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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

#241

Post by brudgers »

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".

When a story gets to the front page more people will see it and some may upvote it. Likewise more people will see it and some may flag it. I'd hypothesize that longer term or more active users are among the people who are more likely to use flags. Likewise, I suspect that long term and active users are more likely to not want to see meta posts on the front page.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#242

Post by dibeoenjr »

dang wrote: post #212
foob wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Honestly this is typical of your usual responses to be dismissive, faux outraged... And also just incorrect, factually incorrect.

Someone finally has enough data to confront your obvious bias and enough people saw it that you had to back up and apologize but this is a rare exception.

Mods removed submissions and individual posts they find distasteful and it has nothing to do with HN guidelines, they are applied unequally just as some members get special treatment. hN is just not that honest of a place to have an open discussion on a variety of topics.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#243

Post by nkurz »

rimliu wrote: post #27
laurent123456 wrote: post #12

As 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'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…

There was also a lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the guidelines, so…

I think you've unfairly jumped from the evidence you see (I don't recall receiving any warning) to an accusation that Dan was lying. Since lying about this doesn't seem to be to Dan's benefit (why risk adding false information?) it seems more likely that Dan may have confused you with another user, or that you may not have seen (or remembered) the warning.

Scanning back through your comments, I fairly quickly found the warning from a couple months ago that I think Dan was referring to: [redacted]. Likely you didn't notice this (or didn't consider it to be a warning?) but even if he's wronged you elsewhere, you probably should apologize to Dan for the false accusation.

while some of my comments might be harsh

Having just scanned through a couple months of your comments, I think that's unfortunately an understatement. A surprisingly large percentage of your recent comments are, as Dan warned, "personally abrasive". If your intent was to cause offense with each of these comments, I think Dan was right to ban your account. If the offense you were causing wasn't intentional, then there would appear to be a cultural misunderstanding that would be to your benefit to address.

the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well.

I agree with you about the use of "we". It often comes across oddly when it seems clear that the decision was made by an individual. I don't think a blanket switch to "I" solves it, but it seems like there should be a better phrasing.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#244

Post by M_Grey »

walterbell wrote: post #236
M_Grey wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If moderators don't have review capacity, HN could have a dedicated page for flagged posts, so that users could review and vouch as needed.

I'm sure that kind of thing could work, especially with the group of users here, but it would probably represent a full-time job for a mod just to police that page and make use of it. They may simply not see the benefit?

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#245

Post by jstandard »

Tenoke wrote: post #199
dang wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

As much as I love this place, every time I find out more about how the sausage is made, I lose faith in HN a little bit more. Look at just the stuff from this case - heavy handed uneven constant moderation (you claim moderators dont see a bunch of stories, but those that you do see like this one, often get adjustments), misreporting, questionable transparency, too much hardly visible power of flags, etc. I know the r…

Are there other online discussion forums that also go into such detail about how the sausage is made you can point to as an example?

From the ones I frequent, HN via Dan and team is the only one I've come across which frequently and directly engages the community in a detailed and genuine way about their policies.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#247

Post by walterbell »

M_Grey wrote: post #244
walterbell wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If moderators don't have review capacity, HN could have a dedicated page for flagged posts, so that users could review and vouch as needed.

I'm sure that kind of thing could work, especially with the group of users here, but it would probably represent a full-time job for a mod just to police that page and make use of it. They may simply not see the benefit?

Moderators would not need to police it, users would use the page to rescue incorrectly flagged posts.

In any case, someone other than HN (e.g. Algolia) could construct a page/queue of flagged posts for review. It would be used by a subset of the audience for the "new" page.

No permission needed from HN moderators. Users already have the power to vouch for stories, they only need a timely way to review.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#248

Post by SFJulie »

unethical_ban wrote: post #84
icebraining wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They would.

I made some experiments. Mix of fear of cross voting and anti spam technique I guess.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#249

Post by nowarninglabel »

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"…

I know how difficult it can be to run a volunteer review system, but we have done it for years and have learned a few lessons. One thing you should do here is remove privileges for a bit from the moderator in question. Reviewers need to have some consequence for mistakes, otherwise they will tend towards moving faster and faster in their actions, with lower quality as the result.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#250

Post by walterbell »

reitanqild wrote: post #240
burger_moon wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Publicly pointing out who flagged a story seems like a bad idea. Possibly better idea: Moderators could take a look at unfairly flagged stories and silently adjust flag weights for flag-abusing users. This is of course based on my unscientific thought that the majority of interesting (IMO) stories flagged of the frobt page are removed by competitors (political or business-wise) rather than moderators.

And commercial reputation management / PR firms. See the book Grassroots for Hire.
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