Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 409 posts

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#191

Post by pbhjpbhj »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #52
minimaxir wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dang made a full writeup here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 I agree it (along with other moderation behaviors described in the article) should be documented more explicitly in the guidelines/FAQ

I think HN is factoring in that transparency can also be a weakness too. When google released its page-rank algorithm it became a target for manipulation and entire forums got wrecked (until nofollow) with the wave of consequences it created. I think the threat of user manipulation will always outweigh that of mod manipulation. Worth considering.

I assumed they didn't want transparency as, eg, showing the stories HN self-promotes would be deleterious to that promotion.

It strikes me it's always worth holding that this is a subdomain of YCombinator and presumably is used to further that corporation, its controllers ideals, and its associates interests over others who might seek influence here.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#192

Post by striking »

harlanji wrote: post #120

It's ridiculous that mods can hide my comments but I can't delete them. If a post is removed, I should have the anility to revoke my license to tue copy and have it removed. Would DMCA cover that?

There's the EU right to be forgotten if a company does business in the EU, and the ability to ask the mods to delete things, which they do.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#194

Post by matt4077 »

andrewguenther wrote: post #134
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…

I've found moderation on HN to be a bit heavy handed recently. Specifically when it comes to the issue of sexism in SV. No matter the opinion, posts on this seem to get removed shortly after reaching the front page. Question for the mods: Why? It doesn't appear to be a bias towards either side. Is the perception just that people are tied of hearing about it? Why not let the users decide that?

HN's readership is a bit less progressive than what you'd expect from the age/education demographics–or at least than what I'd expect.

See, for example, this very article calling out the moderation of a submission on anti-white racism in the restaurant industry, while there are probably dozens of stories buried each week exploring racism or sexism on the tech sector. Yes, some of those do make it to the front page. But in terms of / you need about a thousand female Uber employees invited to a strip club for every alt-right Googler that gets fired for writing the wrong memo.

It's also interesting to watch the insistence on "engaging with others' arguments" when it comes to literal mobs with torches calling for the next holocaust, yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#195

Post by sillysaurus3 »

tptacek wrote: post #139
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can call me out any time you'd like. I think an actual database backend for this site is only a couple years old. Or do we actually have one yet? I know the API has one, but HN doesn't run the API. It's possible this thing is still relying on flat files.

Direct answer: no, probably no database. HN forwards info to Firebase which provides an API. But assuming Arc is still running on Racket, there aren't a lot of options for database bindings (https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/) and flat files work well enough.

EDIT: Actually, you may be right. They already forward data to Firebase, which means they could just store the data in Firebase directly. Firebase is pretty great, so it's possible they did this.

One bit of supporting evidence: there seems to be no startup time. Loading GBs of data from disk takes a little while, so restarting HN would be painful. We'd notice it as ~30 seconds of downtime. Especially now that HN has grown so large. I haven't noticed this in a couple years (but I'm not omnipresent).

So it could go either way, and there are a lot of advantages to the Firebase approach.

I guess I take back everything I said. But only because a lightweight alternative exists, not because flat files are inherently bad.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#196

Post by wglb »

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.

I flag stories whose thrust that I agree with but that are leading to toxic conversation. To me, HN value is the stories that are posted as well as the discussion. When the discussion gets out of hand, that is a detriment to the site.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#197

Post by trgv »

Here are some posts whose flags I consider questionable:

Harvey, the Storm That Humans Helped Cause (23 points)

ES6 imports syntax considered harmful (12 points)

White-Owned Restaurants Shamed for Serving Ethnic Food (33 points)

The evidence is piling up – Silicon Valley is being destroyed (27 points)

Personally I'm glad all of these posts were flagged.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#198

Post by dec0dedab0de »

andrewguenther wrote: post #154
wvenable wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. If you want your forum to have some nutritional value than you can't let the candy topics run rampant no matter how much people seem to want them.

I think that makes sense. But how much is too much? Say you have a very high post volume on one side of an issue, so you start moderating more heavily. Do you allow posts through representing the other side? Is that "fair"?

I believe there is an automatic penalty if the comment count goes above the vote count beyond a certain percentage

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#199

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

tptacek wrote: post #82
pjc50 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Flag the trolls, not the articles.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#200

Post by tptacek »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #199
tptacek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Flag the trolls, not the articles.

No. That doesn't work.
Post reply on HN