Analyzing HN moderation and censorship • Hacker News Board

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#171

Post by dsfyu404ed » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

wizbright wrote: post #112

flavio81 wrote: post #78

In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesti…

Really, the users police themselves for the most part. People aren't as obnoxious as many Reddit users tend to be. That being said, the front page changes a good amount during the day so nothing really sits at the top for awhile unless it is a really popular post. The last one Drew submitted dropped down pretty quick if I remember correctly.

> Really, the users police themselves for the most part.

This is a very double edged sword, especially when advice is being given. Being able to anonymously down-vote BS rather than explaining one's objection creates a positive feedback loop.

Someone will ask about something, subjects that are not mainstream enough for many people to know but are still common enough for many people to have exposure to are particularly dangerous. Reddit's design amplifies even the slightest majority opinion to where it looks like a near unanimously held opinion. If the first ten people on the scene are laymen who just up-vote whatever the relevant old wives tail or urban legend is then an actual SME who comes along saying "but you're wrong, it doesn't actually work like that" they often get down-voted to oblivion.

People tend to Google it when they see conflicting opinions so what the first page of Google says is highly relevant. Now, for a semi-mainstream topic information on the general case is far more accessible than the specific case. The result is a lot of advice that is terrible for the specific situation but good in general gets tossed around like it's gospel.

Reddit doesn't self police. The appearance of consensus where there isn't one creates the illusion of everyone stepping in line because any non-majority (majority local to the sub) opinion is negative-weighted.

Edit: realized you were talking about HN users, my comment about Reddit still stands.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#172

Post by sillysaurus3 » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:06 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #139

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said you'd be two generations of tech ahead of HN. I know it was tongue in cheek, and I'm not calling you out. I'm nerding out about how much functionality pg managed to pack into so few lines of code. And it all worked! No data loss, no massive security problem, and the last time HN was down for >24h was because pg manually edited the database and accidentally created a circular comment chain. One way to look at…

You can call me out any time you'd like. I think an actual database backend for this site is only a couple years old. Or do we actually have one yet? I know the API has one, but HN doesn't run the API. It's possible this thing is still relying on flat files.

Flat files FTW. Proof that a simple solution can scale. And not just in a "Why the fuck would you subject yourself to this torture?" kind of way, but in a "This actually simplifies everything" way. It's why Arc was so fucking fast: remember how impactful memcached was? Arc had that from day one.

Here's how it works. Everything is loaded into memory at startup. You can think of it like a bigass JSON tree. Anytime you change the tree, write the whole thing out to disk. Since all the data is loaded from file "foo", and you write out to "foo.tmp" followed by `mv foo.tmp foo`, there is no risk of data loss, ever.

So what about sharding? Well, yeah, that's a problem. But it's not a problem that HN had to deal with. You can see how effective it was to throw a single 64GB RAM monster at the problem rather than a cluster of servers. The moment they hooked up Cloudflare to HN, they got all the same benefits a big cluster would provide anyway.

People can be prejudiced against this simplicity all they want, but it's hard to argue with results. You don't even need to know SQL to start using it.

"But migrations --" well, Arc makes it super easy to define a "template", which is just a set of fields, and each field is whatever you want them to be.

https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/6b4ed26acc9c...

  (deftem item
    id         nil
    type       nil
    by         nil
    ip         nil
    time       (seconds)
    url        nil
    title      nil
    text       nil
    votes      nil   ; elts each (time ip user type score)
    score      0
    sockvotes  0
    flags      nil
    dead       nil
    deleted    nil
    parts      nil
    parent     nil
    kids       nil
    keys       nil)

So yes, theoretically if you wanted to rename "kids" to "children", you're gonna have to process all the old data. But 1. then don't do that, and 2. even still, it's not hard to do that anyway.

It's sort of similar to mongoose record definitions.

But look, HN is proof positive that this system can work and can scale to a top-1000 website. 99% of webapps won't even come close to those performance requirements. And when you do approach them, you can find ways to make it scale.

My main focus has been updating Arc to run on JS, and to add keyword arguments. That way you'll be able to use the whole JS ecosystem too.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#173

Post by wvenable » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:07 PM UTC

andrewguenther wrote: post #154

wvenable wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. If you want your forum to have some nutritional value than you can't let the candy topics run rampant no matter how much people seem to want them.

I think that makes sense. But how much is too much? Say you have a very high post volume on one side of an issue, so you start moderating more heavily. Do you allow posts through representing the other side? Is that "fair"?

For the most part, the topic gathers posts from both sides regardless of the content of the linked article. So simply flagging the entire topic away is fair.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#174

Post by _jal » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:11 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #160

_jal wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ends up being a debate about word choice, and I normally hate that. But there is good reason to distinguish the two carefully, and the easiest way to do that is word choice. I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind…

>I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.…

> feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further

Think you're right. You completely ignored my point, so this is pointless. But the root issue is not different than, either through ignorance or deceptive calculation, claiming that copyright infringement is theft. It is a category error that negatively effects people's understanding of what's going on, so it matters.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#175

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

What I personally dislike is the "spam filter". I sometimes hit it when participating in multiple threads and it says "You're submitting too fast, please slow down" - and it does not reset itself after sometimes over 8 hours.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#176

Post by wizbright » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #171

wizbright wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, the users police themselves for the most part. People aren't as obnoxious as many Reddit users tend to be. That being said, the front page changes a good amount during the day so nothing really sits at the top for awhile unless it is a really popular post. The last one Drew submitted dropped down pretty quick if I remember correctly.

> Really, the users police themselves for the most part. This is a very double edged sword, especially when advice is being given. Being able to anonymously down-vote BS rather than explaining one's objection creates a positive feedback loop. Someone will ask about something, subjects that are not mainstream enough for many people to know but are still common enough for many people to have exposure to are particularl…

Reddit is a whole different story. Especially with the brigading that happens quite often in some sub-reddits but yes, HN users tend to be better at self moderation and the mod team has also done a pretty good job at running the site. Transparency will only benefit the users and allows us to see why some decisions were made and how we can fix them moving forward if we need to.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#177

Post by astura » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #156

tptacek wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people who are deeply concerned about sexism in this industry also flag those stories, because it only takes 2-3 misogynist trolls to create a 300-comment shitshow out of them. There are still kinds of threads that this site simply can't do well, and it's better we not pretend we can until the guidelines and mod tools evolve to actually make them work here.

And, to underline, we have a lot more than 2-3 misogynist trolls in these parts. Reflexive rich-white-dude defensiveness is perhaps HN's greatest challenge.

Hopefully they are just trolls, trolls just post comments that are inflammatory to get people riled up, not because they actually mean what they post. If they actually are misogynistic and think they their contributions are reasonable and welcome, that's a different problem.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#178

Post by sillysaurus3 » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:13 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #143

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said you'd be two generations of tech ahead of HN. I know it was tongue in cheek, and I'm not calling you out. I'm nerding out about how much functionality pg managed to pack into so few lines of code. And it all worked! No data loss, no massive security problem, and the last time HN was down for >24h was because pg manually edited the database and accidentally created a circular comment chain. One way to look at…

>I think it's possible to do the same thing for modern webdev. Arc's goal was to be a reliable foundation for building webapps. It comes with a user+admin system out of the box, for example. Every Arc app does. Forums written in other languages do as well - and any decent framework can just include user management as a dependency. To me it doesn't seem like an unqualified good idea for Arc to bake all of that into th…

It's pretty handy. A few times over the years, I've needed to throw together a standard "manage this data" type of app. I just extend the standard blog.arc app that ships with Arc: https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/master/arc3....

Bam, you get CRUD for free, you get special superpowers if you're logged in as an admin, and you can put in access controls so that other people can log in as other types of users and see a subset of the data. I dunno, it's pretty great. You even get a REPL at /repl in case you need to hop on and run some code on production. (If something seems amiss, rather than bother with grepping logfiles, you'd head to /repl and start asking questions about the current state of the app. This tends to be a lot faster.)

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#179

Post by losteverything » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:13 PM UTC

I never gave thought to the moderator position till this analysis.

I wonder if it is a full time job. Do other sites have full time moderators?

Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past.

To compare and contrast, if you are a construction worker making residential housing, you and see its effect on people and humanity. Year after year and perhaps decade after decade you can drive by and know your work helped a family. Yet the effort of a moderator goes away within hours and is hard (for me) to see the long lasting value.

This write up helped me think about a topic i never thought of before. Thanks

(HN moderators: i know u make this site a good read. Thanks)

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#180

Post by deadmetheny » Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:13 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #163

wyager wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. The Reddit mods and admins are notoriously censorious. If you want minimal moderation, you would need to go to the anonymous imageboards. The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.

> The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many. Could you provide some examples of how the content is better there? I'd be interested, but any time I've ever tried to investigate, I can't get past all the unfettered crap

At least on 4chan, the content is all time-limited, so finding persistent examples isn't really doable. However, the more niche boards are full of quality content for their particular niches, and depending on the culture of the particular board people can be very helpful.

I personally appreciate 4chan for generally weighing the value of a particular post on its own merits rather than any sort of user history or whatever - it's a good counter-balance to places like HN or Reddit where comments can get buried or removed if they go against the hive mind and there's no post history to dig through. I definitely get how the trade-off of inflammatory posts being more common isn't as palatable to some people, though, so it's kind of a mixed bag on if you'll get anything out of it or not. Opinions, etc.