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Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#31

Post by dang »

fragmede wrote: post #29
dang wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008383 was on the front page for over 6 hours. We turned off the flags on it for a while to allow for that.

Just wondering, what's the reasoning for not applying more heavy handed moderation on which stories get dumped off the front page? Why not manually suppress a submission when you think the comments are likely to be of low quality, rather than leave an unrepliable comment at the top? A more curated place would be welcome, in order to stave off some of the eternal September-ness places undergo. There are other places o…

Moderation is soft power. People think we have the power to be heavy handed, and a lot of users think that's what we do (just look at threads like this one), but we don't and we aren't. Mostly we just try to please the community, while doing our best to foster the mandate of the site. Of course this is impossible; the community can't be pleased, because different people want different things and many are incompatible. But if there's a way to keep it least-unpleased, that's what we're going for.

The posts you're asking about are in the vexed category where parts of the community feel they absolutely belong on HN while other parts believe they don't. Not only that, but the topics themselves have contradictory qualities: they're partly intellectually interesting, partly sensational gossip, partly a political slugfest. Unfortunately the slugfest is dominating everything else right now. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824. That's also why I pinned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010948 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010908 to the top of the two threads last night.

I don't know if that answers your question. It's hard to talk about this briefly. I've written a lot about how we moderate politics on HN, and some of it may make sense in this context. Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29219906

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

Lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

If you take a look at those explanations and still have a question I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to hear what it is.

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#32

Post by dang »

It's a combination of user flags, software penalties, and moderation downweights. But there have also been moderation upweights - for example last night we turned off flags on the Twitter-Musk-journalists thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008383) so that it would be on the front page. It ended up being there for 6 hours.

If you want more explanation, I answered a similar question the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824 - though more in a cri de coeur style.

Btw, none of this is new—it happens every time there's a major ongoing topic with divisive qualities. The principles we use are: (1) downweight the follow-ups so there isn't too much repetition; (2) upweight (not a word - I just mean turn off user flags and software penalties) the ones that have significant new information*; and (3) downweight the hopeless flamewars, where the community is incapable of curious conversation and people are just bashing things they hate (or rather, bashing each other in the name of things they hate).

The most important is #3, because it's about preserving the ecosystem. We want HN to live another day. No thread is worth more than that, despite how huge and existential these stories always feel.

If HN were an art house theater, those principles would look like this: (1) don't show the copycat movies; (2) do show the interesting movies; (3) when the theater catches fire, stop the movie and deal with the fire.

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#34

Post by NigelThornberry »

yuppie_scum wrote: post #25
proc0 wrote: post #9

I'm seeing a lot of Musk posts, but they're mostly negative. I'm just saying, I visit dozens of online aggregators, and I've yet to come across one that is "balanced". It's almost impossible at this point. The polarization is real.

Bud, not everything has “balance.” Some things are black and white.

Posting a controversial figure's location to the web in real-time puts his safety in jeopardy. That's as black and white as it gets, champ.

Re: Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

#35

Post by trasz2 »

dang wrote: post #27
trasz2 wrote: post #18

HN is owned by YCombinator. They must not annoy their (potential) business partners.

We don't moderate HN that way, as anyone can tell for themselves by looking at HN. There isn't any "business partner" who wouldn't have been "alienated" years ago by such shitty "moderation". (Btw, the only "business partners" that I know YC to be interested in are prospective startup founders who hopefully will apply and get funded. That's who YC's success depends on.) You've been breaking the site guidelines badly,…

Banned for pointing out that you are lying about your moderation policy, nice!
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