There are no results for tank man • Hacker News Board

Re: There are no results for tank man

#371

Post by wizzwizz4 » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

idbehold wrote: post #194

detaro wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Wait, flags are only meant to be used for bad things? I've been using them for “title is bad, pls change” requests. (Oops.)

Re: There are no results for tank man

#372

Post by ALittleLight » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

throwaway492338 wrote: post #369

ALittleLight wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that "This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this." ------ There is no way this is due to an accidental human error. The lying on this point is infuriating.

Accidentally applied worldwide instead of just China sounds possible (or more possible than "my fingers slipped on the t, a, ... keys")

It is still not giving the correct results. Now Bing is pretending not to understand and giving innocuous pictures rather than the famous one. We can tell it's not just because of Bing's poor quality because similar searches, but slightly reworded get the iconic picture.

I don't see how it could've possibly been an accident when they "fix it" by slightly obscuring it. It's intentional deception and censorship by Microsoft. And it is particularly galling, because Microsoft, a massive and powerful international company without serious risk is cowering in fear of the same organization that one man, with everything to lose, stood against alone. Microsoft is trying to hide that he did so.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#373

Post by wonnage » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

jopsen wrote: post #197

JPKab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legitimate criticism of the CCP results in rather intense flagging. I'm no angel and I've definitely made comments that deserved flagging on HN and I really try hard to play by the rules that dang sets, but it's a rather clear pattern that certain subjects solicit pretty intense flagging despite not really being "nationalistic flame bait". In case dang sees this I hope I'm not violating further rules of service I'm j…

Don't we all know that the CCP employs agents to flag critical content. Do we have any reason to think said agents aren't active here?

I don't think this sort of baseless speculation is useful. God forbid a Chinese citizen support their own government without being an agent or brainwashed. Way to deny a billion people the agency to disagree with you.

Flagged this comment; US citizen, btw

Re: There are no results for tank man

#374

Post by mananaysiempre » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

KirillPanov wrote: post #137

toxik wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, which is an implementation detail to some extent

It's not an "implementation detail". It's a problem with the fact that the Internet has only two functioning crawlers remaining.

Three, arguably—Yandex still exists and is generally pretty decent in addition to being the best at dealing with Russian morphology (although relying on it after Segalovich’s death seems foolish).

Re: There are no results for tank man

#375

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #293

iso1631 wrote: post #213

https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/1400906032176640004 A Microsoft spokesperson tells me that "accidental human error" is to blame for missing images of "tank man" on its Bing search results. "We are actively working to resolve this." The incident comes on the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

This is plausibly a filter intended for Chinese IP addresses that was accidentally applied to all searches regardless of geographic location.

[deleted]

Re: There are no results for tank man

#376

Post by zwaps » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

thih9 wrote: post #340

jakeva wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know DDG uses Bing's search index. What exactly is their value proposition over Bing then?

No profiling. > DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by showing all users the same search results for a given search term. Also note that DDG doesn’t just rely on Bing. > DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. Source: https://en.m.wikip…

Well either it uses only Bing for images, or it also censors. Because I sure wasn't able to find the picture on DDG.

So either way, as a user of DDG from day one - it's dead to me.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#377

Post by ALittleLight » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

kevincox wrote: post #370

ALittleLight wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that "This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this." ------ There is no way this is due to an accidental human error. The lying on this point is infuriating.

Why not. A human was asked to fulfill a request to block the "tank man" search in China and forgot to add the country restriction. There is no way to know if it is true, but it is definitely possible. This is probably an interface that isn't used incredibly frequently and may not be as polished as one might hope.

We certainly know that explantation isn't true because they are continuing to censor the results after "fixing it". Searching "tank man" now gets you images of tanks and men and not the iconic image. We know they could get it right if they wanted to because the non-image search for the phrase works.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#378

Post by dang » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

kian wrote: post #313

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:/…

As it is too late to edit my comment, I wanted to write this here, rather than sending a private email, dang. I apologize if the questions of myself and other users on this site today has set you on edge - and I am sure that today, in public and in private, you have seen many ugly things that the majority of us do not, and you reasonably draw a trend-line. I believe that you should extend the same charity of trend-sp…

That's very sweet of you and of course there's no need to apologize. The issues here are all systemic.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#379

Post by TchoBeer » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

samcheng wrote: post #368

Just curious: are there any Chinese nationals (in China) here in this thread? I want to understand the scope of censorship. What do YOU think?

I would also like to know. It's funny, because I feel like a lot of media and news I've consumed paints china as this hellish dystopia, so when I (very occasionally) talk with chinese nationals online I'm kinda underwhelmed by how it's just... a place? I don't know.

Re: There are no results for tank man

#380

Post by dang » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

tolbish wrote: post #200

belter wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very interesting. I would love to see if @dang has addressed this before.

No, I only found out about it from the comment belter linked to. FWIW I think (god help us) fshbbdssbbgdd's explanation sounds plausible. I had a similar instinctive response but not as well thought through.

We have banned people in a few cases for serious $BigCo astroturfing but there's always a grey area in the Venn diagram around "PR operation" and "overzealous fan". You can't tell those apart without a smoking gun and those are hard to come by. Fortunately, from a moderation point of view it's a distinction without a difference because the effects on the site are the same.

Also FWIW, my sense (and we do have circumstantial evidence for this) is that even when these things are PR, they're somehow haywire (e.g. a contractor gone rogue), not official strategy, and if high-enough execs found out about it they'd probably shut it down. That's just speculation though; informed speculation, but not highly informed.