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Open secrets about Hacker News

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Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#201

Post by kuu »

dredmorbius wrote: post #177
kuu wrote: post #67

If pool is curated by moderators and dang is the only moderator, does it mean that pool is actually dang selection? :)

It's possible for HN readers to make suggestions for the pool, and I'll do this periodically. Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment, most often. I don't nominate my own posts, of course. It may be a matter of how many…

I didn't know we could do that. What's the process for nominating a story?

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#202

Post by kuu »

dang wrote: post #151
kuu wrote: post #67

If pool is curated by moderators and dang is the only moderator, does it mean that pool is actually dang selection? :)

I'm not the only moderator, and there are a few non-moderators who also contribute to pool selection. I'd really like to open that mechanism up to the community but it's still not obvious how to make that work well. Most ways of doing it would just recreate the voting system, and we already have one of those.

> I'm not the only moderator

I misunderstood the article and translated "main" to "only". Thanks for the clarification!

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#203

Post by throwaway0a5e »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #7

> In other words, the story must persuade 13.3% or more of readers to up-vote. That’s a pretty high conversion rate. This I feel is a very good thing. Up-votes to readership is a good correlation and is better than Reddit's hotness algorithm for finding good content which seems to be just up-votes over time. The main contribution to article goodness seems only to be the choice of those that read and up-vote however a…

>That’s a pretty high conversion rate

Hence the constant stream of articles confirming tropes that play to the HN demographics.

It's basically impossible to have a reliable 10+% conversion rate without targeting the lowest common denominator.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#204

Post by actually_a_dog »

arp242 wrote: post #99
actually_a_dog wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely annoying. It doesn't give you any indication how you triggered it, nor does it give you any indication how long you need to wait until you can post normally again. What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two things are oversights. Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this feature is intended to be annoying, because your…

Interestingly, I have never hit this. I heard about it before, and I have sometimes posted a fair number of comments over a fairly short amount of time too, but somehow I've never hit any limit on this. This leads me to believe that in most (though perhaps not all) cases people are probably posting short comments. Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but overall it's the sort of thing HN tries to discourage, which isn'…

I first experienced it a few weeks ago, coincidentally after I started experiencing some kind of weird, mass downvoting of basically every comment I write. For some reason, this mass downvoting is continuing.

I don't mean that literally every comment I write is getting downvoted to below zero. Rather, I'll write something, it will accumulate a couple to several upvotes, and then, those upvotes all go away over the course of a few more hours, sometimes to be replaced by net downvotes.

The end result is that I actually have less karma now than I did a few weeks ago. And, I wouldn't particularly care about those fake internet points, if the loss of them didn't seemingly come with these weird, arbitrary-seeming restrictions like "you are posting too fast."

TBH, it's getting to the point where I'm about ready to abandon this account.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#205

Post by newbamboo »

dang wrote: post #146
newbamboo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just assumed he had some intense business interests involving trade with China. He has had a heavy moderation hand when people are critical of the CCP or for example what was formerly thought of as the conspiracy theory about COVIDs likely lab leak origin. He seems to have come around a little bit on this maybe he read about the Uighurs or who knows.

It's true that I/we come down heavily on nationalistic flamewar, slurs, and groundless insinuations about spies and shills and bots and manipulators and all that kind of thing. But this isn't related to China—it follows clearly from the site guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ) and is the same whichever country or group is at issue. Guidelines-breaking comments do frequently appear about Ch…

I’m hesitant to respond because I don’t know that I can really add anything meaningful other to say that I think one day history will change the way you and others view some of those comments you’ve considered flamebait. Lab leak is one example. I think that’s now acceptable as a topic of discussion amongst educated adults, but it was deemed a “groundless insinuation” at one point and I believe something that would get moderated here, maybe I’m wrong about that. Meanwhile many comments get posted that make fair and strong criticisms of Facebook, or apple or the surveillance state in the USA, five eyes and so forth. I think you and others do a great job of moderating and I’m not trying to argue otherwise, just that I think flamebait is subjective and it’s possible to be overzealous and that criticism of the CCP is no less legitimate than criticism of the NSA, FBI, the prosecution of Julian Assange, etc… I say that with great respect and gratitude for the generally excellent work that you do.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#206

Post by dredmorbius »

kuu wrote: post #201
dredmorbius wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for HN readers to make suggestions for the pool, and I'll do this periodically. Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment, most often. I don't nominate my own posts, of course. It may be a matter of how many…

I didn't know we could do that. What's the process for nominating a story?

I'll just email with a title "2nd-chance nomination: story-ID title"

And include the link in the post.

The story-ID is the numeric part of the post URL.

For this thread, where the post URL is

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024032
The story-ID is 29024032

(Moderators can use the story-ID via browser extensions / bookmarklets, I just learned yesterday.)

Similarly, include the story-ID for other issues (e.g., editorialised or clickbait title, suggesting a canonical URL, vouching flagged stories, spam).

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#207

Post by dang »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #204
arp242 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, I have never hit this. I heard about it before, and I have sometimes posted a fair number of comments over a fairly short amount of time too, but somehow I've never hit any limit on this. This leads me to believe that in most (though perhaps not all) cases people are probably posting short comments. Nothing wrong with that sometimes, but overall it's the sort of thing HN tries to discourage, which isn'…

I first experienced it a few weeks ago, coincidentally after I started experiencing some kind of weird, mass downvoting of basically every comment I write. For some reason, this mass downvoting is continuing. I don't mean that literally every comment I write is getting downvoted to below zero. Rather, I'll write something, it will accumulate a couple to several upvotes, and then, those upvotes all go away over the co…

Your account is rate-limited. I described this elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29028227. Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If you want the rate limit turned off, we'd be happy to do that as long as we have reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future. I'm sorry for the annoyance but we have to do what we can to prevent this place from burning itself to a crisp, and if you want to post without being throttled then we need your help with that.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#208

Post by actually_a_dog »

dang wrote: post #207
actually_a_dog wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first experienced it a few weeks ago, coincidentally after I started experiencing some kind of weird, mass downvoting of basically every comment I write. For some reason, this mass downvoting is continuing. I don't mean that literally every comment I write is getting downvoted to below zero. Rather, I'll write something, it will accumulate a couple to several upvotes, and then, those upvotes all go away over the co…

Your account is rate-limited. I described this elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29028227 . Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... If you want the rate limit turned off, we'd be happy to do that as long as we have reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future. I'm sorry for the annoyance but we have to do what we can to pr…

I can't provide you with that assurance without more specific information as to what exactly I've done wrong. You've removed the punishment so far from the act being punished, then hidden it behind a cryptic error message, so that I have no idea what not to do in the future.

Rather than prostrate myself before the mod team, only to end up having this happen again, I'd honestly rather flush this account down the toilet, go grab a VPN and start again. If nothing else, I'm guessing that would get rid of the random, mass downvoting that's driving me crazy, and it would save us both some time.

Re: Open secrets about Hacker News

#210

Post by nomaxx117 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #128
weinzierl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting idea and another rabbit hole to fall into. There are this uninteresting posts that never get any attention (no upvotes, no comments) and there are the popular posts that get a ton of upvotes and comments. That much is understood. Occasionally, though, I have this post that gets a decent amount of upvotes but not a single comment. I never understood why. I post for the comments and not for the u…

If you want comments, just post something wrong! https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law >Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

This is far and away one of my favorite metrics. If I see something with more comments than upvotes on here, I can expect an intense debate over something controversial. These tend to be some of my favorite comment sections.
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