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

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251–260 of 447 posts

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

#251
This is what I have come to expect from every person that calls themselves a "free speech absolutist." What they actually believe is that they should be able to say whatever they want and do whatever they want, personally, without any consequences for themselves. There is no grander principle than "my ability to do what I want and exert power over others however I want, without critique or criticism."

I really wish the term hadn't been polluted this way.

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

#253

Additional details I wrangled for this rabbit hole. I don't think it's t.co doing this intentionally, but rather poor handling of 'do you have our cookies or not'. Everyone in this thread _proving things_ without taking into account the complexity of the modern web. man curl -b, --cookie (HTTP) Pass the data to the HTTP server in the Cookie header. It is supposedly the data previously received from the server in a "S…

Amen

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

#254
post #15

I can confirm. NYT shows a five-second redirect delay: "wget https://t.co/4fs609qwWt ". It redirects to gov.uk immediately: "wget https://t.co/iigzas6QBx "

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 )

Could this be explained by the UA derived redirect behaviour described in this other comment on the thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130982

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

#255
post #20

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

Well, yes, many sites are banned on HN. Others are penalized (see e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). None of this is secret, though we don't publish the lists themselves. Edit: about 67k sites are banned on HN. Here's a random selection of 10 of them: vodlockertv.com biggboss.org infoocode.com newyorkpersonalinjuryattorneyblog.com moringajuice.wordpress.com surrogacymumbai.com max…

pg posted an early version of the list back in March 2009 when it include only 2096 sites:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910>

That grew fairly rapidly, it was at 38,719 by 30 Dec 2012:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4984095> (a random 50 are listed).

I suspect that overwhelmingly the list continues to reflect the characteristics of its early incarnations.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You possibly haven't experienced how devious and determined and dishonest and unpleasant some bad actors are, including SPAMmers. (Even when doing the RightThing(TM) would probably be easier...) And, BTW, I occasionally get blocked by the mechanisms here, even though not doing anything bad, but understand that there is a trade-off.

I am fully aware of the issue. That's one of the costs with having a public website.

The HN moderation policies are clearly effective, because the site is mostly full of useful information that attracts a wide audience of readers.

I really like this take on moderation:

"The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience."

From Nilay Patel in https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

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

#257
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you're going to censor someone unless HN is suddenly the government what you've misnomered is moderation, not censorship. Calling censorship just exaggerates your opinion and makes you look unhinged. It's a private website not national news.

Censorship is not limited to who does it.

Is deleting spam censorship?

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You possibly haven't experienced how devious and determined and dishonest and unpleasant some bad actors are, including SPAMmers. (Even when doing the RightThing(TM) would probably be easier...) And, BTW, I occasionally get blocked by the mechanisms here, even though not doing anything bad, but understand that there is a trade-off.

I am fully aware of the issue. That's one of the costs with having a public website.

I agree with you both. The only thing I'd add is that it's a tradeoff - if we do it this way, it's only because the alternative would be even more user-hostile.

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

#259
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, many sites are banned on HN. Others are penalized (see e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). None of this is secret, though we don't publish the lists themselves. Edit: about 67k sites are banned on HN. Here's a random selection of 10 of them: vodlockertv.com biggboss.org infoocode.com newyorkpersonalinjuryattorneyblog.com moringajuice.wordpress.com surrogacymumbai.com max…

Do you have get-out-of-jail or N-strikes-and-you're-out policies? What if someone's legitimate website gets caught in this? I've also long wondered about user specific shadow bans. Can you please shed light on this?

There's no automatic unban. That would require writing code that knows how to tell a good (for HN) site apart from a bad one, and if we could write such code, we wouldn't need to keep a list of banned sites in the first place. However, we're always happy to unban a site when we notice that it's actually fine for HN, or when someone points this out to us.

Re shadowbanning (i.e. banning a user without telling them), see the past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and let me know if you still have questions. The short version is that when an account has an established history, we tell them we're banning them and why. We only shadowban when it's a spammer or a new account that we have reason to guess is a serial abuser.

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

#260
post #73
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, many sites are banned on HN. Others are penalized (see e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ). None of this is secret, though we don't publish the lists themselves. Edit: about 67k sites are banned on HN. Here's a random selection of 10 of them: vodlockertv.com biggboss.org infoocode.com newyorkpersonalinjuryattorneyblog.com moringajuice.wordpress.com surrogacymumbai.com max…

It is a secret if the system does not inform the poster it's been penalized.

HN operates, based on a number of reasons, on numerous dynamics of friction and nudges. Mostly for the better. I've had my disagreements about things in the past, though as I watch the site and have studied it (particularly over the past few months, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36843900>) I mostly agree with it.

The parts that don't work especially well, most particularly discussion of difficult-but-important topics (in my view) ... have also been acknowledged by its creator pg (Paul Graham) and mods (publicly, dang, though there are a few others).

In general: if you submit a story and it doesn't go well, drop a note to the moderators: hn@ycombinator.com. They typically reply within a few hours, perhaps a day or if things are busy or for complex.

You can verify that a submission did or didn't go through by checking on the link from an unauthenticated (logged-out) session.

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