471–480 of 532 posts
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> keep in mind that user flags affect a submission's rank long before the [flagged] marker appears What kinds of user flags are there and why are they not public? People should know. Shadowbanning belongs in the 2010s.
In your profile settings there is an option to show flagged topics and posts.
> The assumption is that a Story cannot go from the top 30 to a position higher than 90 in a single minute, without having been explicitly removed. I'm not sure this is a valid assumption. https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39094387 looks to be a story that dropped to the thirties pretty quickly. Maybe due to other suddenly popular content? Looking at the 13 stories listed for Monday, January 22, 2024 only 3…
I dont understand what "explicit" means here. If it gets algorithmically deranked for user flags, but but not hidden, is that explicit? I assume "explicit" means manual moderator intervention, but I don't really see anything that suggests that.
Because there is no visible indication when moderator intervention happens. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
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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 can find a meta-analysis to prove anything you want. It is an extraordinary claim that wearing a mask properly does not reduce transmission of viral particles. You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously. Then you can point to studies whose results are explained by that hypothesis.
I'm not trying to prove anything. I just rely on the judgement of domain experts.
In this thread I cited Cochrane, The Lancet, SciAm and Science Magazine. If you have more reputable sources, please share them here.
>You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously.
It's only unintuitive if you stick to the droplet model. SARS-CoV-2 however spreads like smoke through the air, as I documented already extensively in this post:
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"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…
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…
I would rather see the highest voted comments, and I'm pretty happy to just scroll down myself if I find the top comment to be useless.
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This isn't actually COVID specific. It's a nasty and frequent tactic on this forum, where someone makes strong assertions about one side of an argument whilst simultaneously claiming that the other side can't be allowed to speak because it would be "fighting", a "flamewar", a "trash fire", "not curious", "tedious" or whatever. It's an attempt to manipulate the site rules to suppress debate and is itself anti-curious.…
Hm. I think what I'm going to do instead is relentlessly flag them. Check this out. It's barely on the front page, and has just 3 comments right now. How great is this post? How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235484 My son is a biochemist (interviewing for grad school slots right now , as in this actual evening ,…
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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No because most people stopped talking about it
Yeah, you're just wrong. I have several people in the Philippines and South America who help me out with misc things (VA-type tasks). All of them have asked me if I could pay them in crypto (USDC on AVAX Chain). There's tons of people who use it for day to day. You're just in a bubble.
Your people are dodging tax, probably because no one has got around to regulating crypto in their jurisdiction yet. Not that I blame them.
In other places where it's regulated and you get taxed anyway, there's no point in losing money on exchanges.
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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…
> all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed HN had an enormous thread about the ICJ decision: ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043 - Jan 2024 (1397 comments) The question here isn't whether the topic has been suppressed; it's how much of it HN can handle. We're willing to turn off flags f…
Which is the point - a small crowd of partisans can flag third rail topics here, no matter how much interest or how much positive discussion is happening.
I remember, in particular, the time all the posts about a lead torturer from Abu Ghraib were suppressed. Although she destroyed Congressional evidence, she was promoted to a top position at at a top tech hirer. We should be able to talk about things like that.
Your response then was the same as now; to deflect responsibility to 'users'. I don't buy it. The same happened with Annie Altman's claims about her brother. The same has happened with quite a few Zionism related threads, recently and historically. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37953737, which clearly is squarely in our domain.
There is room for improvement here. A minority of strongly biased participants, on any issue, shouldn't be able to completely disappear whole sides of the story, as has been happening.
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> 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 doe…
"and non toxic discussions" Have you seen one discussion about Gaza free of that? I haven't. (My main account is rate limited, because of a recent Gaza debate btw. Because I like heated discussions from time to time. But I can respect that it is not wanted here) "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.…
I have. I linked them as examples above.
> demanding that other people and places change to your liking
I haven't made any demands. I've said what I'd like to see improved.
On the whole I like this community, and I try to contribute to it positively. Making suggestions on how it could be run with less censorship and suppression is not an unreasonable thing to do, and it's odd you think it is tbh.