Earlier quoted context omitted.
Security through obscurity is rarely a winning tactic.
All security is some form of obscurity, is it not?
No. That's not what the phrase means.
Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
281–290 of 327 posts
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
The danger of making it public is that it makes the system much easier to game. The upside is that it is easier to see who is gaming the system. Or that could be another downside if the answer is "the moderators".
Security through obscurity is rarely a winning tactic.
This may be true for locks and cryptography but a message board is not really a 'security system' nor does it fail completely and catastrophically if someone manages to figure out the details of the ranking algorithm or spam countermeasures.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
The danger of making it public is that it makes the system much easier to game. The upside is that it is easier to see who is gaming the system. Or that could be another downside if the answer is "the moderators".
Security through obscurity is rarely a winning tactic.
That's only true when it's known how to publicly secure something.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#284The 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…
> There's no way around the need for moderator intervention on a site like HN—the clue is in the word 'moderator' itself: left to its own devices the system runs to extremes and it needs a negative feedback loop to dampen it. Uh... not really? Left to its own devices, the system will include both extremes and non-extremes. In order to cut extremes out you have to sample what the extremes are, detect them and then min…
> The detection comes by letting users tag stories by content and emotional weight.
So what's to stop malicious users from tagging a post they don't like in such a way that the system sees it as controversial?
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"…
As much as I love this place, every time I find out more about how the sausage is made, I lose faith in HN a little bit more. Look at just the stuff from this case - heavy handed uneven constant moderation (you claim moderators dont see a bunch of stories, but those that you do see like this one, often get adjustments), misreporting, questionable transparency, too much hardly visible power of flags, etc. I know the r…
I'm sorry that any user who loves this place would feel that way! I've tried to answer some of the concerns you mention in comments elsewhere in the thread—not that you'll necessarily agree with the answers, but if there's something unaddressed, let me know, and if you don't get a reply, hn@ycombinator.com is best.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Which part of my comment do you disagree with. I specifically mentioned that I and others appreciate the work the mods are currently doing.
You are wary of them furthering their personal agenda. I quoted that. There seems to be this assumption that good only occurs when some Christ-like martyr falls on their sword for the benefit of other people. The entire world seems to think that the only good men are dead men who died as martyrs to a cause and if someone is getting something out of the deal, they are evil predators. I loathe this idea with every fibe…
> "I wholly approve of them having a personal agenda here."
Any forum with a policy like that will never gain the credibility and respect that HN currently enjoys. If someone wants to create a private forum and moderate it in a way that furthers their personal agenda, as opposed to the community's interests, more power to them, but they should disclose it publicly. As community members, it is entirely reasonable if we ask them whether this is indeed the case.
Thankfully, Dang disagrees with you and isn't moderating HN in a personal-agenda-driven manner (see his post above).
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are wary of them furthering their personal agenda. I quoted that. There seems to be this assumption that good only occurs when some Christ-like martyr falls on their sword for the benefit of other people. The entire world seems to think that the only good men are dead men who died as martyrs to a cause and if someone is getting something out of the deal, they are evil predators. I loathe this idea with every fibe…
> "I wholly approve of them having a personal agenda here." Any forum with a policy like that will never gain the credibility and respect that HN currently enjoys. If someone wants to create a private forum and moderate it in a way that furthers their personal agenda, as opposed to the community's interests, more power to them, but they should disclose it publicly. As community members, it is entirely reasonable if w…
Your reply suggests a huge disconnect between my meaning and your interpretation of my words.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Meta is basically crack, so we routinely downweight such posts Interesting that you make a drug analogy. What's wrong with letting HN users have their crack? Unlike actual crack, there's no danger of side effects, dependency, withdrawal, etc. Maybe the "upvoting trance" is the expression of a sincere communal desire? It's not like it's "trashy" content... meta is simply self-reflection. Why penalize it? Maybe the f…
Speaking of meta, perhaps there could be a Meta: area strictly for meta discussions, similarly to Ask HN:? Then the meta addicts could congregate and upvote all the want there? A slight modification might need to be made so that Meta: prefaced titles never appear in the regular submission queue, or if they do they start with a huge negative factor.
This is more or less what works for Stack Overflow.
How about if there was a bit associated with every post that indicates whether it's meta or not. A submitter can set it when they post if they like; a mod can set or clear it later. Perhaps users could flag posts as being meta as well, i don't know.
Then we just take all the meta posts off the main page, and show them on another top-level page like Ask HN or Show HN.
I i think i'd be happy for meta posts to appear on the 'new' page. There aren't that many of them, so they won't flood it. If they get upvoted, they get promoted to a different place to substantive posts, so they won't clog it.
It's a bit like a GC which allocates large objects in the nursery, so you can still, eg, create a scratch buffer quickly, but promotes them to a large-object heap instead of the normal tenuring generations.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are wary of them furthering their personal agenda. I quoted that. There seems to be this assumption that good only occurs when some Christ-like martyr falls on their sword for the benefit of other people. The entire world seems to think that the only good men are dead men who died as martyrs to a cause and if someone is getting something out of the deal, they are evil predators. I loathe this idea with every fibe…
> "I wholly approve of them having a personal agenda here." Any forum with a policy like that will never gain the credibility and respect that HN currently enjoys. If someone wants to create a private forum and moderate it in a way that furthers their personal agenda, as opposed to the community's interests, more power to them, but they should disclose it publicly. As community members, it is entirely reasonable if w…
Fwiw I hear you and Mz arguing much the same thing here. It's 'personal' in the sense of self-interested but not in the sense of a personal agenda beyond that... or at least we try hard not to be that way.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Which part of my comment do you disagree with. I specifically mentioned that I and others appreciate the work the mods are currently doing.
You are wary of them furthering their personal agenda. I quoted that. There seems to be this assumption that good only occurs when some Christ-like martyr falls on their sword for the benefit of other people. The entire world seems to think that the only good men are dead men who died as martyrs to a cause and if someone is getting something out of the deal, they are evil predators. I loathe this idea with every fibe…
The best way to optimize HN's value to YC is simply by having it be as interesting as possible. Curiosity is the reason the community comes here, and the community coming here is why HN is valuable, so to do it any other way would trade a global optimum for a local one—basically trading the goose that lays golden eggs for some eggs. We're in an unusually fortunate position this way. If HN were a startup constantly needing to get its numbers up, we'd be under business pressure to do things that made HN less interesting. It's a happy coincidence that the most-interesting HN is also the HN that most serves YC's long-term interests.
Secondarily, HN has job ads and (more recently) 'Launch HNs' for startups that get special treatment. The job ads are written about in the FAQ and the launches eventually will be, but we're still figuring out the best way to do them. These are concessions HN grants to YC in return for being funded by YC, and our intent is to have them be both secondary and obvious. I agree that it's fair for HN to make these concessions and especially with your reason for saying so: it's the way to have a sustainably high-quality site, which does not come free. What HN doesn't do is make non-transparent concessions, like moderating anti-YC stories differently. But I've covered that elsewhere in the thread.