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

#221

Post by coffeebeqn »

elpocko wrote: post #211
bitcharmer wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the front page is heavily moderated. Almost every day you'll see posts with 50+ upvotes falling of the front page within an hour or two when some article about LISP with It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.

The "force" is actually one or two people. It's hard to prove and impossible to change. No one will believe you, either.

If it works..

There are a billion forums with less stringent moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN good and not so game-able like most sites

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

#222

Post by [deleted] »

nullindividual wrote: post #214
23B1 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#223

Post by LordDragonfang »

mandmandam wrote: post #184
lolinder wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is accurate, per dang's comment on the Gary Tan thread the other day: > We didn't flag the post; users did. When it comes to submissions, that's nearly always the case - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html . https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169622

There are stories on this list that deserved to be seen, were popular, were important, and were not in fact dumpster fires in the comments - but a particular crowd with a particular bias decided to flag them. Example 1: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39142094 Example 2: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39130652 Example 3: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39214844 Does this crowd think…

While those stories may be important, they are all off-topic for Hacker News. This is not a general news/discussion site, and there are other places on the internet to discuss those things. HN is explicitly set up to discourage stories which would incur flame-war-like political arguments.

Per the guidelines:

>What to Submit

>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The latter two stories are not new phenomenon (the war has been ongoing), and the former, literally being a decision by a political body, falls squarely under "politics", and is highly likely to lead to nonproductive flamewars.

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

#224

Post by skeaker »

throwaway665544 wrote: post #174
dang wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have nothing to hide, why not make all story and comment removal history publicly visible, like Wikipedia edits.

Just enable showdead if you want to see all of that. It's 99% botspam.

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

#225

Post by bnralt »

rhaksw wrote: post #209
dang wrote: post #139

I don't have a problem with users building things like this because the principles by which HN works are all easy enough to explain and defend—just remember that anything this complex is inevitably a mess, so you need to have high tolerance for messiness if you want to understand it accurately. However, it's important to correct inaccuracies like the one mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537 .…

> Robin89, can you please fix the text? know that was just a mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong. How can he/we verify it's wrong? The down-weighting you describe is not visible to users. Even OP won't know. You can say that down-weighting happens, but we're asking to see where down-weighting happens.

Additionally, just because it’s possible that this could happen doesn’t really give us an idea of how likely it is. Is it one of those theoretically possible, but it never actually happens events? there’s a huge difference between it impacting half of the stories that fall off that quickly, and it impacting 1 in 10,000 stories that fall off that quickly.

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

#226

Post by jlokier »

karaterobot wrote: post #190
goles wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone that is concerned about over flagging, please consider turning on showdead and vouching responsibly! If as many people thoughtfully vouched as maliciously flagged it may be less of an issue.

Wait, how do you vouch for something that has been flagged? I don't see that option, even with showdead turned on.

For recent dead comments, click on the time ("31 minutes ago") to bring up the comment's own page where there's a "vouch" option next to the other comment options if you have enough karma.

For dead stories in the "new" queue, I see a "vouch" option already without going to the story's own page.

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

#227

Post by fragmede »

mvdtnz wrote: post #37

I wrote a program that tracked the changes in story titles on Hacker News a while ago. Some of them were really quite strange. I can't understand some of the policies, like why the words "How" and "Why" are stripped from the front of titles (eg "How I rewrote my app" would be changed to "I rewrote my app"). Some very small proportion of the title changes could definitely have been construed as politically motivated b…

did you write up your findings anywhere? I'd love to read about them!

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

#228

Post by projectazorian »

isoprophlex wrote: post #102
kjkjadksj wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took about 10 years for the crypto headline hysteria to taper but it might have been only because ai is now the big annoying thing to shoehorn into everything. Monkeys pawl will curl and you will emerge out of your hibernation to more disgust at whatever the next annoying thing will be.

Also, it's very clear from the messaging and breathless hype that the NFT grifters packed uo their stuff and moved over en masse to the GenAI space

Was at a networking event recently and "I was in the crypto/NFT space but I'm now pivoting to GenAI" was by far the most common way people introduced themselves.

At least it made it easy to figure out who I didn't need to talk to.

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

#229

Post by kortilla »

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.

The moderators are mainly the users. Flags are what kills a story quickly

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

#230

Post by Workaccount2 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #161
ggdG wrote: post #89

> In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel should not have been removed. I don't understand why this story was removed: "It turns out the six-feet social-distancing rule had no scientific basis", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200511 On a forum with an overwhelmingly science-minded audience, it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.

(Shrug) I don't require scientific proof of the inverse-square law. It's self-evident to the point of being axiomatic. Standing 6 feet away from a virus source will expose you to about 44% fewer virus particles than standing 5 feet away from one, while not imposing any real hardships in most public interaction scenarios. What's controversial about that? If you demand precise scientific rigor in all aspects of everyda…

The same with masks:

Put a water hose on mist and spray someone with it. Then put a cloth over the nozzle and try to spray them. It's self evident yet people just could not grasp it.

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