Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 35 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#21
post #6

HN downranks threads with many comments, that is the main thing. Think of each comment as a downvote and it makes more sense why those quickly disappears from the frontpage.

We can't downvote submissions, but we can flag them, which is way more punishing in the algorithm, and it's why they disappear from the front page so quickly, despite being highly up voted.

I don't think it's flags, it's the high comments-to-votes ratio that pushes a thread down in the ranking.

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#23
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't downvote submissions, but we can flag them, which is way more punishing in the algorithm, and it's why they disappear from the front page so quickly, despite being highly up voted.

I don't think it's flags, it's the high comments-to-votes ratio that pushes a thread down in the ranking.

I don't think so, eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34006622 is currently number 26 for me and it's been there for a bit. Plus dang's mentioned that flagging's effects on ranking in the past.

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#24
Because it's not very interesting. World's richest man misbehaves again on some website he bought? People protest by using an inferior clone of said website? Storm in a teacup. There are much more fascinating things going on in the world than this tedium.

If we're going to gauge how thought-provoking a topic is by how wealthy the main character is, might as well flood HN with submissions about what the Kardashians had for breakfast or how often Bill Gates uses the toilet or whatever. It's the same thing as following Musk's car crash behavior.

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#25
post #9

I'm seeing a lot of Musk posts, but they're mostly negative. I'm just saying, I visit dozens of online aggregators, and I've yet to come across one that is "balanced". It's almost impossible at this point. The polarization is real.

Bud, not everything has “balance.” Some things are black and white.

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#26

Sorry but we don't need to discuss every little shitty thing that happens three times per day just because you missed the thread with hundreds of replies when it was on the frontpage.

Can you please make your substantive points without being mean? That's why we have site guidelines like: "Be kind", "Don't be snarky", and "Edit out swipes".

If you know more than other people (e.g. about how HN works—but it applies to anything), the thing to do is to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. What you said about the front page and using HN Search is true, but it's not good to deliver good information with poison.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#27
post #18

HN is owned by YCombinator. They must not annoy their (potential) business partners.

We don't moderate HN that way, as anyone can tell for themselves by looking at HN. There isn't any "business partner" who wouldn't have been "alienated" years ago by such shitty "moderation". (Btw, the only "business partners" that I know YC to be interested in are prospective startup founders who hopefully will apply and get funded. That's who YC's success depends on.)

You've been breaking the site guidelines badly, in exactly the way we banned https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=trasz for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33265609 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33265508 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33254262 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33013513 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005522 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32279647 (July 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916978 (Jan 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687837 (Dec 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27751799 (July 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578442 (June 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578435 (June 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578417 (June 2020)

When we ban an account and someone immediately creates a new account to carry on in the same way, obviously we have to ban that one too. Therefore I've banned this one too.

Making sinister-vague criticisms of HN/YC doesn't change this, even though people love to do it because then they get to say "aha! see what they do to critics?!!". Similarly, pre-posting excuses in your profile ("Soon to be banned for pointing out that HN condones racism"!!) doesn't change this, even though people love to do that too because then they get to say "see? just as I predicted!"

Obviously we can't be influenced by that kind of thing because if we let any of them work, it would be a license to break HN's rules with impunity. Fortunately the community is fair-minded and can look through comment histories to decide for themselves whether an account was breaking the rules. Your accounts have been breaking the rules so badly that (a) I don't think we have a choice, and (b) I'm not worried about the community verdict.

Btw, I don't want to ban you at all and would be much happier to persuade you to just contribute to HN in a positive way, despite how limited and annoying it is. Believe me, I'm frustrated by its limitations too. I can't help but imagine that if we could sit down and actually talk about all this, it would not be so hard to agree.

It's true that a lot of things that you don't like about HN (or Americans, or religious people, or racists, or any of the other groups that you've posted flamewar comments about) do actually exist. But in HN's case at least, it's not true that they have the weight that you ascribe to them. Rather, they exist as part of a statistical cloud, and there are a lot of things in that cloud, some of them are bad and distasteful and all of them show up here. It's an inevitable dynamic that we're all trying to deal with. There's no agenda to propagate those things.

Unfortunately we can't sit down and talk because we're limited to exchanging tiny text blobs through small internet pipes like prisoners passing notes through a crack in a cell wall. So I don't suppose I have much chance of persuading you, though I'd certainly like to try.

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#28
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use the search function [0] [1]. Not even 12 hours old threads with combined over 1300 comments and that's not enough for you on HN? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008064 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008383

And none of them is on the front side, despite the upvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008383 was on the front page for over 6 hours. We turned off the flags on it for a while to allow for that.

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#29
post #28
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And none of them is on the front side, despite the upvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008383 was on the front page for over 6 hours. We turned off the flags on it for a while to allow for that.

Just wondering, what's the reasoning for not applying more heavy handed moderation on which stories get dumped off the front page? Why not manually suppress a submission when you think the comments are likely to be of low quality, rather than leave an unrepliable comment at the top? A more curated place would be welcome, in order to stave off some of the eternal September-ness places undergo. There are other places on the Internet to have those discussions; HN doesn't have to be the place for that. There seem to be quite a few submissions on the frontpage these days that would fall under the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" section of the guidelines and all I can do is flag them when I see them.

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#30

Mods desperately trying to avoid becoming Reddit. The change is inevitable though, the quality and variation of comments are in line with Reddit already.

This has been the case since before HN was called Hacker News 15 years ago.

I plead the Fontenelle defense: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Post reply on HN