411–420 of 580 posts
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the mods take flagging rights away from people they find abusing it
i would like an option in the settings to disable/enable my ability to flag content. On mobile, I have accidentally flagged things and recall it being challenging to hit the button to unflag.
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I have a flag on my platform that flags users who reported things I agreed with the removal of, as "trusted" and their reports are given more weight in the algorithm next time. Sort of the inverse of what you propose where everyone is somewhat untrusted by default. (But not entirely untrusted.)
What is that platform of yours?
As discussed extensively in the Bing thread [0] comments, this is because DDG uses Bing’s search index. Microsoft has acknowledged this is in error...[1] (though the error seems to be that censorship meant to just apply to China is being applied everywhere) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635 [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man
The search shows images now, but none of them are related to Tienanmen. They're generic images of tanks. That seems worse, honestly, since before it was obvious to anyone something was being censored. Was the "error" that the search was completely blank instead of full of faux-result clutter?
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I don't doubt posts are flagged by users as opposed to moderation. But at the same time, it also seems like flagging can be too easily abused, and can lead to accusations of censorship and distrust. (Though I've certainly seen it work well in cases, especially for false/defamatory articles.) But it really does seem like we're at the point where longstanding users need to also be able to vouch for flagged stories, or…
Three or four coordinated accounts is all it takes to have de facto editorial control over HN.
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With all due respect, I disagree. This conversation is specifically about a nation exerting censorship across the web. It is not unreasonable to think those censorship efforts would extend to other sites. Moreover, I did not mark the primary thrust of the comment as a nationalistic attack. I took it as an observation that a motivated minority (or a nation-state actor) could game the system to mute a conversation by w…
Edit: argh, I confused you with the GP commenter. I'm terribly sorry! Obviously "you" doesn't mean you in the below. I'm usually more careful but today has been a bit hectic with several high-intensity threads going at once, and evidently I've been dropping packets. --- If you hope Chinese users feel welcome here, you need to make some massive adjustments to the commenting style you exemplified above, because accusin…
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Very interesting. I would love to see if @dang has addressed this before.
No, I only found out about it from the comment belter linked to. FWIW I think (god help us) fshbbdssbbgdd's explanation sounds plausible. I had a similar instinctive response but not as well thought through. We have banned people in a few cases for serious $BigCo astroturfing but there's always a grey area in the Venn diagram around "PR operation" and "overzealous fan". You can't tell those apart without a smoking gu…
I do not want to single out a single company, but would like to use this particular example to ask you the following: Please keep in mind the level of manpower and persistence, some of these corporations can call upon for their strategic objectives..
In 2020 Microsoft had, apparently, 106 lobbyist companies working on its behalf: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
and 94 in 2021 https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/lobbyis...
Looking at the website of some of these companies, offered services include and quoting: "Third party influencer outreach" :-)
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It must be. There is nothing in the words "tank man" that would trigger any sort of filter. My guess is that this was supposed to be limited to Chinese IP's and someone forgot to add that to the config.
I got thousands of images back by searching “ dhshsjdjfjfjdj” Censorship is disgusting.
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dang 27 minutes ago [–] [flagged] on submissions nearly always means users flagged it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#flag https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397158
Right. Why haven't those users been banned, and the article restored? Dang is actually quite effective as and administrator, but this seems pretty clear-cut abuse of the flagging system. I don't expect perfection, dang might have not been aware of it yet, but I do expect that some action will be taken on hot-button topics when surfaced.
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Very interesting. I would love to see if @dang has addressed this before.
No, I only found out about it from the comment belter linked to. FWIW I think (god help us) fshbbdssbbgdd's explanation sounds plausible. I had a similar instinctive response but not as well thought through. We have banned people in a few cases for serious $BigCo astroturfing but there's always a grey area in the Venn diagram around "PR operation" and "overzealous fan". You can't tell those apart without a smoking gu…
I think social media (sorry for calling this site that) vote manipulation detection will be one of the defining problems of the decade.
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I’ll start with: no I don’t think you or “HN” are in on some conspiracy. My question is: does HN actively attempt to counteract government actors from influencing the site? I think it’s been proven that China among other countries employs folks to try to influence social media sites. Not necessarily by influencing staff, but by creating user accounts who do things like downvote unfavorable comments or flag stories th…
Counteracting abuse of this site is the #1 thing we do behind the scenes to try to prevent the value of HN from eroding. That's actually what I spent the first hour of my morning doing, before I realized that there was $BigDrama happening. (Thank you, bat-signaling emailers.) If you ever see me commenting on how "large HN threads are paged for performance reasons, so click the More link at the bottom, and we'll event…