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Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#151

Post by 23B1 »

lolinder wrote: post #137
wolverine876 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with the GP at all. Most seem normal for the front page or the intellectual curiosity standard (I mean, personally I'd like a much higher standard, but I'm basing it on what HN already has). All from only one day: * Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-scr... * Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germa…

What these are is evidence of your parent comment's point that this isn't direct moderator action, rather a combination of algorithms and user flags. Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's overblown. I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people because they're tired of LLM stor…

I think you're probably generally correct, but "blaming the algorithm" sure smells to me like a whole lot of camouflage for censorship, which we ought to know by now has as much to do with 'quality' as it does 'shaping the narrative'

Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in successful community moderation, but you have to wonder 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost entirely at the behest of big tech.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#152

Post by duck »

jgrahamc wrote: post #39

> While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news. I think the answer to this is... go set up your our LLM News web site and build a community. I really love HN but I wanted more retro computing and gaming news so I created by own site ( https://twostopbits.com/ ) using the HN source code. It's not hard. Go build the thing you want and moderat…

I hadn't see this before, but that is exactly what I've been wanting more of - thanks for setting that up John! I'm curious, do you feel like lower traffic communities like yours serves up the content mix you were hoping for when you started it?

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#153

Post by fakedang »

lolinder wrote: post #137
wolverine876 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with the GP at all. Most seem normal for the front page or the intellectual curiosity standard (I mean, personally I'd like a much higher standard, but I'm basing it on what HN already has). All from only one day: * Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-scr... * Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germa…

What these are is evidence of your parent comment's point that this isn't direct moderator action, rather a combination of algorithms and user flags. Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's overblown. I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people because they're tired of LLM stor…

There ought to be a time-based flagging limit, so that people don't abuse the system. I've already raised this earlier.

If Company A makes a killer product announcement, rival Company B could simply get its employees to spam down votes on and flag that post. Company A gets less visibility, and dang won't be able to come on time to stop it.

This is an easily plausible hypothetical, which may already be happening.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#154

Post by saagarjha »

jjackson5324 wrote: post #138
nottorp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The corpse of blockchain would like to have a word with you :)

Um, have you seen the price of bitcoin? Or the Bitcoin ETF? What are you talking about lol.

No because most people stopped talking about it

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#155

Post by oramit »

a12k wrote: post #3

Looking at the list of removed stories makes me really happy with the moderators here. They're all sensationalist, advertising for some company, clickbait, way off topic, or some combination of above. In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel should not have been removed. Thanks, mods.

Yeah this list seems to be pretty low quality stuff. There's a couple economic/political links that I think are interesting but I can totally see why they would be removed as off-topic or likely to produce a flamewar.

It's pretty clear to me that any online forum needs good moderation to be healthy long term. HN has been good about this with a strong community providing upvotes/downvotes and a moderation team that seems pretty light handed but not afraid to say no when necessary. Please keep doing what you're doing.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#156

Post by indigodaddy »

jgrahamc wrote: post #39

> While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news. I think the answer to this is... go set up your our LLM News web site and build a community. I really love HN but I wanted more retro computing and gaming news so I created by own site ( https://twostopbits.com/ ) using the HN source code. It's not hard. Go build the thing you want and moderat…

Wow very cool love the retro angle. Assuming you are using Workers for this?

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#157

Post by smaudet »

nonethewiser wrote: post #50

This is an interesting dataset. I suspect the main things that get removed are A) politics B) duplicates.

I'm echoing others, but the article on rust async/await seems good.

You may or may not agree with the conclusions of the post, but its a technical topic with at least some specific exploration of the (performance/code writing) issues, that links to quite a few further topics for exploration.

https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html

That said, I noted more than a few typos in the article, so I wonder if there is generally a spell check filter for article quality.

https://trunk.io/blog/git-commit-messages-are-useless

I also found this one interesting. I don't agree with the article, but its an interesting viewpoint and I learned a bit about what some people are doing with git. I couldn't tell you why it dropped (unpopular)?

Which is where its possible that this (new) tool falls short, it can't actually tell what was censored, just what wasn't popular.

Unpopular things sometimes are so because they fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but aren't actually wrong or invaluable, which might be the real value of this tool.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#158

Post by dang »

TheCoreh wrote: post #36
a12k wrote: post #3

Looking at the list of removed stories makes me really happy with the moderators here. They're all sensationalist, advertising for some company, clickbait, way off topic, or some combination of above. In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel should not have been removed. Thanks, mods.

At a quick glance, I found several that don't match that criteria you mention, here are a few: Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/ Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough Avoid Async Rust at All Cost https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html (Perhaps…

The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector. The last one was downranked by users. Admins didn't touch any of them.

Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of people's questions.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#159

Post by ParetoOptimal »

dpkirchner wrote: post #141
lars_francke wrote: post #10

> While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news. I am, so you can believe it. But: I don't flag things that I'm tired of.

I will occasionally flag things that will result in discussions that are always the same because I'm tired of them. Stories about tipping at restaurants or Trump or Biden, for example -- literally every argument for or against has been made and there's nothing new or interesting to say. But I'm more likely to hide them.

Why would one ever flag stories they believe will result in the same useless discussions rather than just hiding them?

I think I've only ever flagged one or two instances of spam personally.

Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time

#160

Post by ggdG »

wtallis wrote: post #142
ggdG wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think reading the top comment on that post provides plenty of explanation why users would flag that post. That top comment complains that the HN title is WSJ's informative subheading instead of its clickbaity headline.

The top comment complains that the title submitted to HN is both not the original headline, and not an accurate characterization of the content of the article. If there's no possible title to use for a submission that won't get it flagged, then clearly it's not a great article to be submitting. And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response…

> The top comment complains that the title submitted to HN is both not the original headline, and not an accurate characterization of the content of the article.

What do you mean: "not an accurate characterization of the content of the article"? The title pretty accurately describes an admission by the former NIAID director in a House Select Subcommittee, according to the WSJ. That admission is the topic of the article.

> And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules.

From HN's rules:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait;

I think using the clickbaity original title ("Anthony Fauci Fesses Up") would be flouting HN's rules.

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