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Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

drewdevault.com

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Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#361

Post by archagon »

dang wrote: post #288
ploggingdev wrote: post #67

The voting ring detector is in need of a serious upgrade. There are so many cases of vote solicitation by people with meaningful social media following and their posts even make the front page. It's mostly the Product Hunt style "Hey we launched on HN, check us out" which is code for "upvote my post". People have stopped directly linking to the post submission for fear of tripping the voting ring detector, but they e…

> many cases of vote solicitation [...] and their posts even make the front page That last bit is the critical one. Vote solicitation that doesn't go anywhere is an annoyance, but fake upvotes getting otherwise lame content on the front page is a threat. If you (or anyone) see cases of this, I wish you would send them to hn@ycombinator.com. We investigate, and can usually figure something out one way or the other. Fr…

Wait, are you suggesting that people shouldn’t post their own stuff to HN? Or by “promote on HN”, do you mean posting on Twitter and telling people to go upvote?

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#363

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

dang wrote: post #279
KekDemaga wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And you long for the day when it's your particular brand of racism and sexism that wins? Beautifully put, the solution to sexism isn't more sexism.

We've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, trollish usernames are trolling: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

Sorry, I don't see how this acocunt violated the guidelines, or how the username is trollish. Can you clarify?

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#364

Post by [deleted] »

forapurpose wrote: post #346
anigbrowl wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective? I have my doubts about how welcoming HN is for different demographics, and while the grandparent poster is handwaving things with a mental mockup as you say, absent transparency on moderation policies many people inevitably feel the same way about the moderation. I mean, at present you have a bunch of secret rules to make everything run better. That works O…

> How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective? This makes an excellent point, and the same could be said of the junior moderation team - the HN readers who up/downvote comments. A practical solution: The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities for some honest, frank perceptive and feedback. Stop guessing and trying, and get some real knowledge. Look at particular threads (on sexism, etc.)…

[deleted]

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#365

Post by metiscus »

tomkat0789 wrote: post #324
abandonliberty wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily the community largely self-moderates and comments are generally very high value. At the moment we don't appear to have a significant troll problem. Reddit was like this almost 10 years ago. This is the bliss of obscurity. We should hold a wake for Reddit 2010. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit,h... (though I doubt people coming to this site actually google it) Supposedly if you find t…

The problem with obscurity is I don't know where to find another HN when it goes the way of Slashdot! How do people find small unique sites like this?

Some people mentioned this place in a few threads during the whole Slashdot 2.0 thing and that lead me here. I presume if this place ever does go south similar things will happen. Let's work to keep this place what it is and make it better.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#366

Post by timthelion »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #363
dang wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've banned this account for violating the HN guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, trollish usernames are trolling: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

Sorry, I don't see how this acocunt violated the guidelines, or how the username is trollish. Can you clarify?

I think that dang was simply reacting to "Any user name with the word Kek in it is a troll." Kek is a word used almost solely by extreme right, sexist, racist trolls (in that order, more likely to be extremely sexist than racist).

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cult-of-kek

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#367

Post by dang »

belorn wrote: post #326
matt4077 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lets describe a example of moderation by dang. For an article a about work and unrelated to sexism, gender or racism, a commenter wrote out of the blue that all white men live privileged and easy lives. A second person replied and disagreed, arguing that some men don't have everything perfect and easy from the point of birth to death. The reply got moderated for causing a flame war, with third-party people asking dan…

Wouldn't it be better to supply a link? Then people could make up their own minds.

Even if you're right, I'm not sure what evidence it's supposed to count as; everybody knows we make bad calls, and I know it better than anyone. But I searched for your incident and could only find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530877, which is close to what you describe and (I think) would strike most HN readers as pretty defensible.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#368

Post by dang »

forapurpose wrote: post #346
anigbrowl wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective? I have my doubts about how welcoming HN is for different demographics, and while the grandparent poster is handwaving things with a mental mockup as you say, absent transparency on moderation policies many people inevitably feel the same way about the moderation. I mean, at present you have a bunch of secret rules to make everything run better. That works O…

> How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective? This makes an excellent point, and the same could be said of the junior moderation team - the HN readers who up/downvote comments. A practical solution: The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities for some honest, frank perceptive and feedback. Stop guessing and trying, and get some real knowledge. Look at particular threads (on sexism, etc.)…

> The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities

What makes you think we don't?

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#369

Post by dang »

DanBC wrote: post #352
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.

If you think something is particularly good you can always email us. We probably didn't see it.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#370

Post by dang »

archagon wrote: post #361
dang wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many cases of vote solicitation [...] and their posts even make the front page That last bit is the critical one. Vote solicitation that doesn't go anywhere is an annoyance, but fake upvotes getting otherwise lame content on the front page is a threat. If you (or anyone) see cases of this, I wish you would send them to hn@ycombinator.com. We investigate, and can usually figure something out one way or the other. Fr…

Wait, are you suggesting that people shouldn’t post their own stuff to HN? Or by “promote on HN”, do you mean posting on Twitter and telling people to go upvote?

Definitely not suggesting that! Sorry for the ambiguity. Of course it's fine for people to share their own work here (assuming it's on topic—but anything intellectually interesting is on topic).

By 'naively tries to promote on HN' I mean things like asking friends to upvote and passing links around on Twitter. Those tactics don't work (or at least as far as I know they don't) and usually hurt the submission rather than help it. Does that make sense?

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