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Open secrets about Hacker News

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171–180 of 210 posts

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#171

Post by ddevault »

>HN’s anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good enough

A chilling effect of this can be that moderators have a much more direct hand in choosing what kinds of content is successful if their criteria for "good enough" is not the same thing as "was not actually a vote ring". There are a few other sources of bias introduced by the human/automation moderation relationship.

Another issue is that HN's flagging system is routinely abused by small groups of users to remove content which does not actually run afoul of the guidelines. It's effectively a super downvote: it removes content entirely, works for posts and comments, has a much lower minimum karma threshold, and it's very hard to rescue a flagged post, and you can't "vouch" before a post gets flagged - only after.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#172

Post by HunchedOver »

graycat wrote: post #78

Anomaly: How can a thread quickly get a lot of points, many more points than posts? So, who is voting up points but not posting?

I'd reckon the majority of users, you see this all over the internet where there's ability to vote or 'like' something; Twitter, Youtube, Facebook etc - the vote will usually outweigh the comment count.

On HN the culture of 'nothing good to say?; say nothing' is fairly baked in so will create this effect even more so.

Voting allows lurkers a voice, who often are the majority of users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker citation 11).

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#176

Post by coupdejarnac »

ketzu wrote: post #33
capableweb wrote: post #6

A collaborative resource with more information about undocumented/norms on HN: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented > Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots). Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is th…

> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include... Not just that, but for some time you could observe subthreads accusing him of being a chinese subversion of HN in china related discussions.

There's been a lot of misguided moderation that happens to be in favor of China. Earlier in the pandemic, the left bought into the propaganda that the lab leak theory etc were racist. I attribute the pro-China moderation to good intentions and ignorance.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#177

Post by dredmorbius »

kuu wrote: post #67

If pool is curated by moderators and dang is the only moderator, does it mean that pool is actually dang selection? :)

It's possible for HN readers to make suggestions for the pool, and I'll do this periodically.

Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment, most often.

I don't nominate my own posts, of course.

It may be a matter of how many such nominations occur, but I'd say my success rate is >50% in having those accepted.

TL;DR: it's not just dang, and normal HN'ers can participate.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#178

Post by dang »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #176
ketzu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include... Not just that, but for some time you could observe subthreads accusing him of being a chinese subversion of HN in china related discussions.

There's been a lot of misguided moderation that happens to be in favor of China. Earlier in the pandemic, the left bought into the propaganda that the lab leak theory etc were racist. I attribute the pro-China moderation to good intentions and ignorance.

I don't know if you're talking about HN, but what you're describing there is not the dynamic here.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#179

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

theHIDninja wrote: post #174

There are also a ton of ongoing news stories and stories in that past which were completely censored off HN. I cannot talk about them or link them here, but please know that they exist.

What if you create an article listing all of them, submit it to HN and post a link here in the comment? I routinely check dead links to see why a few people found it so controversial to censor it. I'd say 80% are true positives - spam, SEO junk, or some utter nonsense. The remaining 20% is content that is controversial to some people for some reasons. I learned quite a lot from it. There are days when this censored content is more interesting than top submissions.

I also happened to submit one such article somehow. I found an article on BBC saying things that are controversial today. It was flagged very quickly. It was interesting to me because BBC is a relatively reputable source and they don't publish junk.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#180

Post by dang »

theHIDninja wrote: post #174

There are also a ton of ongoing news stories and stories in that past which were completely censored off HN. I cannot talk about them or link them here, but please know that they exist.

Why not? I'd like to see them. I also think that if you're going to make grand claims like that, you should include links so that readers can make up their own minds.
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