Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#131

Post by chris11 » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #130

chris11 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason is security. Telling the user explicit reasons for account deactivation could open you up to more sophisticated attacks. Of course this isn't a huge concern in most situations, and it can sometimes be less of a concern for older, active accounts. But this is definitely an issue in banking.

This sounds like a proxy for money. Using a bad heuristic with high false positives rate and not talking about the reasons behind the false positives lets an organization to avoid paying the costs of fixing the heuristic.

I wouldn't say it's the result of bad heuristics. It's coming from not being able to fully trust your user and Goodhart's law. A small minority of your userbase might be extremely motivated to attack you, and giving them explicit reasons for your actions will just make your security policies ineffective faster.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#132

Post by nkurz » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 1:10 AM UTC

tlb wrote: post #97

tom_mellior wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The HN mods generally try to explain why they remove unacceptable comments, if the comment seems like it's from an actual person trying to participate. This is a good policy, thank you for doing it this way. Personally I feel that something along the lines of an explanation should also go with downvotes. When I'm downvoted, I would like some feedback on what people didn't like about my post -- do they think I was r…

People sometimes seem to think the purpose of the voting mechanism is to provide an objective evaluation of the quality of their contributions, or even their inherent value as a human being. It's not. The main purpose of the voting mechanism is to sort the responses within a thread, so that someone can skim a large comment section by reading only the first comments at each level of nesting. If it's working right, it…

Are you a mod here? If so, welcome! I had thought it was still just Scott and Dan.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#133

Post by yellowapple » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 2:49 AM UTC

privateSFacct wrote: post #119

filoleg wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you actually have to argue back with those people? If I had to give a feedback to a candidate, I would just send the feedback, read their response (if I cared for it), and then set an email rule to autoforward all of their future emails to a separate folder that I have for stuff like that that I never open.

Just realize that one person could result in you losing your job. Sometimes folks have an axe to grind or lots of time on their hands (unemployed).

In the case of unemployment, that "or" could very well be an "and". Every day of being unemployed grinds that axe sharper and sharper.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#134

Post by bcrosby95 » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:05 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #55

bcrosby95 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't rely on Google anymore. I do have a Youtube account separate from the Gmail account I used to use, but I don't trust Google to not figure out its the same person and simply terminate both if the Youtube account does something they don't like. It really is amazing how much power they have. In 19th century terms, if you're an ass to people at the tavern they can raid your home and burn all your pers…

I think a better 19th century analogy would be: You chose to keep all your personal documents and correspondences in the basement of the town tavern. Then some time later you have a disagreement with the tavern owner and he bans you from entering, preventing you from accessing your stuff. I think the lesson is when you rely on hosted services, you’re denying yourself the final say on who has access to your stuff and…

You're looking at it from the point of view of technical details. I'm looking at it from the point of view of social norms. Even my technical friends think it's weird that I don't want Google having my only copy of emails, pictures, and increasingly documents. Your average user has no chance.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#135

Post by graphcalculator » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:08 AM UTC

privateSFacct wrote: post #86

saagarjha wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…

The other reason is to avoid long arguments. We used to give specific details for things (ie, price is going up because x). People INTENTIONALLY misunderstand, selectively pay attention, and argue endlessly. Same thing with job interviews and hires. Imagine a potential hire for a client facing role with poor communication skills. If asked point blank about any areas of challenge in their application you might say thi…

This!!

I used to work at a prominent venture capital firm where I started an initiative that required everyone on the investing team to respond to all inbound emails from founders, even if the reply was "Sorry, this isn't a fit for us." We tried for several months to respond with atleast 2-3 sentences about why we passed on companies if a founder ever asked. About 10% of founders said 'Thank you, that's useful' and moved on, another 10-15% straight up said "You're assholes" but moved on. The remaining majority were just incapable of understanding what we were trying to say since they were so sheerly blinded by their self-belief. Example, I remember emailing one founder of a poker game app back to say we didn't invest in gaming, only to receive an angry email saying poker isn't a game, it was a social activity. Thinking it would help, I replied saying 'Hey, thanks for the note. Really, our issue is that gaming apps and apps where the primary social activity is gaming, are very hits driven and we don't think we have the necessary experience ore desire to predict hits in this space.' He then proceeded to tell me why I did in fact have the skills required, even though literally no one on our team had consumer or gaming experience, and that I in fact also did have the desire to predict hits in this space - how could I not?_____"I was a VC after all"_____(direct quote)

A few months later, cold inbound emails that were passes went straight to archive...

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#136

Post by pkaye » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:50 AM UTC

ccsnags wrote: post #110

CharlesColeman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's closer to the real reason. As a culture it seems we're more and more frequently engaging in selfish "optimizations," that are really just creating or ignoring negative externalities. Corporations are especially guilty of this, given how pathologically focused they are on shareholders. Often their cost-cutting verges on customer abuse: (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513556 , for an example…

Have you ever worked for a company and felt like most of your time was spent negotiating the misaligned incentives within that organization? One aspect I found in orgs like that is that they rely on a culture of isolation or conflict between departments. The worst example of this I experienced was a purchaser buying parts that were not to the spec of the design and caused problems in the field. No one in engineering…

When I used to do engineering that requirement procurement, we would have a checkbox that it is a critical component and needs engineering approval to substitute.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#137

Post by dimino » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:54 AM UTC

post_break wrote: post #5

Moderator of a large sub here. I hate removing content that violates our rules because of the pitch forks coming out. But it's like baseball and you're the ump. These are the rules, you broke the posted rules (and it's not wishy washy rules like /r/politics or /r/videos), and here's the rule you broke. Most of the time you don't have to eject anyone, but sometimes you do.

You shouldn't be in that position. You are a user, Reddit shouldn't out you in a position to have to do their job for them.

At the very least, you should get a cut of the ad revenue your sub brings in. No technical reason they couldn't do that, and it would incentivize you to behave, as well.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#138

Post by dimino » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 3:58 AM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #89

Yuval_Halevi wrote: post #82

Comment I saw about the manner from a mod on reddit: >As a moderator, I will sometimes send a message to a poster whose post is removed. However, if it is "commercial spam," I don't bother because we both know why. Sometimes redditors comment without understanding that they broke the rules. Sometimes redditors comment using spam and they fully know what they are doing. In the first case, a message to them to tell the…

I agree that even though the HN moderation tends to be more heavy handed, it's 100% beneficial for the community. However I doubt that the HN approach would scale well for a site like reddit— once you have dozens or hundreds of people doing moderation it gets hard to vet someone. Eventually you're gonna get a jerk moderator that goes on a power trip. I was a fan of how slashdot did "metamoderation" but I don't know i…

Could not disagree more; the community is an echo chamber because of how poorly dang treats dissent, and more importantly how easy it is to silence alternative viewpoints here.

As a result, growth doesn't happen here, only self validation. Try taking a nuanced view on privacy if you disagree.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#139

Post by mikekchar » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

privateSFacct wrote: post #86

saagarjha wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…

The other reason is to avoid long arguments. We used to give specific details for things (ie, price is going up because x). People INTENTIONALLY misunderstand, selectively pay attention, and argue endlessly. Same thing with job interviews and hires. Imagine a potential hire for a client facing role with poor communication skills. If asked point blank about any areas of challenge in their application you might say thi…

When I've done job interviews I've always given feedback to candidates. In fact, when we were actively trying to sponsor visa positions we legally had to record exactly why a local candidate was not suitable for the position. We gave that feedback to the candidate and also added some information about how the candidate might improve their pitch for other jobs. For example, if we felt that the candidate was overstating their experience in an area, we would tell them this and explain why we felt that way.

Occasionally we would get questions back. There is a point at which you have to stop answering questions, though. We're not a tutoring service. At that point we'd just say something like, "We don't have any more detailed feedback other than what we've given you. Good luck on your job search" kind of response. We never got beligerent replies from candidates, but sometimes got them from recruiters.

The recruiters are the real problem because they will sometimes (some of them even often) demand "partial payment" for candidates that they thought were "good enough" but who we rejected. We had to write a few strongly worded "Our decision is final and we believe it is justified" letters to those recruiters. Saying that we won't accept any more candidates from the recruiters if they persist shut up most of them, but not all of them.

Eventually we gave up using recruiters anyway because they were essentially giving us random candidates. I think if you can find good recruiters and you can build up a good rapport with them, this kind of feedback is as useful to them as it is to the candidate. If you can't, then you are better off without them.

So, if anyone is wondering if it's worth doing, I would say that my experience is generally positive.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#140

Post by dang » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 8:10 AM UTC

300bps wrote: post #4

I can’t imagine what it’s like to moderate large sites like HN. I read it with Show Dead turned on and I’m amazed at how many people have been shadow banned with no clue they’ve been posting frequently for years with no idea 99% of people will never see what they wrote. In most cases it looks like dang does give them a reason when they’re banned but I don’t think many of them read it.

When we see a banned account that has been consistently posting good comments, we unban it. If you see one of those, you should let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We appreciate users looking out for each other and always look closely at these requests.

Much more common is banned accounts that post a mixture of good comments and ones that break the site guidelines. Those, unfortunately, we can't unban, for the obvious reason that the bad comments do more harm than the good ones add value. That's why we introduced vouching: so the good comments can still make it through.

Sometimes we unban accounts and as soon as they're unbanned they revert to breaking the site guidelines. Then we ban them again and they start posting good comments again. The human heart has murky depths.