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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

#141

Post by dang »

Mithaldu wrote: post #39
DanBC wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front Mods (as far as I know, I'm not one) never forcibly remove things from the front page. These are almost always the result of user flagging.

Those are marked first "flagged" as a warning, and then "dead" when the user flags reach a high enough level. This article however is about stories that disappear without receiving either.

As others have pointed out, the [flagged] annotation means heavily flagged. A story can be downweighted off the front page by user flags long before [flagged] shows up. Indeed that's what happened to the submission the OP is complaining about. Moderators never saw it.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#143

Post by danso »

I didn't find this particular OP to be as enlightening as its current upvote count suggests, but the previous post that was supposedly disappeared was very interesting and well-written. Considering how many upvotes this OP gotten, the purported short-shrift the previous post got was fortuitous ;)

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#144

Post by joosters »

pvg wrote: post #75
hardwaresofton wrote: post #6

The site is being crushed by traffic right now -- but without reading the article, I've also found that some stories that I thought were important that were scrubbed from HN's front page just about as soon as I saw it (when I doubled back to read the comments)... While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated. Maybe it could even be automatic, whenever a mod removed something…

The naive thing is coming up with 17 complicated theories about this instead of just emailing the mods and asking. They're very responsive.

We're on a discussion board web site. Using it to discuss the subject would seem the obvious place, right? Perhaps the mods could use their own site and be responsive to everyone...

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#145

Post by Cthulhu_ »

throwaway743824 wrote: post #118
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that works best; a moderator is / should be only a member that happens to be responsible for maintaining the site's user behaviour policy and tidiness of articles posted, and thus decisions shouldn't be an "I" or "we" thing, but "the site". Of course, that's an utopia and no amount of rules will cover every situation.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#146

Post by dsacco »

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?

What does "verifiably" mean for you? Are you talking about provable security?

First establish an upper bound, worst case scenario cost (as a function of time + resources) to fully reverse engineer the algorithm. Use that as the comparison benchmark, and if you can come up with a design that eliminates any reverse engineering efforts with fewer costs than worst-case, you've done it.

Here's where that breaks down: "ungameable" is not precise enough to establish worst-case bounds for, in the same way that we can establish worst-case bounds for breaking an MD5 hash (brute-force it - what does "brute-force it" mean for gaming a ranking algorithm, or reverse engineering more generally?). Other than that, were you to come up with such a measurement, it would almost assuredly increase the costs of reverse engineering to infeasibility by increasing the authorization controls in place and decreasing the usability requirements.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#147

Post by dang »

djsumdog wrote: post #105
laurent123456 wrote: post #12

As much as I like HN, I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc. I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]". Some websites manage to fi…

I remember a few weeks back I was looking for a comment reply to my comment. The original post got flagged and the comment itself didn't appear in my comments block! I was really disappointed as the comment I was looking for wouldn't even show up in search.

The comment probably got enough flags to kill it, in which case it would show up as [flagged] [dead] if you turn 'showdead' to 'yes' in your profile.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#148

Post by mirimir »

c3534l wrote: post #139
mirimir wrote: post #127

Conversely, I've wondered how some stories (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857880 ) hit the top of the front page with only a few points. Edit: Thanks all. I get it now :)

Protip: every post hits the front page. Some posts just stay there longer.

OK, I'll look at the algorithm :)

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#149

Post by dang »

The story the OP is complaining about was flagged by users. Moderators never saw it (edit: wrong, we put 2010 on the title by mistake, see downthread [1]). Had we seen it, we would have turned off the flags. There's a long tradition of people looking at HN data and posting about it. Edit #2: since the 2010 thing was our mistake (an accident of sleep deprivation by the looks of it!) I've invited foob to repost the original article using the second-chance mechanism described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and the links there. I think he's planning to do that tomorrow.

The [flagged] annotation only shows up on stories that are heavily flagged, i.e. enough to kill the post. User flags have downweighting effects long before that.

Story rank on HN is determined by upvotes, flags, software, and moderators. Moderators downweight stories to the degree that they don't fit the site guidelines. This doesn't happen by upvotes alone, unfortunately; certain stories routinely get tons of upvotes regardless of how good they are for HN—e.g. anything sensational, indignant, or meta. If we didn't have a compensating factor, those stories would dominate the front page every day and HN would no longer follow its primary rule: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Of course that means HN is subject to our interpretation of what counts as "intellectual curiosity". HN has always worked that way; before we did it, pg did, and he trained us to do it so it would work as before. There's no way around the need for moderator intervention on a site like HN—the clue is in the word 'moderator' itself: left to its own devices the system runs to extremes and it needs a negative feedback loop to dampen it.

When YC is involved, we do this less than usual as a matter of principle. When HN itself is involved it's a little bit different, because the hypnotic power of all things meta causes HN upvoters to go into an upvoting trance. Meta on forums is basically crack, so we routinely downweight such posts—but only so much, to compensate for the crack effect. That's what I've done here, which is why the post is now at #7 rather than #1. It should probably be lower, but I want to illustrate the point that we intervene less, not more, when judgments about ourselves are involved. As a further example, a moderator actually turned off software penalties and user flags on this post this morning, which is probably why it went to #1 in the first place. That's more than I would have done but it shows how seriously we take that principle.

None of this is new information, btw. I've posted about it plenty over the years and am always happy to answer questions.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858850

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#150

Post by Analog24 »

minimaxir wrote: post #15

Historically, the mods have not killed a post for discussing Hacker News meta, although on occasion they apply a penalty to meta submissions. (the original post only had 32 upvotes, which is enough to get swallowed) Indeed, HN recently allowed a post that advocated gaming the system because it encouraged debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362 A conspiracy theory, even backed by data, is not the best ap…

Presenting the facts out of context isn't helpful. The original post might have "only had 32 upvotes" but, as mentioned in this article, it received about 20 in less than an hour. More than enough to get to the front page, where it was steadily receiving more upvotes until it just vanished. The post was not "swallowed".
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