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

#451
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Envision an airline withholding safety records, a car manufacturer keeping crash test results private, a restaurant refusing to provide health inspection logs, or a government refusing to disclose details of its budget allocation — all claiming that transparency would only complicate matters and provide "more data for distrust". In each case, the flawed nature of your core argument becomes obviously evident. I fully…

I don't think you can reasonably compare the importance of transparency in your examples to that of editorial decisions in a private moderated community.

In the first set, the stakes are far higher, which is why the collection of objective data is legally mandated in the first place.

In the second set, you have only the subjective opinions of people who have an explicit goal to cultivate a specific variety of community. As members of that community, we select into the cultivation regime under which we participate. Not everyone will share the same preferences, and that's OK.

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

#453
post #170

This is a good thing to be able to see, but I'm much more interested in identifying the soft censorship in comment sections. This is obviously harder, because vote totals aren't publicly available for comment sections, but it is much more important as a tool. What topics are on the front page is much more clearly the legitimate domain of moderation than what commentary is made about them, especially when moderation o…

It's more boring than you'd expect. The comments that get most heavily upvoted tend to be either (1) indignantly rhetorical, or (2) generic. Mostly what we do is downweight those when they're at the top of the thread. The "algorithm" is about as simple as:

(1) if the top comment is indignantly rhetorical or generic, downweight it; otherwise go look at another thread;

(2) refresh the page;

(3) goto (1).

If I'm feeling diligent, I might do this for the top few subthreads, but that's about it.

This simple intervention turns out to be the highest-leverage thing we've figured out in recent years:

ttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20highest%20leverage&sort=byDate&type=comment

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

#454

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.

Most probably that's us turning off the flamewar detector.

If you see examples you're welcome to ask us at hn@ycombinator.com.

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

#455

I've always assumed that when a story rapidly drops past the first three pages (e.g. >90) it is because it has been flagged some indicative, disproportionate number of times[1] by users with flag functionality. The submission seems to presume that such drops are only the result of Daniel or whoever manually doing it. Which is true? [1] - Notably the majority of the "removed" stories have pretty tiny number of upvotes…

Mostly flags, yes, but also software penalties and moderation downweights. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237446.

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

#456
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t really need a state-of-the-art anything here. People get too distracted with building the perfect system when it comes to use cases like this because they are paralysed thinking about the avoidance of false positives and make a bunch of sub-optimal decisions on that basis. False positives are much less of a problem with a human in the loop, and putting a human in the loop doesn’t require moderator effort. Y…

You're right about one thing: I didn't need to say "state of the art". A system that works at all would be great! I don't think a confirmation prompt will help because people tune such things out after they've seen them a few times.

Even a bad implementation isn’t going to be showing this warning to people often enough to desensitise them. And if they make a habit of ignoring the warning to post flamewar stuff… that’s solved with moderation by a human. The intent is to add friction for knee-jerk low-quality comments, not solve for people who persistently, intentionally post low-quality comments after a warning.

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

#457

This story has close to 500 up votes as of 2:19PM Pacific and is no longer on the front page. Why flag an article that is simply trying to show how HN can potentially be improved?

It got flagged by users. We turned that off per https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... The story has been on the front page for 9 hours now and is still there.

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

#458

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…

I wrote a whole thing about that one in case it's useful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235382

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

#459

Thank you. Already saw one I would like to read. What is criteria to remove some of these. I've read the 'terms' for submitting. sometimes the removed ones don't appear to violate anything.

The key word there is "appear". For example: sometimes the story is fine except that it has already had a big discussion recently.

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

#460

HN would be a much better place if they banned domains like the guardian, nytimes etc entirely. There's way too much journospam.

The problem is that while the major media sites generate a lot of noise, they also publish solid original articles from time to time, and we don't want to miss those. For that reason, they're downweighted, but not banned.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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