21–30 of 84 posts
What's the reason this is being flagged?
"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".
What's the reason this is being flagged?
"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".
"Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we want to, or even think that way.
The reason there was a penalty—the mildest possible—was procedural. For several months after the Snowden news broke back in 2013, HN's front page was overrun with copycat stories that were simply follow-ups and added no new information. Many users complained about this, and they were right. So we applied the best tool we had available, with the intention of taking it off when the flood died down, and so we eventually did.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this discussion is in the best interest of HN because developers on the whole are obviously passionate about the issue and will be a part of how it evolves in the future, one way or another. I…
>because developers on the whole Careful. You are projecting here. This is the very reason that these topics get penalties. When it comes to politics, people assume that everyone must fall on a side and have strong feelings about a given topic. A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone with stories related to these topics and it turns a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read…
Not having a valid counter-argument to being accused of apathy, is ignorance.
A good thing about America is that while the "politics" lag behind citizens and US companies try at least to solve partially the problem. I liked these bits: Google encrypted the backhaul communications between their data centers to prevent passive monitoring. Apple was the first forward with an FDE-by-default smartphone (kudos!) We often denigrate US and his biggest companies like: Apple, Google or Microsoft. So I a…
"Our data" may be sort of safe, but the civil rights are being eroded, which is a much bigger issue. Having such powerful entities living in complete independence from the government, and with complete unaccountability, is a social disaster.
Besides, the data owned by a user in the more "immediate" sense, may be sort of safe, but don't forget that you're not the only possessing data about you; there is a large ecosystem, and such entities will be always a step ahead in the game.
In absence of accountability/civil rights, such entities are completely free to rape you, independently of your technical private defenses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".
There hasn't been any penalty on NSA/Snowden stories for a long time. I'm surprised to see this even come up, since I've commented on it quite a bit and thought the information had gotten around by now. "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we want to, or even think that way. The reason there was a penalty—the mildest possible—was procedural. For several months after the Snowden news brok…
I don't see how a blanket penalty works better than manually removing the small number of genuinely pointless articles.
Reminds me of Lessig's "Code is Law".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".
There hasn't been any penalty on NSA/Snowden stories for a long time. I'm surprised to see this even come up, since I've commented on it quite a bit and thought the information had gotten around by now. "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we want to, or even think that way. The reason there was a penalty—the mildest possible—was procedural. For several months after the Snowden news brok…
The higher up on Hacker News an article is, the more awareness will typically be allocated to the story. If a story drops from the front page, significantly less attention will be allocated to it.
While the penalties might not have been intended to minimize awareness of these stories in the greater scheme of things, they were certainly meant to minimize awareness of the stories on Hacker News.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this discussion is in the best interest of HN because developers on the whole are obviously passionate about the issue and will be a part of how it evolves in the future, one way or another. I…
>because developers on the whole Careful. You are projecting here. This is the very reason that these topics get penalties. When it comes to politics, people assume that everyone must fall on a side and have strong feelings about a given topic. A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone with stories related to these topics and it turns a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read…
> a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it
talk about projecting. i'm sure it was super democratic and indeed the voice of the people that got an NSA/snowden filter put in place and how robin hood of you to spring to its defence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".
More specifically, HN tries to avoid inflammatory topics that cause a lot of ultimately fruitless discussion ("flamewars"), typically identified by news items with more comments than votes. Political topics are frowned upon for causing this. I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from th…
No, that's incorrect. The first thing the site guidelines say is:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
There's no question of the Snowden stories being off-topic. The issue is purely one of balance. The right principle seems to me to be that articles with significant new information are more HN-appropriate than those without it.
Similar to the HN penalty, reddit also seems to have some Snowden countermeasures in effect. It was a very popular IAmA, but the Android AMA app, displayed only 2 answers for it, and the 3 people who wanted to answer, Laura Poitras, Ed Snowden and Glen Greenwald, were limited to about one answer per 10 minutes, so for the whole hour they could answer about 10 questions. This limits usability and civil interactions a…
I love that you completely guessed the incorrect answer, and then moved right to calling it censorship and critiquing Reddit based on your assumption. Snowden's account was rate-limited because accounts with no activity are more scrutinized for spam purposes. If the other accounts were (and I see no evidence of that, since Glenn Greenwald has done his own AMA before), it's the same reason. That limit exists because n…