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Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

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Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#141
post #86
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I came to HN because it seemed to be a place of free dialogue. > It's certainly under no obligation to promote right-wing propaganda and hate. It's certainly under no obligation to promote any propaganda or hate. That's what makes the site great. The HN crowd is not your average layman - it's largely well read and educated people. Why not let them decide what is propaganda and what's not (as opposed to some arbitrary…

   I came to HN because it seemed to be a place of free dialogue.
It certainly does feel like a series of monologues at times.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#142
post #131

Many words about site moderation have been posted in the thread.. Who here has actually moderate(s|d) a forum/chat site?

Some of us have, you will find. (-:

But, that said, I'm more interested in the discussions about verification, neutrality, and the reasons that people have for still clinging on for grim death that, in a few hours, will likely be pushed down onto a second page by that huge comment thread currently in the middle of this page and above them.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#143
post #131

Many words about site moderation have been posted in the thread.. Who here has actually moderate(s|d) a forum/chat site?

I have, for about 20 years. I empathise with @dang's methods and explanations here. e.g., don't disclose a blocklist, use shadowbanning, don't get dragged down by pedantic responses to explanations. You're often one person against many trolls finding grey areas for sport, or spammers (automated or otherwise) probing defences.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#144
post #72

That sounds like a play on the "slow ban": > Selective downtime, where the troll finds that the website is down (or really slow) quite often. Not all of the time, because that would tip them off. Trolls are impatient by nature, so they eventually find a more reliable forum to troll. https://ask.metafilter.com/117775/What-was-the-first-website...

Usually, slow bans aren't done for people who pay you money and add value to your platform.

NYT and others are still adding value to the platform even if users become discouraged from clicking those links and navigating away (choosing instead to just stay on Twitter and read the summary and reactions there). Nudges like this help Twitter have their cake and eat it, too.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#145
Worth pointing out that t.co has always been an instance of an annoying and seemingly unjustified practice I named "nonsemantic redirect". Rather than legitimately redirecting using an HTTP Location header, it instead is an HTML page with a META refresh tag on it.

You don't see this with curl/wget because they use user agent sniffing. If they don't think you're a browser they _will_ give you a Location header. To see it, capture a request in Firefox developer tools, right click on the request, copy as CURL. (May need to remove the Accept-Encoding tag and add -i to see the headers).

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#147
post #72

That sounds like a play on the "slow ban": > Selective downtime, where the troll finds that the website is down (or really slow) quite often. Not all of the time, because that would tip them off. Trolls are impatient by nature, so they eventually find a more reliable forum to troll. https://ask.metafilter.com/117775/What-was-the-first-website...

A variation on this is returning an error message of sorts.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#148
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't banned in comments - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... , https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... , etc. We probably banned it for submissions because we want original sources at the top level.

And how was the decision made to ban Federalist, but not say Guardian or The Daily Beast? Do you have any process in place to ensure that your political biases don't influence the list, or you don't care about that?

We don't have "processes" at HN. The idea makes my skin crawl.

Plenty of both left- and right-wing sites are banned and/or downweighted on HN. When a site is primarily about political battle, we either ban it or downweight it. Which of the two we choose depends on how likely the site is to produce the occasional interesting article (in HN's sense of the word "interesting"). That's why The Federalist and World Workers Daily (or whatever it's called) are banned, while National Review and Jacobin are merely downweighted. Both the Guardian and Daily Beast are downweighted, btw, as are most major media sites.

If you or anyone thinks that HN moderation is unfairly ideologically biased, I'm open to the critique, but you guys need to first look at the site as it actually is, and not just look at your own pre-existing perceptions. Every data point becomes a Convincing Proof when you do the latter.

People think that when their team gets moderated, the mods are OMG obviously on the other side. The Other Side feels exactly the same way. This "they're against me" perception is the most reliable phenomenon I've observed on HN. Leftists feel it, rightists feel it, Go programmers feel it, even Rust programmers feel it. Literally the very-most-popular topic on HN at any moment is perceived by someone as Viciously Suppressed because of this perception. Stop and think about that—it's kind of amazing. Someone should write a PhD thesis.

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it just be rotting infrastructure? I.e there is some logic on most visited domains to allow ease of moderation, that logic is read heavy and is now bucking under skew. Or even like some junior dev removed an index

A few years ago I remember their URL shortener on android app directing somewhere that my hostfile adblocker would catch (like an analytics domain or something). This made it so first click on certain twitter links would fail, but if I clicked it again it would go successfully. Ultimately I never researched it deeply enough but my guess is they had some sort of handler that would log whether loading their analytics s…

Seeing that right now with NYT links. First click takes a few seconds to redirect, second click is almost instant

Re: Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually, slow bans aren't done for people who pay you money and add value to your platform.

NYT and others are still adding value to the platform even if users become discouraged from clicking those links and navigating away (choosing instead to just stay on Twitter and read the summary and reactions there). Nudges like this help Twitter have their cake and eat it, too.

Once referral pageviews take a hit, I suspect the NYT will be reevaluating their options.
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