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An Update on Hacker News

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Re: An Update on Hacker News

#151

Post by jval »

dang wrote: post #69
rspeer wrote: post #37

> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately. This seems like one of the cases where HN's moderation is both draconian and completely opaque. I can't flag comments, and I have no idea why. I certainly don't think of myself as an abusive user. Maybe I accidentally clicked the "flag" link once. If that gets flagging privileges remo…

As other users have pointed out, to flag a comment you have to click on 'link' to go to the comment's item page [1]. I don't know why PG designed it this way but have always assumed it was a speed bump to reduce impulsive flagging, since flags are more powerful than downvotes. We never remove flagging privileges because of just one flag. The concept of a mistake is all too familiar over here. 1. https://hn.algolia.co…

I feel like the UI should be consistent dang, because I've been flagging entire threads where there's an inappropriate comment (not knowing that there was a comment flag there).

I think at the moment it's too easy to hit that flag button on the front page (as others have said, especially on mobile), so maybe it should be moved back too?

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#152

Post by dang »

eksith wrote: post #141
dang wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people be…

What are your thoughts on this episode? https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...

That was before I started working on HN, so I don't have any inside details. But I'll give you my take on what I think happened, based on the time I did spend working with pg on the site. I need a few minutes though--there's another comment pending on my stack. Will come back and edit this.

(Edit: I haven't forgotten, but have to run out to an appointment, so this will need to wait for another hour or two. Sorry about that.)

Edit: back now. My gut feeling is that PG might not have had enough time to look into all the details. I say that because June 2012 was about the peak of when HN moderation was extremely time-constrained (I started a few months later) and the only option was to enforce the guidelines generically.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#153

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #147
throwit99 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you don't personally, maybe you don't as a group anymore. As I suggested in my original post though, I have more useful things to do than look back at comments I posted years ago and compile evidence. I've moved on. I'm sure it happens a lot more often than you realise, because in general when people get hellbanned, they come to the same realisations as me.

> anymore Not only did we never ban people for criticizing YC companies, the very first thing PG told me when I started moderating HN, and the thing that he emphasized most strongly after that, was never to do things that could be construed (or misconstrued) as censorship of anti-YC stories. (I've edited out some irritation that leaked through in my original version of this comment.)

[deleted]

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#154

Post by DanBC »

I hope that flagging is used to consider when a user is shadow-banned and that down-votes just remove points.

> third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change.

I recently lost over 70 points across two posts. The first post was rightly down voted. (I would have preferred it to have been killed to stop losing votes) but the second post IMO was suffering from pile-on downvotes. Killing the first post would have prevented some of those follow-on downvotes. Without the context of the first postthe second post would have received some mix of votes.

Killing unpopular opinions might be too harsh, but people need to start applyimg corrective upvotes if they feel that strongly about minority opinions.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#155

Post by [deleted] »

vectorpush wrote: post #111

How does HN's moderation staff feel about users who are dead, completely oblivious to it, but who continue to post, sometimes for years after the fact without any kind of warning that they are wasting their time. Sometimes I check the comment history of these dead posters; 80% of the time it appears like they are a genuine troll who was correctly moderated out of the community, however, a significant portion of the t…

[deleted]

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#156

Post by existencebox »

dang wrote: post #135
throwit99 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this happen to me when I critiqued a YC backed company. Had a few thousand in 'meaningless internet karma points'. You pretty soon realise after a few further comments anyway, so I doubt it's actually effective. It's pretty mean spirited though - generally a "douchebag" move. It'd be like having a bad employee, but instead of firing him, or discussing his work, just don't bother paying him any more. After being…

Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people be…

For what its worth, validity of the hellbanning aside, I do agree with the points he brought up re: emergent problems in scored boards. The karma system does tend to contribute heavily to the echo-chambery nature of many of these discussion forums; and while I certainly think HN is in a much better state than any others that come to mind, it's not immune. (Mentioning because to me, this point is far closer to home than the actual reason for the ban, yet often seems to go without effective discussion of possible remediation.)

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#157

Post by gojomo »

stock_toaster wrote: post #121
cs702 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than once, I've unintentionally downvoted comments I meant to upvote, upvoted comments I meant to downvote, and/or clicked on a button I didn't mean to click (that includes clicking on 'reply' after writing something that doesn't really add any value and almost instantly regretting it). So I agree, it would be great to have more/better undo options!

Agreed. I wish the up/down vote links were on opposite sides (I would prefer they were bigger too, but at least spacing them would be preferable). Something more like this.. ▲ cs702 31 minutes ago ▼ | link note: they are supposed to be the same size.. oddly unicode down triangle is rending larger for me.

Also it's sufficiently typical to have the timestamp be the permalink to the post/comment, that the "| link" could be eliminated.

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#159

Post by opendais »

eksith wrote: post #141
dang wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever notice how people who make claims about why they got banned never provide links to the posts in question? That's because their claims are nearly always false. If users could look at the actual record, their perennial sob story of perfectly reasonable behavior struck down by bullying censors would evaporate. So they make new accounts and post linkless statements designed to be unanswerable. We don't ban people be…

What are your thoughts on this episode? https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...

> The guidelines (as you probably already knew) also say that if you have a question about moderation, send us an email instead of posting about it on the site.

So it sounds like got banned for refusing to follow the guidelines?

Re: An Update on Hacker News

#160

Post by ars »

tptacek wrote: post #73
jonnathanson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments." In theory, no, downvoting is not supposed to be used to disagree. It's supposed to be used to move "stupid" comments (inarticulate, illogical, poorly argued, etc.) down towards the bottom of the screen. Flagging, on the other hand, is meant to call out wildly inappropriate, offensi…

That's a reasonable take on what downvoting is for, but the HN take is that it's better to downvote a disagreement than to write a noisy bad comment to express the same disagreement.

> is that it's better to downvote a disagreement than to write a noisy bad comment to express the same disagreement

No, quite the opposite. (See I wrote a comment explaining that I disagree, I didn't just click the arrow. Much more valuable to you and the reader.)

And that's why you are wrong, by saying why you disagree you might (rarely) change the posters mind, or more likely change a 3rd readers mind about the topic.

Clicking downvote is pretty useless.

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