I think it would be really interesting to get a tracker for the ones that hit the front page, then fall off, and then surge back in 30-60 mins. I wonder what's going on with those ones.
Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
351–360 of 532 posts
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Communities would get a good sense for the frequency if forums would simply disclose content moderation to the submitting users. Offending users would learn what's not allowed and share that with the community. But today's forums frequently do not disclose moderation to submitting users, and that is why we are now seeing major court cases over 230, government-led censorship, etc.
I don't know anything about other forums, but for the reasons why on HN we don't publish a full moderation log, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 as well as the past explanations linked from there.
You can, however, always get a question answered. That's basically our implicit contract with the community.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I appreciate the accuracy in your comment but do please edit out swipes like "Wtf are you talking about"—those spread bad feeling, and when we're talking about the community itself it's even more important not to do that.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are several low-point, long-lived but highly ranked unnatural posts on the top page that appear to be manipulated. Such unnaturalness and opacity make users feel that the ranking is arbitrary and unfair, even if for good reasons. Can you display the manipulation that has been done on the ranking and other lists per post? For example, a reset of the submission time should be easily displayed.
I use the downvote button for two reasons: overwhelmingly for rude, come-uppance, and similar type of comments; very rarely for comments spreading FUD for no particular reason. I just downvoted your comment for the second reason. Demanding transparency is fine but you’ve got to provide proof with your claims. If there are stories which feel manipulated to you link them and let the audience see, maybe you’re right.
Dang explained here that it could happen.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's "self evident" yet a large Cochrane meta-analysis finds no benificial effect of masks whatsoever: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
You sure?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abs...
When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless. Also keep in the mind that the primary reason for studies showing masks not working is that people don't wear it correctly or at all.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Generally, after asserting that someone is drastically wrong, the next few paragraphs should be about backing that claim up with convincing evidence and explanations. Instead you digressed into talking about droplets vs aerosols and forgot to even make a connection between that and the "drastically wrong" take you were replying to.
Thank you to sibling ggdG for presenting even more evidence.
But I don't get your reply at all, wtallis. "the next few paragraphs should be about backing that claim up with convincing evidence and explanations" - which is what the stuff about the Diamond Princess, SARS-1 and Hong Kong was about? Evidence and explanations for why the droplet model was wrong. Do you see that? The connection is that the claim exposure as simple as inverse square law on distance assumes no aerosol transmission, which is incorrect.
It's hard not to feel that if people didn't keep flagging these kinds of discussions off the front pages, the wider HN community would be aware of all these basic facts which as the sibling post points out, is actually not controversial and hasn't been for years. HN is supposed to be about intellectual curiousity but the aggressive flagging behavior talked about by others in this thread means that too many posters here are stuck in a timewarp where it's still Jan 2020.
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#357Earlier 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.
The flags on the last item don't seem to be made in good faith. This looks like abuse of the flag system to me. Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
I assume you mean this one:
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 - Jan 2024 (62 comments)
I can make an argument either way there. The argument in favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this much-discussed topic; its title was flamebait and arguably misleading as well since the article seems more about async in general; and generally it was more of a drama submission on a classic flamewar topic than an interesting technical piece. I'm not saying all that is fair but it's easy to imagine good-faith users flagging for such reasons.
I checked the flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases where a user had previously flagged a different article about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4] below. A few of those might be borderline calls but I don't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags are legit if the story has had a large amount of discussion recently. Otherwise HN would consist of the same few discussions over and over, and we have enough of that as it is!
> Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
There are some software protections in place against that, but like all such protections, they don't catch all the bad cases and they have false positives as well.
We review the flags and turn flags off sometimes. I would not say it's perfect because although we try to look over all the flagged stories, it has to be done hastily (or one wouldn't get much else done). That makes it easy to miss things. However, users often email us at hn@ycombinator.com when they think a story has been unfairly flagged, and in those cases we always take a closer look. I don't know what percentage of the time we turn flags off in such cases, but it's not a low number. So if we include "users sending emails" as part of "the system", then yes, there's a system for monitoring flag abuse.
Last point: this is a pretty typical case. I'd say it's borderline but in the end I probably agree with the flaggers. If the topic of Rust (and async Rust in particular) weren't already so thoroughly covered, and/or if the flamewar aspect hadn't been there, then I'd probably disagree with the flaggers.
---
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061839 - the word 'async' appears over 200 times in that thread!
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] You Don't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 - Feb 2024 (21 comments)
Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 - Jan 2024 (151 comments)
New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire wear shocks some drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 - Jan 2024 (64 comments)
Google layoffs: Tech giant to cut down 30k jobs, says report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791297 - Dec 2023 (6 comments)
Code will make me rich and famous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336699 - Nov 2023 (2 comments)
The NSA Invented Bitcoin? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37599194 - Sept 2023 (61 comments)
Leaving the Web3 cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803267 - July 2023 (47 comments)
How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105 - June 2023 (97 comments)
Alphabet plans to announce its new general-use LLM called PaLM 2 at Google I/O - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866435 - May 2023 (5 comments)
Is your husband/ boyfriend gay? LGBTQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 - April 2023 (0 comments)
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't know it could be a bug. Next time I find it, I will report it. I have heard that sometimes the submission time is reset, such as when returning from the second chance pool. This could also create an unnatural ranking order, so the original time before the reset should be listed as well.
It could certainly be a bug! but it could also be a lot of other things. Yes, the timestamp munging is an artifact of HN's re-upping system, described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and links back from there. About the timestamps, there are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... . The original times are always available because the modified time is us…
Can you also list the original times on the front page for consistency in rankings?
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#359[deleted]
Re: Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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.
> what you apparently want is activism, not discussion
I'd call the flaggers colluding to spike stories with lively and non toxic discussions the 'activists'.
> Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options. Suppressing anything with a whiff of controversy doesn't result in positive outcomes.
Besides; freedom of speech, and free exchange of ideas, are both decidedly in the "good hacker" wheelhouse.