301–310 of 327 posts
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As a regular user, I have no interest in being witch hunted because I flagged a story. Votes and flags should be anonymous as far as other users are concerned.
It has to cost something to hide good content if you expect people to take the time to produce or submit quality content and engage with the community. Otherwise you'll end with the things no one cared much about.
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As a regular user, I have no interest in being witch hunted because I flagged a story. Votes and flags should be anonymous as far as other users are concerned.
This is highly irrational and speculative in nature. If an entity flags all articles by another entity or group, they should be held accountable for their actions, which could be shown to be biased. Further, a "witch hunt" would be driven by irrational decision making processes in the "hunter" aggregate, which is the point of exposing the meta data in the first place. Stopping recursive irrational thinking is the goa…
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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 purp…
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). If HN serves no business purpose, why does it employ full-time paid moderators?
/sarcasm
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…
Though, i'm continually driven back here because of the insanely high quality of the comments here.
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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…
In the weighting function, wouldn't vouching invert the changes that were previously effected by flagging, which in fact took place on an incremental basis? Or are you saying that vouching is not needed?
I don't think flagging is creating problems in terms of HN's quality. As I indicated, there were lots of reasonable criteria under which to flag the previous post. To me, this post has characteristics that meet those criteria as well.
Where vouching might have a role is a quality story with very few points that is flagged dead based on misunderstanding or malintent. A story that hits the front page has had many eyeballs upon it and if it is killed from there by organic means, that's the way the system is supposed to normally work. Even when I think the story does not deserve it.
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It has to cost something to hide good content if you expect people to take the time to produce or submit quality content and engage with the community. Otherwise you'll end with the things no one cared much about.
And to engage with the community you use a throwaway account?
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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?
I didn't understand why the guy's PayPal story was removed from the front page -- the one about PayPal seizing a $40k USD balance without warning, allegedly due to a 2% chargeback rate over several years of doing business and hundreds of thousands of dollars in successful transactions. I thought that the point of HN was auto-moderation? Perhaps now that HN has seen great increases in popularity, the quality of conten…