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There are no results for tank man

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Re: There are no results for tank man

#201

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

belter wrote: post #178
tw04 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll start with: no I don’t think you or “HN” are in on some conspiracy. My question is: does HN actively attempt to counteract government actors from influencing the site? I think it’s been proven that China among other countries employs folks to try to influence social media sites. Not necessarily by influencing staff, but by creating user accounts who do things like downvote unfavorable comments or flag stories th…

Not only government actors. It looks like Microsoft has a whole team working this site: https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201... Quote from Satya Nadella Q1 2019 Earnings Conference Call "...In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to se…

The charitable interpretation of this comment is that Microsoft uses Hacker News comments as a barometer for developer sentiment about Azure. It’s just Microsoft trying to do the “developers developer developers!” thing. They want to make Azure into the kind of thing that people on Hacker News would like. I think this is the most reasonable interpretation, because why on earth would Satya confess to astroturfing on an earnings call?

However, if any executive is getting graded against this metric, Goodhart’s law applies, and there’s a good chance astroturfing would happen. Satya probably wouldn’t know about it.

If a Hollywood CEO says that they are trying to raise the audience Cinemascore ratings of their movies, we’d interpret that to mean that they are trying to make audience-friendly movies, not that they are trying to astroturf Cinemascore. And similarly, if someone at the studio were astroturfing Cinemascore, the CEO wouldn’t talk about it on the earnings call.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#202

Post by ltbarcly3 »

If you follow this link and get 'no image found', and hit reload a few times you do get results. Same if you click to web search and back to images.

To me this seems like a bug and not some kind of censorship attempt that only works if you don't hit reload.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#203

Post by stingrae »

detaro wrote: post #189
idbehold wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another approach is to penalize users (e.g. stop trusting their flags) who flagged a post which then got unflagged by a mod.

the mods take flagging rights away from people they find abusing it

i would like an option in the settings to disable/enable my ability to flag content. On mobile, I have accidentally flagged things and recall it being challenging to hit the button to unflag.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#204

Post by jerry1979 »

ggggtez wrote: post #172
jerry1979 wrote: post #69

Interestingly, they didn't just block the query string, it appears that they purged their image results based on some generalization of tank man. I noticed that "tiennamin square man" doesn't return any pictures of the scene. However, the purge didn't hit the "suggested image" thumbnails.

Yeah, there are two things going on here: 1) Some queries are blocked. This results in "Nothing found", even when there obviously are images... 2) Some images are blocked. If you use a query that bypasses the word-filter, some images are still removed from the result list anyway. It's very clear that what we're seeing is the Chinese results for Bing, but everywhere in the world...

I like to pretend that the impetus for the stunt came not from a mentality that values civic minded free speech but rather from the CCC couple-whining (and getting its way) to bing about blocking tank man globally "just this once on the anniversary".

Re: There are no results for tank man

#205

Post by Judgmentality »

dang wrote: post #97
0-_-0 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did notice it the past that HN articles critical of China behaved in a strange way. In the past all the comments in the comment section were downvoted, sometimes you could see dozens of comments greyed out, every single one of them. (Probably because it's not possible to downvote an article). Now the articles are flagged, probably whoever was organising this realised that flagging an article is effectively downvoti…

No one is organizing anything. It is all just community + software + moderation interacting normally. People read sinister "organization" into it purely because of their pre-existing conceptions. It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more. I say that based on looking into literally thousands of such cases, and spending god knows how many hours poring over data. My comments are based exclusively on what I know about…

> It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more.

This is a really insightful way of describing this phenomenon.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#206

Post by tptacek »

kragen wrote: post #196
dragonwriter wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is nothing gross in my comment, tptacek “Gross” is subjective, so that’s a legitimate viewpoint. Your comment is overtly, expressly, racist though. For those who find racism gross, its also gross. Obviously, YMMV. > Your comment, by contrast, amounts to a slanderous innuendo. I don't think you understand either slander or innuendo if you believe that.

My comment is not racist, either overtly, expressly, subtly, or implicitly. Acknowledging diversity of opinion and the existence of factions does not imply discriminating against any of those factions. You can find an extensive list of recent comments I've made that are complimentary to China and Chinese people in the last three months in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398213 . I said that many HN users are C…

The whole sentiment here is gross, but it is particularly fucked up how you keep going out of your way to pull Chinese-American people into it. Why not call me a Papist while you're at it?

Re: There are no results for tank man

#209

Post by seattle_spring »

tschwimmer wrote: post #164
dang wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is on the front page right now (edit: and now also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 ) - that's the opposite of "disappearing". I'd have to see links to the other ones. Here's one tip for you guys, from years-long, world-weary experience: if you're coming up with sensational explanations in breathless excitement, it's almost certainly untrue. Edit: ok, here's what happened. Users flagged https:/…

Somewhat refreshing to see the normally mild-mannered dang show a flash of annoyance at conspiratorial thinking for once. Thanks for your consistently even-handed and dedicated moderation efforts sir.

I wish it was more than mild annoyance being expressed. There has been a huge uptick in /r/conspiracy style posts and accusations over the last few months (none of them valid, except one but that was purely by accident).

Re: There are no results for tank man

#210

Post by ddlatham »

kian wrote: post #45

@dang, I think we need an explanation for why Tank Man-related content on Hacker News has been disappearing all day. I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech, and if there isn't some kind of proportionate response here, I don't believe myself or many others here will be able to see it that way going forward. EDIT: Thank you for your response, dang. Hacker News is a special place, which is why we have respond…

It looks like the main reason why the first Ask HN story ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 ) disappeared was because it was flagged.

But that's just the surface reason. The deeper reason is because of HN's design which seems to weight flags much more heavily than up votes. This means that a non-trivial minority can successfully drag a story off the homepage, even if a majority believes it is important and worthy of discussion, and even if the comments are actually constructive.

Unfortunately we are not able to see what the count of flags are, and I don't know the scoring algorithm to see what portion of minority is needed to make a story disappear, or if it is even greater than a fixed portion (i.e. whether flag count may have a greater than linear effect, compared to linear support from up votes).

I have heard the rationale of attempting to avoid flame wars and heated discussion of controversial topics, but I'm not sure that it's the only way or worth the price of making things important to most of the community disappear. So far, follow up submissions seem to still be on the home page, but as I write this comment, I can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 already drop from the top position down to #6 and I wonder if it will disappear also.

I hope that HN may reconsider what options are available to keep discussion constructive and useful while still allowing important topics to be seen and discussed without being buried by a minority.

Edit - 2 additional notes a few minutes later:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 has now dropped more than halfway off the front page.

- Whoever downvoted this comment, please consider responding as well.

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