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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

#261

Post by darksofa »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #184
nvm0n2 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

Does the value Breitbart adds to the internet outweigh the negatives of turning people into dangerous fascists by weaponizing misinformation? No. Does the value added by sources like the NYT outweigh the negatives of being occasionally biased or outright wrong? Yes.

Does the value the NYT adds to the internet outweigh the negatives of turning people into dangerous communists by weaponizing misinformation? No. Does the value added by sources like the Breitbart outweigh the negatives of being occasionally biased or outright wrong? Yes.

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

#263

Post by dang »

mdp2021 wrote: post #238
dang wrote: 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…

Understandable, but I think there should be some discriminating system for another class of sites, the "you can submit but not discuss" ones. For example, a recent submission (of mine): "Luis Buñuel: The Master of Film Surrealism" it had no discussion space because (I guess) it comes from fairobserver.com . Now, I understand that fairobserver.com may had been an hive of dubious publishing historically, but it makes l…

Oh I agree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36924205 was a fine submission. Can you please email hn@ycombinator.com so I can send you a repost invite for it?

That domain is a borderline case. Sometimes the leopard really changes its spots, i.e. a site goes from offtopic or spam to one that at least occasionally produces good-for-HN articles. In such cases we simply unban it. Other times, the general content is still so bad for HN that we have to rely on users to vouch for the occasional good submission, or to email us and get us to restore it. I can't quite tell where fairobserver.com is on this spectrum because the most recent submission (yours) is good, the previous one (from 7 months ago) is borderline, and before that it was definitely not good. But I've unbanned it now and moved it into the downweighted category, i.e. one notch less penalized.

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

#264

Post by ender7 »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #236

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…

I can replicate this behavior fairly easily in a browser.

  1. Open incognito window in Chrome
  2. Visit https://t.co/4fs609qwWt -> 5s delay
  3. Open a second tab in the same window -> no delay
  4. Close window, start a new incognito session
  5. Visit https://t.co/4fs609qwWt -> 5s delay returns

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

#265

Post by dang »

skissane wrote: post #177
dang wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a good argument and subtle enough that I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree.

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

#267

Post by dang »

mrguyorama wrote: post #208
dang wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. Since when has moderation actions and relevant data been made available to the lay public here? We cannot look at the site as it actually is. We either have to trust you or pound sand. >Stop and th…

Re your first paragraph: there's more than enough information in the public data. Usually it only takes a little time with HN Search to find information that clarifies such questions.

We don't publish a moderation log for reasons I've explained over the years- if you or anyone wants to know more, 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.

Not publishing a mod log doesn't mean that we don't want to be transparent, it means that there's a tradeoff between transparency and other concerns. Our resolution of the tradeoff is to answer questions when we get asked. That's not absolute transparency but it's not nothing. Sometimes people say "well but why should we trust that", but they would say that about a moderation log as well.

Re your second paragraph: I agree! and I don't think I've claimed otherwise. In fact, the lazy centrist argument is a pet peeve (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

It's true that the way I post about these things ("both sides hate us") gets mistaken for the obvious bad argument ("therefore we must be in the happy middle", or as Scott Thompson put it years ago, "we're the porridge that Goldilocks ate!"), but that's because the actual argument is harder to lay out and I'm not sure that anybody cares.

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

#268

Post by lossolo »

dang wrote: post #259
bravogamma wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), se…

You forgot to mention that you are also shadowbanning the ability of users to upvote or downvote things when you dislike their upvotes or downvotes—instances that you perceive as not contributing to the discussion or that are escalating the conversation.

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

#269

Post by xNeil »

mrguyorama wrote: post #210
xNeil wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The HN crowd is not your average layman - it's largely well read and educated people. People need to stop thinking this. There's no filter in front of the HN sign up. The community here is the same as the community anywhere else on the internet. We aren't special

That's a very valid point! I simply assumed due to the subject matter (coding discussion, in depth tech industry discussions), the average HN reader would be more well read as opposed to your average X user.

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

#270

Post by bravogamma »

dang wrote: post #259
bravogamma wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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), se…

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Is it also true that users with certain karma count or special permissions have more significant - and potentially lasting - downvoting weight that impacts to the downvoted party's long term reputation?
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