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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

#171

Post by arijun »

janandonly wrote: post #152
mutant_glofish wrote: post #18

I think that HN itself also shadow flags submissions from a list of domains it doesn't like. Try submitting a URL from the following domains, and it will be automatically flagged (but you can't see it's flagged unless you log out): - archive.is - watcher.guru - stacker.news - zerohedge.com - freebeacon.com - thefederalist.com - breitbart.com

Isn't blocking Stacker.news a petty move? It's basically HN, but you can earn small tips for submissions and comments.

It could be because they saw they were getting low quality links from there. In any case, since HN prefers original sources, it’s less likely that a news aggregator would be a good source (the occasional Reddit comment notwithstanding)

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

#173

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

ajb wrote: post #172
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #101

Why not try a Nitter instance. It offers RSS and none of the URLs are shortened with "t.co".

They just broke nitter. Hopefully it will be fixed soon but in the long term Musk can cut nitter off if he wants.

It's working for me.

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

#176

Post by aaron695 »

djbusby wrote: post #11
stilwelldotdev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test yourself, they link to their site from their profile and it's definitely delayed. https://twitter.com/nytimes

A good test might include a bunch of domains. And checking the timing on each. Could we demonstrate the delay is on t.co and not on NYT?

[dead]

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

#177

Post by skissane »

dang wrote: post #45
jemmyw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be nice if the lists were published though with a link to the list from the submission form.

The problem is that if you publish the lists it leads to more abuses. For example if spammers find out which sites are banned then they just post other ones.

I think there are two different types of sites you are blocking: (1) those which are just pure spam; (2) news/opinion/etc websites that you’ve decided are not suitable for HN for various reasons (such as being low quality and tending to produce more ideological flame-wars than curiosity), for example Breitbart

I agree that publishing case (1) causes harm (spammers will just use a different domain if they know you’ve blocked theirs.) But case (2) is rather different. I don’t think the same justification for lack of transparency exists in this case. And I think shadow-banning the submission in case (2) is not very user-friendly. It would be better to just display an error, e.g. “submissions from this site are blocked because we do not believe it is suitable for HN” (or whatever). A new user might post stuff like (2) out of misunderstanding what the site is about rather than malevolence, so better to directly educate them than potentially leave them ignorant. Also, while Breitbart is rather obviously garbage, since we don’t know everything in category (2) on the list, maybe there are some sites on it whose suitability is more debatable or mixed, and its inappropriateness may be less obvious to someone than Breitbart’s (hopefully) is

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

#178

Post by rhaksw »

dang wrote: post #166
rhaksw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct again. Spammers and bots are the most determined actors, so these secretive measures don't impact them. In fact, such secrecy benefits spammers. Good-faith users never imagine that platforms would secretly action content. So when you look at overall trends, bots, spammers and trolls are winning while genuine users are being pushed aside. I argued that secrecy benefits trolls in a blog post, but I don't…

If that were right, then HN would be overrun by spam.

So you think secretive measures more often defeat spammers than trusting users? I'd argue HN's content could be a lot better than it currently is.

Content curation is necessary, but shadow moderation is not helping. When a forum removes visible consequences, it does not prepare its users to learn from their mistakes.

I'll admit, I find HN to be more transparently moderated than Reddit and Twitter, but let's not pretend people have stopped trying to game the system. The more secret the rules (and how they are applied), the more a system serves a handful of people who have learned the secret tricks.

Meanwhile, regular users who are not platform experts trust these systems to be transparent. Trustful users spend more time innovating elsewhere, and they are all disrupted by unexpected secretive tricks.

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

#179

Post by nvm0n2 »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #76
craftkiller wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly enough the delay is reduced to 1 second by using curl's useragent string (wget --user-agent='curl/8.2.1' https://t.co/4fs609qwWt )

Seeing this makes me wonder if it's some sort of server-side header bidding ad server gone haywire, rather than something nefarious. Why would they only delay browser agents otherwise?

Probably a phishing/malware scan gone wrong then. NYTimes has Twitterbot in its robots.txt which might be related?

Even if it's deliberate, I don't see how people can complain. Google has outright blocked Breitbart for years. They prevent results from that domain from appearing at all unless you specifically force it with site: and apparently HN does the same. Politically motivated censorship and restricting "reach" is just how Silicon Valley rolls. Pre-Musk Twitter did freeze the New York Post's account and many other much worse things. It'd be a shame for Musk to be doing this deliberately, even though it seems unlikely. But that's the problem with creating a culture where that sort of behavior is tolerated, isn't it? One day it might be turned around on you.

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