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Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

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Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#351

Post by dragonwriter »

mnglkhn2 wrote: post #119
yorwba wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paid submissions are already disclosed by the inability to vote or leave comments. They also tend to be by one of a few companies looking for developers.

My comment is prompted by the realization that recently (for the past year or so) a lot of general interest NYTimes articles shoot straight up to HN front page. There are two explanations: either the HN crowd is turning into a general interest one or YC/HN has a deal with NYTimes to help the later increase their memberships. Based on how the (down)votes go, I would give it a fair chance to the HN crowd turning into a…

> My comment is prompted by the realization that recently (for the past year or so) a lot of general interest NYTimes articles shoot straight up to HN front page.

I've noticed that for a lot longer, and for a lot more than just the New York Times.

> either the HN crowd is turning into a general interest one

The thing about "general interests" is that they are often shared even among members of a community centered around more specific special interests.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#352

Post by DanBC »

flavio81 wrote: post #78

In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesti…

> so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.

I submit a lot (although not nearly as much as some others) and I have no idea of what submission will be good or not.

Some things I think are good don't take off, and get put in the second chance queue. Other things I think are good don't get put in that queue, and I don't know why.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#353

Post by dragonwriter »

matt4077 wrote: post #194
andrewguenther wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found moderation on HN to be a bit heavy handed recently. Specifically when it comes to the issue of sexism in SV. No matter the opinion, posts on this seem to get removed shortly after reaching the front page. Question for the mods: Why? It doesn't appear to be a bias towards either side. Is the perception just that people are tied of hearing about it? Why not let the users decide that?

HN's readership is a bit less progressive than what you'd expect from the age/education demographics–or at least than what I'd expect. See, for example, this very article calling out the moderation of a submission on anti-white racism in the restaurant industry, while there are probably dozens of stories buried each week exploring racism or sexism on the tech sector. Yes, some of those do make it to the front page. B…

> But in terms of /I just think that's breaking-expectations-bias: "Man bites dog" stories get more attention than "Dog bites man", because the community expects the latter and doesn't see it as newsworthy.

> yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.

No, its not. (Its true that it contains content that is to the right of what you'd usually see in the WSJ, but it also contains content very far to the left of what you'd find in the WSJ; on balance, it is very much not to the right of the WSJ, though it might well be to the libertarian side of the WSJ.)

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#354

Post by anigbrowl »

tptacek wrote: post #332
Mz wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Graham is originally from the UK. I believe Dan Gackle is Canadian in origin. Patio11 is a white American male living in Japan. Jacquesm is Dutch. Tokenadult has an Asian wife and has lived in Asia. My impression is that the forum is fairly multicultural. It is not a monolith of white American males/white American male culture. I am much more concerned with feeling heard than with whether or not they have firsth…

I don't think this is a super productive debate to have here, but I do want to clarify that I'm not calling for more diversity on the mod staff, as much as just an awareness of what the mod staff is.

Same. I just wondered about it because first-hand experience isn't always as transferable as one would wish.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#355

Post by krapp »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #172
tptacek wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can call me out any time you'd like. I think an actual database backend for this site is only a couple years old. Or do we actually have one yet? I know the API has one, but HN doesn't run the API. It's possible this thing is still relying on flat files.

Flat files FTW. Proof that a simple solution can scale. And not just in a "Why the fuck would you subject yourself to this torture?" kind of way, but in a "This actually simplifies everything" way. It's why Arc was so fucking fast: remember how impactful memcached was? Arc had that from day one. Here's how it works. Everything is loaded into memory at startup. You can think of it like a bigass JSON tree. Anytime you…

>"But migrations --" well, Arc makes it super easy to define a "template", which is just a set of fields, and each field is whatever you want them to be.

That's... just a struct or a map in any other language. Convenient but not necessarily a point in Arc's favor per se.

>So yes, theoretically if you wanted to rename "kids" to "children", you're gonna have to process all the old data. But 1. then don't do that, and 2. even still, it's not hard to do that anyway.

It's still an argument against using flat-files. Updating a site with a proper database isn't typically tied to disk read/write speeds - at best renaming "kids" to "children" means changing a field in a model and maybe a template - and that's a fixed amount of work regardless of the number of records you have.

>My main focus has been updating Arc to run on JS, and to add keyword arguments. That way you'll be able to use the whole JS ecosystem too.

You mean Node/NPM on the backend? That might be interesting. I'm not familiar enough with Arc to know (I've only played with Anarki a bit, but I have too many random projects on my plate as it is) but does it even have dependency management?

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#356

Post by anigbrowl »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #307
anigbrowl wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. Sez you. The unspoken premise is that nothing is so important that it's worth stopping to have an argument over. Perhaps I'm misreading your views, but when they're tossed out as an aphorism they come off as smug rather than substantive.

There is a difference between an argument and having a knock down drag out fight. For example when parents have a disagreement about how to deal with catching their child sneaking in drunk after a party. This can go many ways but for the purpose of highlighting the difference take Chris and Pat. (argument) Chris: Pat, I can understand how you'd feel that way, but considering the family history of alcoholism, maybe we…

Unpleasant as the flame war version is, it does cut to the heart of the matter rather than tiptoeing around it, which can perpetuate a problem. Both approaches have their place.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#357

Post by tptacek »

yahna wrote: post #350
tptacek wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's clear to everyone how the mediums are different. What's not clear is how subjective decisions CNN makes about what to air are acceptable, but subjective decisions HN makes about what to allow on the front page aren't. What's especially weird about this argument is that the US media market is in fact in the middle of a giant debate about how acceptable CNN and Fox News's editorial decisions are. It's not…

They have literally had laws enforcing fairness in media. Fox news is heavily criticized for their biased reporting and editorial standards. That would be the comparison to criticism of HN modding policies.

Those rules were unconstitutional and revoked.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#358

Post by tptacek »

krapp wrote: post #349
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yeah. (It's odd that Arc went closed-source but kept improving. It's maybe one of the most important custom languages in the industry, relative to HN's impact on the world.)

Did Arc go closed-source or does Hacker News run a closed-source fork? As far as I can tell, the arc forums site is still up and running, and a lot of people seem to be focused on Anarki[0]. [0] https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

Hacker News has been on a closed-source "fork" (it's really the upstream) since the day news.arc was published.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#359

Post by DanBC »

gras wrote: post #149
flavio81 wrote: post #78

In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesti…

I've personally found HN to be a lot more censorious than the subreddits I frequent. I really don't like the diverse fuckery the HN board software uses as "anti-spam" measures, like account creation IP bans ("Account creation temporarily disabled"), slowbans, hellbans and defacto bans that discard the content of your post and pretend to be temporary ("Too fast").

You might want to look at your comment history in an incognito browser window.

Are you posting via proxies?

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#360

Post by yahna »

tptacek wrote: post #357
yahna wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have literally had laws enforcing fairness in media. Fox news is heavily criticized for their biased reporting and editorial standards. That would be the comparison to criticism of HN modding policies.

Those rules were unconstitutional and revoked.

The fairness doctrine was not found to be unconstitutional.
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