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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

#171

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

ethbro wrote: post #153
dang wrote: post #149

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 ori…

If you don't mind answering, is there a reason [flagged] doesn't show as soon as it starts to downweight?

I would guess that most front page articles have some number of flags from concern trolls, and the down-weighting effect is probably not linear, so it just wouldn't be very informative.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#172

Post by M_Grey »

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…

I'm pretty new here, so take this with a grain of salt. My impression of this place is that it's a pretty highly regulated forum. In particular, it's designed to serve the needs of YC, and is not particularly free. That's the good and the bad of HN. It's a walled garden essentially, but instead of a wall it has very busy gardeners.

Honestly, it's why I like it, but I also recognize that behind all of this is a business, not a chatroom.

Edit: To clarify: there are so many places online to speak whatever is on your mind. What's lacking are places to have a decent conversation, any conversation, that can remain a conversation. How many places like this, with this many users, exist? I can't think of many.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#173

Post by awsoutage »

dang wrote: post #149

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 ori…

An article comes out about how Hacker News has been censored, and Hacker News censors the post... because of "meta crack effect."

Without sounding too snide, it sounds like what's happening is that we do all of the work by posting articles and comments, and hacker news controls the narrative.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#174

Post by david927 »

dang wrote: post #155
minimaxir wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so what's happening to this submission now, since it dropped from #1? :P

You're so quick! I'm busy adding to my comment to explain.

Flagging should be much less effective.

There's no reason why a few people clicking 'flag' should ruin the experience for everyone else.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#175

Post by dang »

ollyoxalls wrote: post #169
dang wrote: post #149

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 ori…

The other post incorrectly had "2010" in the title and I made a comment about how this should be corrected. The "2010" was then removed. If, like you say, the moderators never saw the story then who made these changes? I find it hard to believe that foob would put the wrong year in the title of his own post.

Good question! I will check.

Edit: ok, I think I know what happened now. A moderator put 2010 on the title by mistake. I haven't checked the timestamps on the user flags, but it's possible that people flagged the article because they thought it was old, in which case the title change would have acted as a moderation penalty even though obviously we didn't mean it that way. I was wrong to say "moderators never saw it" because I checked the log for moderation penalties, found nothing, and didn't look for title changes. So I made a mistake too.

We're sorry for the mistake. I don't recall this particular thing ever happening before, but plenty of other moderator errors have. We try to admit them and correct them as soon as we know about them.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#176

Post by Analog24 »

minimaxir wrote: post #165
Analog24 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

"20 in less than an hour" is not a fast velocity.

It was enough to get on the front page.

The point is that the post wasn't swallowed in the usual sense. We now know that the original post fell drastically because it was being flagged by users.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#177

Post by valarauca1 »

minimaxir wrote: post #154
dang wrote: post #149

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 ori…

...so what's happening to this submission now, since it dropped from #1? :P

1. Downvotes after Xkarma you can downvote frontpage items

2. Flags _soft_ downvote people unlock easiers

3. Mods have a ""super"" flag which is the ranking equivalent of aging a post pre-maturely. So the weighting algorithm calculates the post as being much older then it actually is allowing it to slide off the front page faster.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#178

Post by jrs235 »

ethbro wrote: post #153
dang wrote: post #149

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 ori…

If you don't mind answering, is there a reason [flagged] doesn't show as soon as it starts to downweight?

Do you want it show right away? I assume that showing it right away (as soon as possible) will only cause it to fall off even faster and fewer people bother to look at it and possibly upvote it.

I assume that similar to HN meta stories resulting in upvoting trances, seeing [flagged] leads to ignoring the submission.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#179

Post by dang »

david927 wrote: post #174
dang wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're so quick! I'm busy adding to my comment to explain.

Flagging should be much less effective. There's no reason why a few people clicking 'flag' should ruin the experience for everyone else.

The experience wouldn't exist without flagging in the first place. They're an integral part of HN's system, without which it would be overrun with spam, sensationalism, and other kinds of posts that don't belong here.

It's true that the effect of flags isn't perfect in every way, but we have to evaluate this on a whole-system level. I'm not aware of any way to make the whole system work significantly better (otherwise we'd have done it already) and certainly getting rid of flags wouldn't be one.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#180

Post by philh »

david927 wrote: post #174
dang wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're so quick! I'm busy adding to my comment to explain.

Flagging should be much less effective. There's no reason why a few people clicking 'flag' should ruin the experience for everyone else.

I don't think you can say this unless you know how many flags are received by 'good' articles versus 'bad' ones.
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