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There are no results for tank man

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Re: There are no results for tank man

#351

Post by dang »

hutzlibu wrote: post #348
dang wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counteracting abuse of this site is the #1 thing we do behind the scenes to try to prevent the value of HN from eroding. That's actually what I spent the first hour of my morning doing, before I realized that there was $BigDrama happening. (Thank you, bat-signaling emailers.) If you ever see me commenting on how "large HN threads are paged for performance reasons, so click the More link at the bottom, and we'll event…

"What I'm saying is that, with rare exceptions [1], what we find after countless hours of extensive investigation of the private data is...dirt, roots, and worms. It looks exactly like the public data." Ah, but this is just proof, that the communist sleeper agents are entrenched even deeper among us, than we expected!

You're right. That is the wilderness of mirrors.

Unfortunately, it seems that we all do this. It's just easier to notice when other people are doing it!

Re: There are no results for tank man

#352

Post by geoduck14 »

dang wrote: post #338
partiallypro wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FAQs also say a mod can remove the flag if it's unfair...which it is. Yet it hasn't been removed.

Ok, I've removed it. Now people will accuse us of rewriting history, but that's ok - one eventually makes peace with the fact that there's no way to win.

Yeah, but at least you rewrote it to something I agree with

Re: There are no results for tank man

#353

Post by dang »

splithalf wrote: post #289
dang wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counteracting abuse of this site is the #1 thing we do behind the scenes to try to prevent the value of HN from eroding. That's actually what I spent the first hour of my morning doing, before I realized that there was $BigDrama happening. (Thank you, bat-signaling emailers.) If you ever see me commenting on how "large HN threads are paged for performance reasons, so click the More link at the bottom, and we'll event…

Great response. At the same time, absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. It seems improbable that nation states aren’t keenly interested in social media influence. It seems much more likely such efforts are undetectable.

I was getting to that - hence the [editing...] :) Thanks for the reminder - some of my processes time out after a while.

Edit: I got to it! See the lower portion of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725, after the "---".

If you or anyone notices something wrong with the argument, I'd like to hear what it is.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#354

Post by floatingatoll »

crazygringo wrote: post #106
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:/…

I don't doubt posts are flagged by users as opposed to moderation. But at the same time, it also seems like flagging can be too easily abused, and can lead to accusations of censorship and distrust. (Though I've certainly seen it work well in cases, especially for false/defamatory articles.) But it really does seem like we're at the point where longstanding users need to also be able to vouch for flagged stories, or…

The mods respond to emails (contact link in the footer) about observed issues, so that’s always an option if y’all think something needs a human revisit and there’s no site button for it.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#355

Post by ufmace »

tw04 wrote: post #148
dang wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you personally with high confidence that neither the Communist Party of China nor any other Communist Party has influence on how we operate Hacker News. I can't say anything about any other site or company or media or government, because I'm not involved with any of that. But unless the communists are zapping me with behavior-control rays or Angela Lansbury had me brainwashed decades ago, zero such influen…

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…

Social media manipulation is a tricky problem. I'm sure HN has plenty of active measures against various types of abuse and manipulation, and I'm sure they can't tell us about them, because the people doing that read HN too.

Plenty of orgs are surely trying to do that actively for all sorts of reasons. No idea how successful they are, probably tough to tell.

The spookiest thing of all is that most of the effect might be genuine grassroots action. Picture a Chinese Nationalist poster here, genuinely independent tech enthusiast and happens to know enough English to participate in an English forum. Perhaps they are genuinely annoyed by what they see as westerners meddling in their internal politics, which there is a long history of. Perhaps they flag what they see as clickbaity stories likely to lead to a bunch of China-bashing out of genuine annoyance. They don't need to be paid or leaned on by the CCP at all, they just actually feel that way.

Dammit, now I sound too apologetic about it. Sigh...

Re: There are no results for tank man

#356

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

dang wrote: post #72
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…

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:/…

Oh, you have multiple mods now? I thought it was just you, after sctb left.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#357

Post by zxzax »

ethbr0 wrote: post #119
GuB-42 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is not a bastion of free speech and it is not meant to be. Controversial topics are routinely flagged because they incite flame wars and downvoting because you disagree is considered acceptable. However, in this particular case, I don't think it should be flagged unless the comment sections becomes unmanageable. It may be a political topic but it is seen from a technical angle, and indeed, a lot of the comments ar…

From someone with several years of moderate volume online community moderation, the issue with post-hoc censorship is radicalization. If something disappears, no one has bad feelings about it. If something two people are arguing over disappears, then two people carry simmering resentment about it (ironically, likely more than if their verbal spat had reached a cathartic conclusion), that eventually manifests in their…

Is that really an issue? If the user makes more uncivil comments then you flag them again until they get the picture. There are plenty of other places on the internet that seem to welcome and encourage flame wars -- they can go there to work out their resentment and then come back when they're ready.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#359

Post by dang »

kokanator wrote: post #67
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…

HN, time for an explanation. This is not trivial.

Having spent the time digging into it, I'd say it turned out to be pretty trivial.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#360

Post by prepend »

munk-a wrote: post #239
idbehold wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My proposed approach is a little more automated. The mods don't have to find and remove flagging rights individually, they just unflag a post and instantly all the users who had flagged it lose some credibility for future flags. EDIT: The "flagging trustworthiness" could even help mods to find posts which might need to be unflagged quicker based on the average trustworthiness of the flags.

But unfortunately that could lead to a chilling effect on flagging deserving content. I like having dang and other moderators involved as the final say to reverse a decision if it's necessary. I am pretty conservative with my own flagging and vouching (I've vouched precisely once and it was a comment I strongly disagreed with but was clearly made in good faith and added to the discussion) and I believe that other fol…

I don’t think so. I’d still be able to flag, just my flags would count for less. And not make that discount visible to me.
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