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Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

drewdevault.com

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Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#281

Post by jsmthrowaway »

tptacek wrote: post #273
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And your point is wrong. You seemed to claim that in the dang era rank penalization is a thing of the past. You seem to claim that unsubstantive comments will no longer get you penalized. You are claiming that these decisions are more transparent and less arbitrary than under pg. All three are completely false, but you're just not subjected to them. I was not informed that I had been quietly penalized in any way unti…

It's like you didn't read my comment and instead just decided to litigate further whether your penalties are legitimate. I'm the wrong person to have this conversation with, because --- just to be direct about this --- I do not care.

No. Again, I’m refuting your claims, which I repeated back to you, with personal experience and am attempting to do so civilly. If I misunderstood your claims, I’m not the only one; sibling points out the same point I’m making back to you. (You’re also not addressing that misunderstanding at all, if so, and are instead throwing malice around and assuming people aren’t reading even when they repeat the exact claims you seem to have made.)

I care much less than you do whether they’re “legitimate,” I assure you. You’re projecting not reading on me, to be perfectly honest. Why on earth would I litigate my account status with you, of all people? It’s amusing you think I need to be reminded that you’re the wrong person for that, because I already know that. To me, just to be direct about this, you represent among the worst of HN’s qualities as evidenced all over this thread.

You’re just wrong about HN changing. It hasn’t. Yeah, dang and sctb announce bans now. There’s more to it, and in my experience, many of those decisions are just as arbitrary as they were when pg ran this place.

Everything else is an uncivil sideshow you’re dragging me into. Endgame: you’ll remain you, I’m probably stacking up further penalization rising to it, and life will go on. How about sticking to the fact that you’re wrong instead of exploiting your status to be as uncivil as you are with no fear of the exact repercussions you claim have softened because you’re not exposed to them?

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#282

Post by anigbrowl »

sizzle wrote: post #277
gnicholas wrote: post #276

I was actually going to build a tool that scrapes HN every couple minutes and looks for stories that were hot (on the front page) and then drops by 20+ slots. I've happened to be involved in a couple threads where this inexplicably happened, and I was unhappy to see the discussion being muted (people previously involved continued commenting, but no new people saw/joined the thread). I was going to show the buried pos…

Please build this

seconded

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#283

Post by dsr_ »

oftenbanned wrote: post #227
dsr_ wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... if all of your nyms get banned, it might be that you are consistently behaving in a way that the moderators don't like. Have you considered, perhaps, changing your behavior?

You’re not really comprehending what I am saying. If I create an account, never post or comment, and just browse HN from the IP in question, that account will be banned. It has nothing to do with behavior.

Yeah, that didn't come through at all. My apologies.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#284

Post by [deleted] »

minimaxir wrote: post #158
andrewguenther wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Typically the mods unflagkill gender discussion threads if they notice in time.

[deleted]

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#285

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

If we're killing off stories because of the behavior of trolls who don't like them, that seems like a victory for the trolls. Maybe it's the trolls who are the problem, rather than the targets of their misbehavior.

A basic problem in liberal (as in laissez-faire) politics is conflict aversion; victims of bullying are frequently treated worse than their antagonists, because it's less work. That creates perverse incentives, to put it mildly.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#286

Post by tptacek »

anigbrowl wrote: post #278
dang wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a helpful ingredient to pour into the well. You're basically just repeating a mental mock-up you have, not backed by data, only snark. Anyone who looks sincerely and closely will see how much more complex the situation is. Moreover, there's evidence that repeating such generalizations—even though you intend them critically—makes the environment less welcoming and poisons it further for the equality you'd p…

How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective? I have my doubts about how welcoming HN is for different demographics, and while the grandparent poster is handwaving things with a mental mockup as you say, absent transparency on moderation policies many people inevitably feel the same way about the moderation. I mean, at present you have a bunch of secret rules to make everything run better. That works O…

For what it's worth, I largely cosign this critique of how HN is moderated.

I think there's merit to the suggestion that snarking about how unwelcoming HN is to industry minorities is counterproductive. But I don't think HN's institutional commitment to being more welcoming to industry minorities is exactly pellucid.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#288

Post by dang »

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…

> many cases of vote solicitation [...] and their posts even make the front page

That last bit is the critical one. Vote solicitation that doesn't go anywhere is an annoyance, but fake upvotes getting otherwise lame content on the front page is a threat. If you (or anyone) see cases of this, I wish you would send them to hn@ycombinator.com. We investigate, and can usually figure something out one way or the other.

From my perspective—but of course we don't see everything—HN's anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good enough. It's not uncommon for there to be a high-quality project that someone has put months or years into, and then naively tries to promote on HN (edit: I mean by asking friends to upvote). Often people think that's what they're supposed to do. (If you think the opposite should be obvious, try communicating anything to a large-enough audience. The vast majority never get the message.) If we didn't override the voting ring detector in such cases, some really good work would be lost to the audience here, which wouldn't benefit HN. Of course this is rare enough; most ring-voted submissions aren't very good. But years of working on this problem have taught me that the best voting ring detector would not be one that penalizes submissions; it would just turn all ring-votes into no-ops.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#289

Post by tptacek »

anigbrowl wrote: post #285
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.

If we're killing off stories because of the behavior of trolls who don't like them, that seems like a victory for the trolls. Maybe it's the trolls who are the problem, rather than the targets of their misbehavior. A basic problem in liberal (as in laissez-faire ) politics is conflict aversion; victims of bullying are frequently treated worse than their antagonists, because it's less work. That creates perverse incen…

It is in a sense a victory for the trolls (or, if you want to put it as charitably as you possibly can, a strategic retreat). With the moderation system we have now, it's the best outcome we're going to get.

What I won't sign onto is an endless series of septic threads maintained just to illustrate how inadequate the moderating response to this problem is.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#290

Post by dang »

mnglkhn2 wrote: post #148
minimaxir wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better argument against is that the NYTimes consistently produces good journalism .

You will notice that I did not comment on the quality of NYTimes' articles. And it was a convenient example as it is an easy one to spot (at this moment there are 2 articles from NYTimes on HN front page). The question stands: should cross promotion deals be disclosed?

Sure, of course. But there aren't any.
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