to a degree.

And not always a bad thing, even if I think this place could use a GNAA troll every now and then. I don't need 10 cynical articles about big tech every morning. Those views need to be heard but at some point it's not interesting to me, that's not the stuff that keeps me refreshing HN while I should be programming.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#219

Post by burger_moon »

kordless wrote: post #207
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 acce…

>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.

Publicly pointing out who flagged a story seems like a bad idea. I think the data should always be anonymized. I just think it will lead down a bad path to ostracize people for specific votes or flags.

I do however think it would be interesting to see some data after the fact for some stories say ones that reach 500 points or greater.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#220

Post by tptacek »

j_s wrote: post #151
tptacek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moderators bury things on the front page pretty routinely.

tptacek 1 hour ago The moderators bury things on the front page pretty routinely. That's a pretty big (and vague!) accusation to just throw out there, especially in light of this comment elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858327 dang 6 minutes ago As others have pointed out, the [flagged] annotation means heavily flagged. A story can be downweighted off the front page by user flags long before [flagged…

Read Dan's comment at the top of this thread.
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