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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

#331

Post by rhaksw »

dredmorbius wrote: post #260
rhaksw wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-imp…

> if you submit a story and it doesn't go well, drop a note to the moderators

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

Trustful users do not think to do this, and it would not be necessary if the system did not keep the mod action secret.

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

#332

Post by rhaksw »

sanderjd wrote: post #232
rhaksw wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prete…

> So you think secretive measures more often defeat spammers than trusting users? Yes. And it's really not a close question. "Regular users" don't have to be platform experts and learn tricks and stuff. They just post normal links and comments and never run into moderation at all.

> They just post normal links and comments and never run into moderation at all.

On the contrary, secret suppression is extremely common. Every social media user has probably been moderated at some point without their knowledge.

Look up a random reddit user. Chances are they have a removed comment in their recent history, e.g. [1].

All comment removals on Reddit are shadow removals. If you use Reddit with any frequency, you'll know that mods almost never go out of their way to notify users about comment removals.

[1] https://www.reveddit.com/y/Sariel007/

archive: https://archive.is/GNudB

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

#333

Post by rhaksw »

dang wrote: post #148
mutant_glofish wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you guys need to first look at the site as it actually is, and not just look at your own pre-existing perceptions.

How can one see the site "as it actually is" when the decisions are kept secret from submitters?

> 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 will always be a thing. But it's also true that society is more divided now than it was 20 years ago. We find ourselves unable to communicate across ideological divides and we resort to shouting or in some cases violence. Some effort must be made to improve communication, and transparency for content authors is a minimal step towards that.

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

#334

Post by rhaksw »

DamonHD wrote: post #225
rhaksw wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasing cost of attacks is effective against good faith people, not spammers. Even Cory Doctorow made this case in "Como is Infosec" [1]. The only problem with Cory's argument is, he points people to the SC Principles [2]. The SCP contain exceptions for not notifying about "spam, phishing or malware." But anything can be considered spam, and transparency-with-exceptions has always been platforms' position. They've…

In my experience, increasing cost or delay even a little bit cuts out a disproportionate amount of bad stuff. I once had the domain 'moronsinahurry' registered, though not with this group in mind...

In your experience where?

No research has been done about whether shadow moderation is good or bad for discourse. It was simply adopted by the entire internet because it's perceived as "easier." Indeed, for platforms and advertisers, it certainly is an easier way to control messaging. It fools good-faith users all the time. I've shared examples of that elsewhere in this thread.

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

#335

Post by BLKNSLVR »

hnburnsy wrote: post #215
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not applicable to corporations. Bad faith actions are rampant, and I am unwilling to give the benefit of the doubt to billion dollar companies.

How about incompetence instead of stupidity, would that apply to many billion dollar companies?

I believe the two are interchangeable within the Hanlon's Razor definition anyway.

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

#336

Post by dredmorbius »

bravogamma wrote: post #327
dredmorbius wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interpreting your question as "are there privileged HN members with supervotes", excluding moderators, and who can single-handedly kill submissions or comments. So far as I'm aware, no, and there are comments from dang and pg going back through the site history which argue strongly against distinguishing groups of profiles in any way. The one possible exception is that YC founder's handles appear orange to one an…

Thank you, dredmorbius, for this very helpful response. dang has mentioned a procedure or system that involves making guesses for the purpose of shadowbanning. I wonder if downvotes (edit: or post flags) from special users like the ones you mention are used as strong signals in that guess-making?

I don't know about that, but emails to mods count a fair bit.

(I'll occasionally note an egregiously-behaving account that doesn't seem to have been already banned.)

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

#337

Post by dredmorbius »

rhaksw wrote: post #331
dredmorbius wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-imp…

> if you submit a story and it doesn't go well, drop a note to the moderators > You can verify that a submission did or didn't go through by checking on the link from an unauthenticated (logged-out) session. Trustful users do not think to do this, and it would not be necessary if the system did not keep the mod action secret.

Trustful souls may not.

Those who have been advised to do so, through the Guidelines, FAQ, comments, or moderator notes, do, to their advantage.

(I'd had a submission shadowbanned as it came from the notoriously flameworthy site LinkedIn a month or few back. I noticed this, emailed the mods, and got that post un-banned. Just to note that the process is in place, and does work.)

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

#338

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

ajb wrote: post #321
JeremyNT wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can refer to the full list on the github page[0] (which I find to be pretty accurate). I personally use La Contre-Voie[1] for no particular reason. nitter.net was historically a little less reliable for me due to rate limiting, which is why I initially switched. They worked around the rate limiting issue now, so that may no longer be the case. [0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances [1] https://nitter…

Thanks. Unfortunately, not having any luck with any of them, including lacontrevoie. Nitter.net gives a nim error, the others don't find any tweets

If give us a Twitter username as an example I'll find an instance thats working. The tweets and the non-t.co URLs are in the RSS.

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

#339

Post by rhaksw »

dredmorbius wrote: post #337
rhaksw wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you submit a story and it doesn't go well, drop a note to the moderators > You can verify that a submission did or didn't go through by checking on the link from an unauthenticated (logged-out) session. Trustful users do not think to do this, and it would not be necessary if the system did not keep the mod action secret.

Trustful souls may not. Those who have been advised to do so, through the Guidelines, FAQ, comments, or moderator notes, do, to their advantage. (I'd had a submission shadowbanned as it came from the notoriously flameworthy site LinkedIn a month or few back. I noticed this, emailed the mods, and got that post un-banned. Just to note that the process is in place, and does work.)

You don't see the harm of elbowing out trustful people from the public square?

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

#340

Post by chromoblob »

warrenm wrote: post #305
latchkey wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it?

0.02% of a big number ... is still a big number 0.02% of 10,000 is 2 - pretty small 0.02% of 1,000,000,000 is 200,000 ... kinda big :)

In my opinion, absolute value is not important here, what matters is the fraction. I consider 0.02% to be large by itself for the given context.
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