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Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

drewdevault.com

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Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#121

Post by tptacek »

mnglkhn2 wrote: post #100
ploggingdev wrote: post #67

The voting ring detector is in need of a serious upgrade. There are so many cases of vote solicitation by people with meaningful social media following and their posts even make the front page. It's mostly the Product Hunt style "Hey we launched on HN, check us out" which is code for "upvote my post". People have stopped directly linking to the post submission for fear of tripping the voting ring detector, but they e…

[flagged]

There are no paid submissions to HN, nor is there an elaborate conspiracy between HN and "certain media orgs" to get paywalled links onto the front page.

This is the sort of nonsense tangent crud that the mods would normally zap to the bottom of the thread as "off topic". But they probably won't here, because it concerns their own moderation, and they're generally loathe to intervene --- even to clean up the threads --- when the optics of doing so are complicated.

So, if you're interested in helping them keep threads clear of conspiracies between HN and the NYT, it's helpful to know that the "flag" button for comments is revealed when you click the timestamp on the comment.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#122

Post by NicoJuicy »

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.

Or politics ;)

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#123

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

The website that publishes my stats (https://hn.0x2237.club) is getting smashed. This is largely because collecting stats is expensive and I devote most of the CPU time to that. Rest assured, stats are still being gathered, and you should be able to browse them when it cools down a bit. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#124

Post by sillysaurus3 »

tptacek wrote: post #105
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feat…

I'm not saying you'll be as successful as HN. Lobste.rs, which is run carefully by thoughtful people using software which is probably better than HN's, is much less successful. But that's the point.

You said you'd be two generations of tech ahead of HN. I know it was tongue in cheek, and I'm not calling you out. I'm nerding out about how much functionality pg managed to pack into so few lines of code.

And it all worked! No data loss, no massive security problem, and the last time HN was down for >24h was because pg manually edited the database and accidentally created a circular comment chain.

One way to look at the situation is that pg's original vision for arc failed. Arc was supposed to be what Clojure turned out to be. But even though HN alone is the one significant Arc project, what a project! The world was made materially better thanks to it. And I don't think they could've pulled off HN in some other language. There was too much work for one person to do to be distracted by the thousands of details a modern webdev needs to stay on top of.

I think it's possible to do the same thing for modern webdev. Arc's goal was to be a reliable foundation for building webapps. It comes with a user+admin system out of the box, for example. Every Arc app does.

I've been playing around with hooking up AngularJS to it, because unlike React or Angular, AngularJS can operate purely in HTML. You normally never want to do that -- usually you want to set up controllers and such. But when you control the language, you end up being able to give it the Babel treatment: the output looks complex, but you get all the features of a modern frontend site. Initial experiments were quite promising.

And from there, it's easy to just emit JSX instead. React? Angular? Sure, whatever. It's treated as compiler output.

(Indirect sourcemaps are funny... JSX compiles to minified JS, whose sourcemap points back to the JSX. But if Arc spits out JSX, you'll want a sourcemap from JSX -> Arc as well. It's sourcemaps all the way down.)

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#125

Post by mnglkhn2 »

tptacek wrote: post #121
mnglkhn2 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There are no paid submissions to HN, nor is there an elaborate conspiracy between HN and "certain media orgs" to get paywalled links onto the front page. This is the sort of nonsense tangent crud that the mods would normally zap to the bottom of the thread as "off topic". But they probably won't here, because it concerns their own moderation, and they're generally loathe to intervene --- even to clean up the threads…

You seem quite sure! Are you part of the HN executive group?

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#126

Post by minimaxir »

ballenf wrote: post #115
ploggingdev wrote: post #67

The voting ring detector is in need of a serious upgrade. There are so many cases of vote solicitation by people with meaningful social media following and their posts even make the front page. It's mostly the Product Hunt style "Hey we launched on HN, check us out" which is code for "upvote my post". People have stopped directly linking to the post submission for fear of tripping the voting ring detector, but they e…

I have zero problem with someone announcing on social media that they launched on HN. If they have a following it's because they have (or had) something interesting to say there. If that's the case and they have launched something, then there's a >0 chance that it is also interesting. If nothing else, it's interesting solely for the purpose of being more plugged in to what the masses think is or should be popular, ev…

I disagree with this interpretation because there is zero reason to draw attention to an HN submission as it is being posted unless you have an ulterior motive. Especially with people who try to advertise using the /newest trick (which doesn’t work) and remove plausible deniability in the process.

If it hits #1 on the front page after a bit of time, sure, humblebrag away on Twitter.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#127

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

flavio81 wrote: post #78

In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesti…

As the author of this article, I agree with you. I applaud the HN moderation for their work, and I think the result is a really great place for news and discussion. I'm just calling for greater transparency - and pointing out that the users are abusing the flagging feature.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#128

Post by tptacek »

mcguire wrote: post #83

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.

Interpersonal drama gets flagged off the site routinely. You see the same thing happen when a "story" is really an extrapolation of one person's tweet. I remember flagging that post myself.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#129

Post by Sone7 »

tptacek wrote: post #45
Sone7 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it though. Because it seems like we have zero evidence either which way, and your account is seemingly always on the status quo side. Myself, I see fuck all discussion on here any more that reminds me of old HN.

You figured me out!

It wasn't hard.

Feel free to prove me wrong with some time you stuck your neck out against surveillance or our current economic system, or give me another weak-ass one liner, your call.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#130

Post by tptacek »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #101
arkades wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference between a state actor controlling the whole of the public arena and a private individual controlling their own privately-sponsored forum; the latter allows you to crack open a blog and flog whatever opinion you want, and the former does not. I admit there’s some gray area for something like google, which by virtue of its size and role as intermediary has censorship abilities approaching governmen…

This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship. The law doesn't protect this kind of speech, which means they are legally permitted to participate in censorship, but it is censorship all the same. Yours is a common and poor argument for justifying this behavior. There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral . I would prefer to participat…

It is in the same sense censorship when CNN refuses to run one's Youtube show in prime time.
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