Could it be that moderators see things we can't, eg vote manipulation and astro-turfing?
Possible and very likely
Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
61–70 of 327 posts
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#62I can comment on the "Books that Aaron Swartz read, loved and hated" story. OP posted that link to HN and it made the front page. The story was soon flagged by the community (people viewed it as Amazon affiliate spam) and it fell off the rankings. When the moderator dang noticed that the story had been flagged, he decided to restore it ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840869 ). So yeah, that explains why this…
FWIW, the post does acknowledge that:
> There are also a few articles that are thinly veiled affiliate spam. For example, the ShelfJoy links about books that Aaron Swartz and David Bowie loved fall into this category. They get called out in the comments for being very low-effort lists of Amazon affiliate links.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#63I've had one post removed from the top spot on the front page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041
I origionally posted with the title "For a moment, I thought bing was down" or something (I don't remember the origional title). The title was later changed to:
Title: "Bing doesn't support SSL" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041
Later, the story was was removed entirely after I wrote the following comment:
" Actually, it's been like this a really long time. I just noticed, that HN stories which have nondescript titles fare better, so I decided to conduct a little experiment. 1st spot on the front page seems to confirm my hypothesis. " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576342
I certainly understand why the mods removed the "story", but at the same time, I felt that the discussion of the "non-descript title bias" would have been an interesting one to have.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#64Don't forget that HN tries to detect vote fraud. So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.
Another possibility is that voting rings for _other_ posts flag maliciously to remove the competition and give their posts a relative boost. Maybe author can find correlations with other posts that were showing on the front page at the same time as the flagged ones and see how _their_ rankings got boosted due to the flagging.
The article is about posts that never receive the "flagged" designation.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#65Does anyone know why some posts have a rel="nofollow" in the link? (not just these no-comment ycombinator promotional posts)
I asked this before and a mod said I should ask again via mail, but never got a response from hn@ycombinator.com.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front Mods (as far as I know, I'm not one) never forcibly remove things from the front page. These are almost always the result of user flagging.
Those are marked first "flagged" as a warning, and then "dead" when the user flags reach a high enough level. This article however is about stories that disappear without receiving either.
Just a few flags from high karma accounts can knock a submission off the front page if it isn't getting enough counter up-votes. It wont be marked as flagged.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#67The list of stories the author claims "have moderator fingerprints on them" does not seem to have any kind of common pattern at all which would support such a claim.
Edit: to be clear, with common pattern I mean the topics of the submission (obviously they have one common pattern, which is dropping out of the front page quickly). They do not reveal some secret agenda moderators might follow or something like that.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#68The site is being crushed by traffic right now -- but without reading the article, I've also found that some stories that I thought were important that were scrubbed from HN's front page just about as soon as I saw it (when I doubled back to read the comments)... While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated. Maybe it could even be automatic, whenever a mod removed something…
> Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it. Obscuring an algorithm or making it more tedious to reverse may not make it perfectly secure, but that's not the goal. It's not like actual information security, where loss of the encryption keys means your product is broken or your database is on the Internet. You're just t…
You can always find reasons why something has to be a certain way. But at the end of the day, you can't expect to attract and retain curious hackers/entrepreneurs in this way. The author presumably spent some time compiling the original story, the math symbols and graphs are quite nice for instance, just to have it removed without explanation. It's not a very good way to treat people.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#69As much as I like HN, I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc. I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]". Some websites manage to fi…
Any time I've reached out to dang (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang) via email, he's always been responsive and super helpful and pretty transparent. Moderating HN isn't an enviable task IMO.
Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
#70It's very interesting to note the number one pulled story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276 . If you take a look at the comments, it's theorized there that the story got pulled not because of moderator action, but because people abused the flagging mechanism. Given the content, and given the principal person under discussion, this seems pretty likely to me.
In the comments you link to, dang is the moderator, so he isn't theorizing when he says: > It is the usual tug of war between upvotes and flags
Good point :)