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Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

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Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#111

Post by rimliu »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #80
rimliu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got my account (with 9+k point) banned. Which is, of course, annoying, but the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well. There was also a lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the guidelines, so… And while some of my comments might be harsh I sometimes wonder if overzealous moderation leads…

To be fair, sometimes this is a security feature so that folks don't go off hating one individual moderator. I've seen this in games more often, but I imagine it works out here as well. It sucks for normal folks, but sometimes that's the way it works.

Well, yeah, I kind of get it, but still smells fishy somehow. You still can be anonymous and say "I did something" now it just sounds like you are washing your hands and avoid being responsible. OTOH, I was never a moderator of any kind, so I have no idea what problems they have to deal with.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#112

Post by stinkytaco »

ballenf wrote: post #93
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it. Obscuring an algorithm or making it more tedious to reverse may not make it perfectly secure, but that's not the goal. It's not like actual information security, where loss of the encryption keys means your product is broken or your database is on the Internet. You're just t…

Once it's public (even unofficially), people will begin to rely on the current implementation and then complain if it is ever tweaked or changed. They build towards the value it grants and then complain that the value was arbitrarily stolen from them.

But aren't the people who are relying on that value precisely the people you want to keep out?

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#114

Post by logicallee »

lorenzhs wrote: post #90
logicallee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what flamebait means, you likely mean clickbait. There's nothing to disagree with there - all commenters agreed that lightweight sites are great. The title was also completely true. But you are right, it was inappropriate. My point is there were 43 upvotes in a matter of a few minutes (and more coming) but it was not generating good discussion. The top comment: >>hyperbovine 269 days ago [-] >>Loads instan…

I think flamebait is the correct word, because the discussion would have just ended in the usual "modern web" complaints interspersed with people saying that these things have legitimate uses, and so on and so on. They're never productive discussions, just full of ranting and flaming.

But as you can see, no one in the discussion actively disagreed with anyone else. (No one flamed anyone.) It just wasn't very substantive and the reason it was buried.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#115

Post by gus_massa »

anotheryou wrote: post #65

Does anyone know why some posts have a rel="nofollow" in the link? (not just these no-comment ycombinator promotional posts) I asked this before and a mod said I should ask again via mail, but never got a response from hn@ycombinator.com.

At some time, the post with few upvotes (perhaps Probably the mods don't want to disclose the complete criteria, because it may change constantly without warning. Try to send again an email again, but I guess you will get in the reply only a general idea of the system.

If you see something horribly misclassified, try sending an email to the mods.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#116

Post by kilburn »

unethical_ban wrote: post #82
tantanel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The debate is not really whether the algorithm should be made public or not, it's about the method used to try and keep it secure. If the algorithm can be reverse engineered then trying to suppress the knowledge that is already "out there" will only create an illusion of it being a secret, and the fewer people know about it the more damage they can potentially do (i.e they more they can financially benefit from their…

I think the difference is that one can make verifiably secure software. Can one make a verifiably ungameable ranking algocfor a news site?

Well, probably not for such a broad description of "ungameable", but there is an entire research field dedicated to try and come up with such algorithms/systems: Mechanism design!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#117

Post by jacquesm »

azrazalea wrote: post #83
ploggingdev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP uses this story as an example of having "moderator fingerprints on them" i.e moderators censoring posts, which is not true. What happened was the opposite : the moderator uncensored a post flagged by the community.

Well, the author tried to account for that by saying that normal flagged posts don't go down near as fast. If what is being said in other threads is true, high karma accounts clicking flag could push a post off the front page without showing the "flagged" tag, then that could be an explanation instead. Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.

> Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.

And on top of that are allowed to use HN as a platform to ask other users to jump to their aid in flagging stories they don't like.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#118

Post by throwaway743824 »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #80
rimliu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got my account (with 9+k point) banned. Which is, of course, annoying, but the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well. There was also a lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the guidelines, so… And while some of my comments might be harsh I sometimes wonder if overzealous moderation leads…

To be fair, sometimes this is a security feature so that folks don't go off hating one individual moderator. I've seen this in games more often, but I imagine it works out here as well. It sucks for normal folks, but sometimes that's the way it works.

If they want to 'protect' the moderators they should use more neutral language focusing on the actions. You can easily say "This account has been x" instead of "We've x this account" or "x has been changed to reflect y" instead of "We've changed x to reflect y". It's less personal, but that's the point.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#120

Post by j_s »

http://hnrankings.info is a nice UI to see this happening in real time.

Here is an example of three submissions, two flagged enough to get kicked off the front page (for poor use of sources on a contentious topic) but not get marked as 'flagged':

http://hnrankings.info/13714928,13714987,13715552/

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