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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

#251

Post by xiphmont »

azrazalea wrote: post #83
ploggingdev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP uses this story as an example of having "moderator fingerprints on them" i.e moderators censoring posts, which is not true. What happened was the opposite : the moderator uncensored a post flagged by the community.

Well, the author tried to account for that by saying that normal flagged posts don't go down near as fast. If what is being said in other threads is true, high karma accounts clicking flag could push a post off the front page without showing the "flagged" tag, then that could be an explanation instead. Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.

Especially when it's a bit too easy to flag an article by mistake due to progressive rendering causing a misclick, or just being careless. I know I've done it, noticed, and then gone back to unflag. I wonder how often I've clicked off by a few pixels and didn't notice.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#252

Post by mlmlmasd »

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…

> There's no way around the need for moderator intervention on a site like HN—the clue is in the word 'moderator' itself: left to its own devices the system runs to extremes and it needs a negative feedback loop to dampen it.

Then maybe the system needs to be changed?

> None of this is new information, btw. I've posted about it plenty over the years and am always happy to answer questions.

Is there anything in particular that should make us trust the information you provide? You could be lying for all we know.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#253

Post by mlmlmasd »

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…

> There's simply too much data that isn't public.

Make it public?

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#254

Post by kens »

I wrote in detail in 2013 about how the Hacker News algorithm works and the penalties that can drop stories from the front page. My analysis was based on reverse engineering the algorithm from observed behavior and comparing with the published Arc code. This latest analysis seems kind of reinventing the wheel.

http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

Interestingly, my 2013 article also suddenly dropped off the front page. Apparently it somehow triggered "voting ring detection" and was penalized. (I'm not part of a voting ring of course.)

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#255

Post by jsnell »

turc1656 wrote: post #222
qznc wrote: post #44

Afaik there is a mechanism to remove flame bait articles. If a link gets too many comments too quickly, it gets removed.

If that's true, that seems like the sort of thing that would lead to a ton of false positives getting flagged for removal. I'm sure big news events like the Wikileaks Vault7 release would generate lots of comments. Doing a quick search on HN, I see the top posts related to Vault7 have I find this worrisome. Vault7 is the type of thing that I would expect to generate significant discussion here.

It's been covered to death here. There were at least half a dozen posts on that in the last week that made over 200 points (the main one at 2697).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13813160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840544

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#256

Post by DanBC »

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.

That's something that happens. It's always worth talking to the mods to sort that out. There's a bunch of stuff to detect vote rings, spam, etc etc and sometimes it unfairly blocks the wrong stuff.

From what I've seen mods are happy to fix any problems.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#257

Post by whack »

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 we didn't have a compensating factor, those stories would dominate the front page every day and HN would no longer follow its primary rule: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Of course that means HN is subject to our interpretation of what counts as "intellectual curiosity"

I appreciate the straight talk. I had some questions about the above. Suppose there was a post on the front page that was popular, and "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", but it happens to conflict with the interests of

A) HN,

B) YC, or

C) Specific individuals within YC, such as sama or pg

Can you guarantee that such stories will not be negatively moderated for that reason alone?

In the interests of transparency, can posts that are negatively moderated be publicly flagged, so that people can form their own opinions on whether the mods are using their powers in a fair and unbiased manner?

Most of us HN readers appreciate the work you're doing in moderating this forum. We're all in favor of mods using their powers in order to further the site's stated goals, but we're also very wary of mods using their powers in order to further their own personal agendas. We're worried that without sufficient transparency, it's only a matter of time before mods start abusing their powers. Hence why posts like this, and accusations of censorship, are such major topics of interest.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#258

Post by nkurz »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #239

A few months ago I wrote a tool that scrapes HN and detects moderator activity (and provides interesting stats in general). I posted it twice and it didn't receive much attention, and the database storage requirements starting to get out of hand, so I killed it. It seems like an appropriate time to bring it up again. The source code is here: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/hn-transparency Some screenshots: https://sr.ht/…

I wrote a tool that scrapes HN and detects moderator activity (and provides interesting stats in general).

Sounds great! It might be good to distinguish between "moderator activity" (which to me implies that a human reads and makes a decision) and "moderation activity" (which covers automatic adjustments such as the frequently faulty "flame detection algorithm").

If there's interest, I can put this back up and start pruning old data so it's more maintainable.

Yes, I think it would be very useful to have this available.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#259

Post by stefantalpalaru »

Peroni wrote: post #69
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…

Any time I've reached out to dang ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang ) via email, he's always been responsive and super helpful and pretty transparent. Moderating HN isn't an enviable task IMO.

I'm glad you had such a good time interacting with Ian Murdock's friend in need. He hellbanned me on a whim and I saw him hellbanning someone else just for daring to downvote him after being told to stop.

Maybe you're a special snowflake ;-)

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#260

Post by TuringNYC »

brudgers wrote: post #225
TuringNYC wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect that the software does that automatically on the server. Given that 'cartels' are likely to be automated and hence at web rather than human scale, at least some of the counter measures probably should be as well.

Well those are the flagrant cartels. I hear there are pure-human cartels too. I see emails and Facebook posts and en-masse emails asking for Product Hunt up-votes from time to time from some VC associates. I imagine there is a similar thing going on on HN (but what do I know...i'm just a tiny startup staring at PyCharm most of the day.)
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