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Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

drewdevault.com

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Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#81

Post by majewsky »

spash wrote: post #38
a13xb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is not a government or a political party, it's a privately run link aggregator.

Is this definiton of censorship from Wikipedia incorrect then? "Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions"

No. But a thing being "censorship" does not imply that it is bad, unless further context is considered. However, when censorship is a good thing, we usually give it a different name because "censorship" bears a negative connotation.

As a basic example, parents frequently censor their children, but we call that "childrearing". Managers censor their workers, but some of that is necessary to run a company.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#82

Post by tptacek »

pjc50 wrote: post #75
timthelion wrote: post #47

In my opinion, far more than moderation, HN is effected by who votes for the new articles. If you look at the "new" page then most stories never even get one upvote. Those who do go over there and upvote stories have far more power than those who only ever look at the front page. Sadly, it seems that there are too many stories on "new" for a person to sit there, read each one, and upvote, so the only real way to get…

And as mentioned, people will definitely use the flag feature to get rid of controversial articles they don't like. Anything about sexism will get flagged into oblivion, for example.

Plenty of people who are deeply concerned about sexism in this industry also flag those stories, because it only takes 2-3 misogynist trolls to create a 300-comment shitshow out of them. There are still kinds of threads that this site simply can't do well, and it's better we not pretend we can until the guidelines and mod tools evolve to actually make them work here.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#83

Post by mcguire »

Then, there is the case of 'On Whose Authority (http://z.caudate.me/on-whose-authority/), the HN discussion of which was killed while the discussion of Rich Hickey's response (https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au...) was ongoing and both were on the front page.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#84

Post by grzm »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #66
tptacek wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't like the way this site is edited, stand up an m1.large, hook Rails up to an sqlite database, and build your own. You'll be two generations of technology ahead of HN. The freedom to take other people's private belongings and repurpose them to your own ends is no real kind of freedom at all. But that's ultimately what you're yearning for when you allude to the Empire of Napoleon.

I'm not complaining. HN is about the best of what we've got. My Napoleon reference was the slobbering nature of the comment, which is so pro-moderation as to lose objectivity.

Something I find frustrating in discussions like this is a tendency for expressions of gratitude or appreciation to often be dismissed as uncritical, as if the only meaningful act of criticism is that of finding faults or flaws. In such an environment it can be very difficult to express reasons why someone likes something or finds benefit in a way that others read as something other than fawning: particularly when you know that's how it's going to be read.

There are reasons people continue to frequent HN as a news aggregator and comment on the site: it has some uses and benefits to them. 'sillysaurus3 does list a number of reasons supporting their position. If they're expressing a bit more joy and appreciation for your taste, dismissing that as "slobbering" seems quite harsh and unnecessary. Phrasing it as "pro-moderation" in an arguably pejorative manner likewise derails. A quality site, one I find personally valuable, requires moderation. If I'm in favor of a particular site and value its moderation efforts, I'm going to be "pro-moderation". If I actually find it valuable, enjoyable, and a benefit, I'm going to be appreciative, and maybe at times effusive. Have I lost objectivity in such a case? I'd like to think we're more human than that.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#85

Post by aaron-lebo »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #76
aaron-lebo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN's cool but it's just one forum among a million others. The moderation is good though sometimes arbitrary. That's a lot easier for users to accept when they know why they are getting positively/negatively moderated, which is a good reason for more openness. But at the end of the day it's a forum, the moderators have the final say, that's the contract you agree to in using it.

If Dan and Scott were kings, they would be fucking epic. Best monarchs ever. It's hard to think of anyone who cares more about fairness, but clever enough to decide for themselves. And they're usually right. I think I can count on one hand the number of mistakes they've made that even remotely mattered. And from a strategic standpoint, that number is effectively zero. There are probably a bunch of people behind the s…

Was not aware of those projects or their backgrounds - thanks for those links.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#86

Post by ibebnndagan »

logfromblammo wrote: post #62
willvarfar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you have so many accounts in the first place? How many is "a bunch"?

I spend enough time slacking off with just one account. I can't imagine getting anything done at all with two or three. Perhaps that is done to avoid the rate limiter? I can usually only make five posts in one 8-hour span, and then the sixth attempt says, "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. Also, don't count the number of posts tptacek can make in one thread in one hour and compare it to your total fo…

I've seen threads where he and his possey made up 50% of the comments, controlling the narrative and rallying their forces to down vote flag those who had the tenacity to disagree with them.

Also since you mentioned a particular user your comment will be removed. Funny how that works.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#87

Post by tptacek »

deadmetheny wrote: post #39

>Consider appointing one or two moderators from the community, ideally people with less bias towards SV or startup culture While I agree that this would be a great idea, it's laughable in that, as a service run by Y Combinator, it's always going to be for startup hucksters primarily and for the rest of the tech industry and Internet at large secondarily.

This site is overwhelmingly populated by people outside of startupland.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#89

Post by sillysaurus3 »

tptacek wrote: post #64
aaron-lebo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN's cool but it's just one forum among a million others. The moderation is good though sometimes arbitrary. That's a lot easier for users to accept when they know why they are getting positively/negatively moderated, which is a good reason for more openness. But at the end of the day it's a forum, the moderators have the final say, that's the contract you agree to in using it.

If you don't like the way this site is edited, stand up an m1.large, hook Rails up to an sqlite database, and build your own. You'll be two generations of technology ahead of HN. The freedom to take other people's private belongings and repurpose them to your own ends is no real kind of freedom at all. But that's ultimately what you're yearning for when you allude to the Empire of Napoleon.

Antirez tried, with lamernews: https://github.com/antirez/lamernews/blob/master/app.rb

Diff that vs HN circa 2008: https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/master/arc3....

Lamernews seems like just another HN clone, but back when it was launched it was a serious attempt at being a competitor. They probably came closest to pulling away a significant chunk of HN. I started to use it.

Then I ran into missing features. Little quality of life stuff. I forget what they were, but the whole site felt noticeably harder to use. So I stopped using it.

It's so tempting to think "HN is so simple. Just throw Rails at the problem and you can wipe the floor with them." But Lamernews was 2,964 lines of Ruby, and only managed to contain about 60% of the features. news.arc is 2,616 lines. And I don't care what anybody says: if you sat down and forced yourself to read that code for a week straight, you'd find it is actually quite readable. It's terse because it's for getting shit done.

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