Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–409 of 409 posts

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#401

Post by timthelion »

dang wrote: post #374
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15467478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15044224 We eventually ban accounts that ignore our requests to follow the site guidelines. Inflammatory usernames catalyze that.

dang, there is no way to tell who the mods are. So those "requests" to change behavior aren't exactly clear that they are from the mods. And non-mods have certainly asked me to change my behavior in the past, and sometimes I have taken their advice and sometimes I have decided not to.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#402

Post by oftenbanned »

dang wrote: post #380
oftenbanned wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not really comprehending what I am saying. If I create an account, never post or comment, and just browse HN from the IP in question, that account will be banned. It has nothing to do with behavior.

Nobody gets banned just by browsing. If you're concerned about a specific IP, and haven't been abusing HN, it should be easy to clear up by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. And even if you have been abusing HN, we're always happy to unban people (and/or their IPs) if they give us reason to believe that they've taken https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to heart and will follow the rules in the future.

This is not accurate based on my testing. If I browse to HN while logged in to my account from the affected network, that account can never post properly again.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#403

Post by grzm »

oftenbanned wrote: post #402
dang wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody gets banned just by browsing. If you're concerned about a specific IP, and haven't been abusing HN, it should be easy to clear up by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. And even if you have been abusing HN, we're always happy to unban people (and/or their IPs) if they give us reason to believe that they've taken https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to heart and will follow the rules in the future.

This is not accurate based on my testing. If I browse to HN while logged in to my account from the affected network, that account can never post properly again.

At this point, three people, including a mod, have suggested you contact the mods via email to investigate further and get to the bottom of your particular situation. Have you done so? If not, that does seem to be the most constructive way forward.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#404

Post by oftenbanned »

grzm wrote: post #403
oftenbanned wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not accurate based on my testing. If I browse to HN while logged in to my account from the affected network, that account can never post properly again.

At this point, three people, including a mod, have suggested you contact the mods via email to investigate further and get to the bottom of your particular situation. Have you done so? If not, that does seem to be the most constructive way forward.

The article is about bringing transparency to HN operations. To allow what I believe to be a factually inaccurate statement by one of the operators just stand as the last word is against the spirit of the discussion.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#405

Post by grzm »

oftenbanned wrote: post #404
grzm wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, three people, including a mod, have suggested you contact the mods via email to investigate further and get to the bottom of your particular situation. Have you done so? If not, that does seem to be the most constructive way forward.

The article is about bringing transparency to HN operations. To allow what I believe to be a factually inaccurate statement by one of the operators just stand as the last word is against the spirit of the discussion.

Okay. For the sake of discussion, what would satisfy you in terms of transparency? Perhaps I'm misreading you, and please do correct me if I am, but it seems you've arrived at a conclusion of bad faith on the part of mods. What would move the conversation productively forward?

Edit to add: Without more details from you, I can imagine the mods being hamstrung with respect to figuring out or explaining what's going with what you're observing. Likewise, there's nothing preventing you from continuing your comments here while also emailing them. Particularly as it seems you'd like to continue to participate on HN. I can imagine you'd prefer to do so without the hassle you're currently experiencing.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#407

Post by soegaard »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #195
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.

Direct answer: no, probably no database. HN forwards info to Firebase which provides an API. But assuming Arc is still running on Racket, there aren't a lot of options for database bindings ( https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/ ) and flat files work well enough. EDIT: Actually, you may be right. They already forward data to Firebase, which means they could just store the data in Firebase directly. Firebase is pret…

Lots of database options! See https://docs.racket-lang.org/db/

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#408

Post by dang »

timthelion wrote: post #401
dang wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15467478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15044224 We eventually ban accounts that ignore our requests to follow the site guidelines. Inflammatory usernames catalyze that.

dang, there is no way to tell who the mods are. So those "requests" to change behavior aren't exactly clear that they are from the mods. And non-mods have certainly asked me to change my behavior in the past, and sometimes I have taken their advice and sometimes I have decided not to.

It's true, yet I don't feel we should change that, e.g. by putting "mod" beside our names. There's a downside to that sort of thing too, and for HN, I think it's the greater downside.

I'd rather trust the community to figure things out, which it does extraordinarily well.

Re: Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

#409

Post by abandonliberty »

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?

I have the same concern. I assume right now there must be other similarly awesome communities that I just don't know about.
Post reply on HN