Mention "unions" or "professionalism" or anything that involves giving the actual value that a developer produces to the developer and the story will disappear very quickly. Maybe that's because of the mods or maybe it's because of the flagging by readers who have the pro-state-capitalist argument so ingrained in them. Whatever it is, it biases Hacker News in a bad way.
Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
271–280 of 327 posts
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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…
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. HN is quite well moderated, IMO (and I have been a moderator, and I spend a LOT of my time rolling my eyes at how most mods are doing it wrong, damnit ). Your comment is a kind of comment I see a lot on HN that sticks in my craw.…
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Which part of my comment do you disagree with. I specifically mentioned that I and others appreciate the work the mods are currently doing.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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…
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. HN is quite well moderated, IMO (and I have been a moderator, and I spend a LOT of my time rolling my eyes at how most mods are doing it wrong, damnit ). Your comment is a kind of comment I see a lot on HN that sticks in my craw.…
Your blog post mainly consists of the statement:
"Get a clue, people. Hacker News is an awesome discussion forum because it serves a business purpose. Please stop acting like there is something bizarre or ethically questionable about the mods making sure that this free service actually serves the business that pays all the bills for it. Geez"
I don't agree with the the assertion that HN mainly "serves a business purpose", perhaps in its early days its main purpose was to funnel prospective people into YC (second step from pg's essays, I stumbled on HN this way back in the day).
While you consider the arguments as "inane", I think there is merit in people trying to understand the mechanisms on which HN is being moderated. The "Don't worry your pretty head, it's being done right" argument only drives up more suspicion, because this is exactly the way less than savory practices in government and elsewhere are hidden. I don't think this is the case with HN but trying to argue that the suspicions arise not (just) because people are just jerks or stupid.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. HN is quite well moderated, IMO (and I have been a moderator, and I spend a LOT of my time rolling my eyes at how most mods are doing it wrong, damnit ). Your comment is a kind of comment I see a lot on HN that sticks in my craw.…
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Which part of my comment do you disagree with. I specifically mentioned that I and others appreciate the work the mods are currently doing.
You are wary of them furthering their personal agenda. I quoted that.
There seems to be this assumption that good only occurs when some Christ-like martyr falls on their sword for the benefit of other people. The entire world seems to think that the only good men are dead men who died as martyrs to a cause and if someone is getting something out of the deal, they are evil predators.
I loathe this idea with every fiber of my being and would like to see it wholly stamped out of existence. I believe HN is as high quality a forum as it is because it has a purpose that serves the needs of the people who created it and run it.
I have done moderating for free. At the scale of HN, unpaid mods would absolutely not work. I wholly approve of them having a personal agenda here. I think the fact that they need to meet a standard of enlightened self interest is part of why they do so much better than most moderating teams.
Is that clearer?
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Because it is mostly a site for press release type content, I suspect Product Hunt has less incentive to discourage those sorts of get out the vote activities versus Hacker News. And Hacker News users have more incentive to flag posts that rise for reasons other than interesting content or comments. I mean, if I have an informed expectation of what I will get on the Product Hunt front page and it is different than my expectation about the HN front page in part due to the way get out the vote activities are treated.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
The danger of making it public is that it makes the system much easier to game. The upside is that it is easier to see who is gaming the system. Or that could be another downside if the answer is "the moderators".
Security through obscurity is rarely a winning tactic.
All security is some form of obscurity, is it not?
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#277The 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…
When stories are negative about YC or YC-funded companies, we moderate them less than we would if they were about something else. That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all—it would be foolish to leave open any loophole that large on the internet—but we're conscious and careful about doing it less than we usually would. That is literally the first thing pg taught me about how to moderate HN, and the first thing I've taught every other moderator. I've written about this many times: e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date....
An example: the other day someone reposted an old (2011) controversy article about Airbnb. It was a me-too post of the kind users frequently submit in response to something currently on the front page, which tends to be bad for HN because it's repetitive. Also, the article was misleading in several ways (as I understand it) and long out of date in others. Our usual moderation practice is to penalize such stories—i.e. that are derivative of something else or clearly misleading—but we didn't do any of that because it was about a YC-funded startup. We're very clear about this with all YC founders and everyone who works for YC.
Stories about HN itself are a little different because of the evil catnip power of meta, but it's still the same principle: we don't suppress stuff because it's critical of us.
The idea that more data would clear everything up is a fallacy. "Just make everything public" is the sort of argument that sounds great on paper, but I think it would more likely cause just the opposite. People already take things out of context and construct fun, rage-inducing narratives about how awful we are—not because we're special, it's just a fact of life on the internet. Why would it ever stop? Of course it will never stop. What it would do is consume far more of our time and energy than it already does. That would steal resources from the things we should be doing to make HN better, basically giving a small number of users (some well-intentioned, others not so much) the power to do a denial-of-service attack on the good things of HN. Hacker News doesn't magically self-regulate, unfortunately; it takes a lot of work to keep it interesting and stave off entropy, and that's what we need to focus on. Every time one of these things comes up, it takes hours, sometimes a whole day, to answer people's questions about it. There's a burnout risk too.
So I think the balance we gradually arrived at over the years is the right one: be open about the principles we use to moderate HN and answer questions in specific cases. Unless something big happens to change my mind, that's how HN will continue to work; I believe it's what serves the community best as a whole.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Security through obscurity is rarely a winning tactic.
All security is some form of obscurity, is it not?
I can't really think of any good forms of 'security through obscurity'. Is the elimination of buffer overflow vulns and sql injections a form of obscurity? Is SSL a form of obscurity?
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think the rate of objectively incorrectly flagged posts is very low. The author's previous post is an example. Flagging meta posts is not objectively incorrect. Flagging posts that suggest nefarious motives by the moderators is not objectively incorrect. Flagging posts that are technically mediocre (i.e. not reflecting knowledge of HN's moderators or the long published general ranking algorithm) is not objectively incorrect. The only obvious objectively incorrect situation of flags killing a story is when there is organized effort to flag a story to death for ulterior motive...and I suspect that is probably already covered reasonably well algorithmically.
Technically and opinion aside, given the weighting function, what is supposed to happen when someone vouches for an eight hour old thirty-five point story? Does it move to page the middle of page two? How is justice done?
To quote Dennis Moore blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#280The site is being crushed by traffic right now -- but without reading the article, I've also found that some stories that I thought were important that were scrubbed from HN's front page just about as soon as I saw it (when I doubled back to read the comments)... While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated. Maybe it could even be automatic, whenever a mod removed something…
"While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated." No, as a community we are all owed a public explanation. And if stcb and dang can't provide it, they need to step down and make room for someone who can.
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