Can we have it sorted in descending order by date?
Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
301–310 of 532 posts
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I flagged that article, so I'll clearly explain why: 1. I think for anyone that has been on HN throughout pandemic knows it is extremely unlikely for topics like this to produce any sort of valuable discussion. I almost never see any sort of humility on the topic (to be clear, from many/all sides) that admits that people (individuals, experts, literally everyone) were doing what they thought best with the information…
That isn't clear at all. You seem to be saying that if you anticipate that people might question other people's competence or motives, or in your view a discussion won't lead people to think the right thoughts ("encourage actual understanding") then you flag it to try to ensure nobody can discuss it. But you also say that making it undiscussable is also not about making the topic untouchable. That's just playing with…
Your response highlights the exact thing I'm talking about, as it ascribes motives to me that are totally foreign to me, and takes the tone that flagging an article means that I think I want to "ensure nobody can discuss it."
I could respond to some of your other sentences, but you've exactly proven my point, so thank you.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has "international significance". It's by far the most significant development in months. From the submission guidelines: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. People here were clearly finding those stories interesting, as measured by upvotes and comments. > If they'd cover it on TV ne…
>ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has "international significance". It's by far the most significant development in months The verdict had a thread with over fifteen hundred comments and was on the front page most of the day. Others were presumably down ranked as they were dupes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043
The linked deleted thread was 90 minutes older than the thread that 'survived'.
Also, it was removed within a minute of hitting the front page (if I'm reading the graphs right). Doesn't quite line up with your presumption.
Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?
Besides - the point is this: Not all the stories that are in OP's list are spam, or unsuitable. Some topics hit a third rail.
They are easily removed by a small group of users, and then Daniel can come by months later and say, well, users flagged it [ie, 0]. It even happens to PG [1]. This isn't ideal, and pretending it isn't happening is uncool.
I'm not saying Dang doesn't do a great job. But there are some topics that are verboten, despite their impact/relevance on the tech community and our general interest. And this particular topic is too important to allow for such narrative control by a tiny group of flaggers.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I don't care if its a right-wing talking point and I don't care if a company has given themselves permission to censor themselves. My interest is broadly about the attitudes towards speech as they continue to be shaped by corporations who continue to privatize the public square. See Taibbi's 'Twitter Files' for ample examples.
Users are privatizing the 'public square'. We come to HN by choice. I'm sure others use Twitter by choice. And users subject themselves to the TOS by choice.
This is definitely one of those 'if you don't like it, build (or buy) it'. It has worked out disastrously in the conservative realm so far, but perhaps you have better ideas.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We are legally bound as a nation" "We" ain't all americans. There are people here coming from opposing sides in various wars. And there are more wars and slaughtering going on, than in the middle east. And "we" are just tech people. Not better or worse by principle, which shows off very easily as there can be religious flame wars about software already. So it would be good, if we could debate all this in a nice way.…
> "We" ain't all americans. The vast majority of English speaking countries signed the Genocide Convention, if not all [0] > This is why many people want NO politics here at all. They're not a majority, far from it. And the rules don't say "NO politics"; that would be absurd. Tech and politics overlap often - as they do here. 0 - https://www.statista.com/chart/22194/countries-that-havent-r...
The basic metric this site optimizes for is: "interesting discussion". So yes, sometimes there can be interesting discussion about political topics. But most of the times - not so much. And what you apparently want is activism, not discussion. Not to say your activism is bad - but this site is simply not made for activism of any kind. Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Whether or not we’re able to discuss controversial subjects, a topic’s controversy doesn’t imply importance or relevance. It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discuss…
> It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.
The expertise on HN is indeed unrivaled.
If I want to learn about the quirks of a variational autoencoder in some neural network, I read the discussion between experts here on HN [1].
If I want to learn about protein folding, I can find relevant domain experts answering questions here on HN [2].
But why do you and so many others think that there is a covid-shaped hole in the expertise on HN? Do you really believe that out of all domain experts, the covid ones decided to stay away from here?
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong. Partially, but I think these are all symptoms for a more fundamental root cause: HN is just comprised of too many emotional, passionate users with fundamentally differing beliefs. The usual song and dance with flagging goes something li…
It has always been the case and is in fact the stated premise of the site that it's barely held together in a cohesive community. The original mission statement was "see how long we can fend off Eternal September". So that's not alarming; it's how things are supposed to be. I suppose a perfectly stabilized cohesive community would be worrying, a sign that the site is staling.
I agree that a stable, cohesive community is a sign that the site is failing but I think we've hewed too far to the side of "barely holding it together" on this spectrum. I feel that it dissuades new, quality contributors from joining and instead attracts contrarians and arguers.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#308Earlier 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.
HN ID? I don't see that in the FAQ, maybe it's defined elsewhere? edit: oh duh. thanks all, answer was 'right under my nose'!
I changed my comment to say 'link' instead of 'ID' so everyone can follow the same links.
Thanks _kst_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232594
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#309Earlier 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.
That would create a bureaucratic nightmare for no significant gain.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 for a longer answer; and also krapp's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232795, which makes a similar point.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#310Earlier 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.
Why don’t you make the system transparent? This will save you a lot of effort answering questions.
"Transparent" means different things to people, but if you mean a full moderation log: I think most likely it would produce more questions and effort, for no clear gain. I've written about this over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Here's how I look at it: if trust is present, then we don't need to publish a full log, as long as we answer questions when people ask them. That degree of transparency has been available here for many years. If, on the other hand, trust isn't present, a moderation log won't create it. It will just generate more data for distrust to work with—and distrust always finds something.
Thus our focus is on building trust with the community and maintaining it. That happens through lots of individual and group interactions, answering questions whenever we get them, in the threads or by email. That's what I spend most of my time doing.
We're never going to take the community's trust for granted because it's what gives HN the only real value it has, and it would be all too easy to lose. But I would tentatively say that this approach has proven to work well for most of the community. If people learn they can always get a question answered, that's a powerful trust-building factor.
Equally clear is that it does not work for everybody; but that's always going to be the case no matter what we do. I don't mean that we dismiss such users' concerns—quite the contrary, I make extra efforts to answer them. I'm just not under any illusion that we can satisfy everybody. It's satisfying enough if a few people can occasionally be won over in this way—which does happen sometimes!