241–250 of 532 posts
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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
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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.
> The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector. Just some feedback that I've found a number of articles fall off the FP due to the flamewar detector that I've felt were good articles/discussions. In fact, I think some of the more valuable discussions tend to have a lot of back and forth discussions relative to the votes. But I also recognize that flamewars can also look a lot like that. So I'm wo…
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.
I’ve seen it happen when I’ve flagged stories so either there is a vast conspiracy of moderators that receive pages when I flag things so they can downrank… or maybe dang isn’t lying about something that should be super obvious as a community self policing mechanism.
> 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?
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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.
How can users downrank headlines? I only have an option to upvote them. While it's not too frequent, there are things that make it to the front page that I'd like to express my disapproval of.
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> It's not hard. Go build the thing you want and moderate it. Does the source code include moderating tools, or is it just a bare bones aggregator with a default ranking algo?
There are moderation tools. I can do things like kill a story, ban a domain, ban a user, alter the score on a story, mark a story as dead, lock a story so no one else can edit it, see how many sock puppets voted for the story, edit any aspect of a story. I modified the default source to have a concept of tags on a story because I wanted people to be able to filter stories by their areas of interest (e.g. everything C…
It's cool that you set up your own instance, but do you see no problem with covertly altering the score of a story?
Such secrecy leads to oversized, over-trusted forums, and is what this post seeks to address.
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Stories about COVID controversies are almost certainly getting flagged off the front page by users, not touched by mods. People look at the titles of these stories and think that's all flaggers are going by, but lots of people flag stories based on their experience of what the threads are like, and the threads on COVID controversies are fucking dreadful. I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
But why must they be dreadful? Genuine question, I am not being obtuse. We should be able as a community to discuss conterversial subjects somehow. I also think this sort of thing invites flag brigades. Or better yet, a small batch of bad actor can easily start brigading and forcefully associate such flamewar expectations with any subject they don't like to drive it off HN. Maybe worth reconsidering how you flag? You…
In plain English, not enough people actually know what they are talking about to create an informative and educational discussion. So they all just end up as a pointless exercise in all the worst aspects of forum flame wars.
HN is at its best when people with lots of relevant experience and knowledge come into the discussion. Then the rest of us can learn new facts, tools, perspectives, etc.
There’s a long list of topics where that is just not available in the existing audience. So there are a lot of topics that, while interesting, are just not a good investment of everyone’s time here.
> 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?
The HN source base is a monolithic Arc program and Arc is in Racket/Scheme. To use Workers I would have had to get Racket working on Wasm which I simply haven't tried. Also news.arc does a bunch of file system access and I'd have to rewrite that to use Workers KV or something. So, I decided to use lots of Cloudflare and run the Arc code on a VPS I've had for many years. The whole thing is running in a screen session which I can hop into and be in the REPL when I want.
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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.
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> 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.
Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story. I’ve seen it happen when I’ve flagged stories so either there is a vast conspiracy of moderators that receive pages when I flag things so they can downrank… or maybe dang isn’t lying about something that should be super obvious as a community self policing mechanism.
It's discussed in the link, and elsewhere [1]. Some mod actions on HN are transparent, some are not. You should not assume that, just because you see marks of some form of moderation, that you can see them all.
Undisclosed content moderation is like directly modifying your production database. It's faster, but always more troublesome. Nobody else knows what changed or why, etc.