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Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

drewdevault.com

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Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#371

Post by dang »

dhimes wrote: post #296
dang wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Fr…

Often people think that's what they're supposed to do. I recall a discussion here many many years ago where we agreed that we wanted that- it was a cool part of the site. I didn't realize it changed.

Ask friends to upvote? Surely that was never a thing.

Edit: my comment upthread was unclear so I added a bit.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#372

Post by forapurpose »

dang wrote: post #368
forapurpose wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective? This makes an excellent point, and the same could be said of the junior moderation team - the HN readers who up/downvote comments. A practical solution: The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities for some honest, frank perceptive and feedback. Stop guessing and trying, and get some real knowledge. Look at particular threads (on sexism, etc.)…

> The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities What makes you think we don't?

Oops! A very fair point and I actually meant to include that myself, because I don't know and didn't want to presume.

Gimme a break; I'm writing Internet comments not dissertations. Some things slip through the cracks. :)

EDIT: Also, re-reading my comment, I see it's all pretty critical. HN is the best forum on the Internet, IMHO, in large part thanks to the guidelines and moderation; but at the same time the competition is pretty bad and I think HN can be even better. My hope is that by developing and demonstrating effective practices, and then by sharing them, HN could improve discourse throughout the web. It sounds fantastical, but why not - the practices cost nothing, websites and online services everywhere are starving for a solution, and HN is in a very visible position and has a technically sophisticated team, a backing organization that loves innovation (YC), and an audience that can appreciate it.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#373

Post by dang »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #294
krapp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's got six digits of karma. He's obviously a Big Deal.

More likely just the fact that I can't recall an active HN conversation which tptacek didn't post in. It's kinda easier to rack up a high karma when you have a LOT of comments to upvote. His account is also about to hit it's tenth anniversary of it's creation in about a week and a half. He actually only picks up about 78 karma a day average.

You guys are getting pretty weird commenting on a fellow user and this crosses the line. Can we just not go there please?

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#374

Post by dang »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #363
dang wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, trollish usernames are trolling: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

Sorry, I don't see how this acocunt violated the guidelines, or how the username is trollish. Can you clarify?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15467478

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15044224

We eventually ban accounts that ignore our requests to follow the site guidelines. Inflammatory usernames catalyze that.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#375

Post by ansible »

losteverything wrote: post #342
ansible wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past. I'm one of the moderators over on reddit.com/r/AskEngineers. It is work... that I don't get paid for. Or any kind of reward, really. But I'm doing it because I want to promote high-quality discussion on various engineering topics. I'm glad…

Do you manage time so that there is planned downtime? Like no moderating weekends or 8/40/5? Or is it a mostly 24/7 look-at-all-new-posts thing

There's only 65K subscribers, so it isn't a huge sub compared to others. And /r/AskEngineers is a pretty well-behaved bunch for the most part, so it isn't too hard.

I'm usually checking the new queue and moderation queue a couple times per day.

It's good to have multiple active moderators, who are in different timezones to provide better 24/7 coverage.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#376

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #72
alexandercrohde wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are layers to HN's transparency. Some policy is in the guidelines. Some policy is described in moderator comments, so if you want to keep up with it, you have to follow 'dang and 'sctb. Some policy is "public" but you'll only learn about it if you mail hn@yc and ask. Some policy won't be made public. There's no master plan behind it all, but each of these ways of handling policy has a purpose. Describing evolvi…

[deleted]

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#377

Post by dang »

gnicholas wrote: post #343
dang wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you just look at https://news.ycombinator.com/active ? (via https://news.ycombinator.com/lists ). Most if not almost all of those stories show up there. Btw since you brought up the point, we moderate stories less, not more, when they're about YC or YC-funded companies. That's literally the first rule of HN moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... That doesn't mean we don'…

Checking /active makes sense, but once the rank for a story plummets, there's essentially a cap on comment activity. New people don't get brought in, and over time the existing commenters dwindle. So I'm not sure that would quite accomplish what I'm looking for. Regarding YC companies, I totally understand and trust that you and other moderators are not killing negative stories on YC companies. But I've noticed that…

Higher karma doesn't unlock any powers after the downvote threshold (500).

If you have concerns about any specific stories I'd be happy to take a look. It's best to email hn@ycombinator.com because we don't see most comments that get posted here.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#378

Post by dang »

mschuster91 wrote: post #175

What I personally dislike is the "spam filter". I sometimes hit it when participating in multiple threads and it says "You're submitting too fast, please slow down" - and it does not reset itself after sometimes over 8 hours.

That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.

I took a quick look at your recent history and it seems fine, so I'll take the rate limit off. But to prevent it from kicking in again, please stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I recall that we had to ask you many times in the past not to violate that, but hopefully it's all in the past now and things will be nice and guideliney going forward.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#379

Post by dang »

angersock wrote: post #12

There are two other features not listed: submission throttling for comments (which I suspect mods have some influence on) and slow banning (making the site slow for flagged users). For a different approach to moderation, check out Lobsters.

Re rate-limiting see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513929. Slow-banning was dropped years ago.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#380

Post by dang »

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.

Nobody gets banned just by browsing.

If you're concerned about a specific IP, and haven't been abusing HN, it should be easy to clear up by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. And even if you have been abusing HN, we're always happy to unban people (and/or their IPs) if they give us reason to believe that they've taken https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to heart and will follow the rules in the future.

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