I guess the acid test will be what happens to this post. If the first one was removed via manual intervention for whatever reason, then this one surely will be too.
Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
31–40 of 327 posts
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#32Posting on a social news site is a privilege, not a right. I've had stuff removed from Reddit and a few from Hacker News that got flagged after going on the front page...I've had stories on Reddit that got many upvotes and still removed just as it was going viral because the mods didn't like it...it's just the way it goes. It def. can seem unfair at times. No question about it.
> Posting on a social news site is a privilege, not a right. I certainly don't share the sentiment. There are lots of places I or other people can visit and post to, what makes this particular site commend value is precisely the community and user-base it has fostered over the years. Thus, I believe that this kind of meta discussion does provide considerable value to the community.
It may be a privilege, but in this case my reading Hacker News is a privilege for them, and not their right. And I want to know what stories are manually suppressed in order to decide if i still grant them that privilege.
Also, check out Tim Berner Lee's article about the internet being hijacked by the likes of Facebook and Google in order to understand why your 'I am grateful for the privilege' attitude is wrong...
Edit: argh, I attached this to the wrong post. I was responding to paulpauper of course.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#33Hacker News is nothing but a censored echo chamber, pretending otherwise at this point is pure ignorance. Anything that doesn't fit the narrative will be beaten down or removed.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#34As much as I like HN, I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc. I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]". Some websites manage to fi…
I've got my account (with 9+k point) banned. Which is, of course, annoying, but the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well. There was also a lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the guidelines, so… And while some of my comments might be harsh I sometimes wonder if overzealous moderation leads…
Why not indicate your previous account?
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#35Don't forget that HN tries to detect vote fraud. So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.
Another possibility is that voting rings for _other_ posts flag maliciously to remove the competition and give their posts a relative boost. Maybe author can find correlations with other posts that were showing on the front page at the same time as the flagged ones and see how _their_ rankings got boosted due to the flagging.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#36As much as I like HN, I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc. I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]". Some websites manage to fi…
I was under the impression HN start out as a more scoped / directed version of Reddit.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#37The 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…
> Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it.
Obscuring an algorithm or making it more tedious to reverse may not make it perfectly secure, but that's not the goal. It's not like actual information security, where loss of the encryption keys means your product is broken or your database is on the Internet. You're just trying to minimize the workload on humans who act as a back-up for the few posts that slip through.
If an email spam detection algorithm was public, spammers could precisely craft their content to slip through. If the heuristics for showing a CAPTCHA were public, bots could automate their requests to avoid it. If a ranking algorithm was public, people who might financially benefit from the front-page traffic could force content there through vote rings and sock puppets.
If the algorithm is secret, far fewer will be able to do so, and this small fraction of abusers can be handled by humans.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#38The 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…
> whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front Mods (as far as I know, I'm not one) never forcibly remove things from the front page. These are almost always the result of user flagging.
There can be the reverse though. A controversial post may get flagged repeatedly but the impact of flagging could be disabled by mods to not disable the post.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#39The 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…
> whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front Mods (as far as I know, I'm not one) never forcibly remove things from the front page. These are almost always the result of user flagging.
Those are marked first "flagged" as a warning, and then "dead" when the user flags reach a high enough level.
This article however is about stories that disappear without receiving either.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#40Don't forget that HN tries to detect vote fraud. So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.
I've chatted to mods on various sites over the years and I've heard that "voting rings", particularly the automated ones, often try to obscure their upvotes by also upvoting obscure stories and downvoting competing stories.