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Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

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Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#71

Post by ploggingdev »

stordoff wrote: post #62
ploggingdev wrote: post #25

I 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.

OP uses this story as an example of having "moderator fingerprints on them" i.e moderators censoring posts, which is not true. What happened was the opposite : the moderator uncensored a post flagged by the community.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#72

Post by pvg »

Mithaldu wrote: post #39
DanBC wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

Flags downrank a post, a post can drop off the front page well before 'flagged' shows up.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#73

Post by DanBC »

chrisrhoden wrote: post #64
lovelearning wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A story is not marked as [flagged] as soon as someone flags it, and flags have influence even if the submission is not marked as [flagged].

See dang's comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#74

Post by johnlbevan2 »

Other theories:

- This is a bug / happens randomly; you just noticed it because you were looking (i.e. as you analyse this data); all the posts it's happened to before and since went unnoticed. That's supported by the evidence of your analysis; most of the results don't look any different to other posts.

- It's not the link, but the related activity. Presumably if you're running analysis on HN data, there are a lot of HN requests coming from your machine. Maybe any posts made by your IP are therefore treated as suspect (i.e. the sort of protection you'd expect to avoid automated posting or upvoting... just without that extra sophistication). Perhaps the other posters had something similar... Would be good to see if any of those posts were by the same author; as that may add weight to this theory.

- Other variables... Maybe the algorithm has rules which cause this behaviour under some conditions; e.g. posts made the previous day (not 24 hours ago; but rather before midnight UTC / something like that) lose weight when midnight hits; so posts made moments before suddenly lose enough score to knock them off the top spot; whilst those which had more score before midnight, or were posted just after survive... Many other possibilities such as this may exist; and we'd only know by looking at those variables in the data... What else is common about the posts which are in your post's club vs those which aren't?

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#75

Post by pvg »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #6

The 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…

The naive thing is coming up with 17 complicated theories about this instead of just emailing the mods and asking. They're very responsive.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#76

Post by Sean1708 »

I don't think I understand your figures correctly, because none of them (except the last) seem to show any significant drop. There's a drop of about 10 positions in one of them but I wouldn't call that particularly significant, and it even climbs back up after twenty minutes or so.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#77

Post by tptacek »

DanBC wrote: post #8
hardwaresofton wrote: post #6

The 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…

> 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.

The moderators bury things on the front page pretty routinely.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#78

Post by tantanel »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #37
hardwaresofton wrote: post #6

The 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…

The debate is not really whether the algorithm should be made public or not, it's about the method used to try and keep it secure.

If the algorithm can be reverse engineered then trying to suppress the knowledge that is already "out there" will only create an illusion of it being a secret, and the fewer people know about it the more damage they can potentially do (i.e they more they can financially benefit from their knowledge).

It's the same as with information security - if you discover an exploitable bug then chances are someone else has already discovered it too (or can discover it any time) so making it public is one of the most sensible things you can do.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#79

Post by logicallee »

minimaxir wrote: post #58
logicallee wrote: post #28

This is called "burying" and it is unremarkable. (This story is likely to be buried.) The stories that are buried are not appropriate for the front page. The reason you come to Hacker News is because it has a better front page, with better comments under it, than other places. You experience the benefit of this editorial intervention each and every day. I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very…

> I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very quickly: this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431 I would have flagged that submission if I saw it since it's flamebait.

That's not what flamebait means, you likely mean clickbait. There's nothing to disagree with there - all commenters agreed that lightweight sites are great. The title was also completely true.

But you are right, it was inappropriate. My point is there were 43 upvotes in a matter of a few minutes (and more coming) but it was not generating good discussion. The top comment:

>>hyperbovine 269 days ago [-]

>>Loads instantly, looks fine on mobile, the thing(s) you are probably interested in are linked right from the front page. As usual, Buffet is onto something here.

>>> walrus01 269 days ago [-]

>>> Looks fine in Lynx, too!

>>> http://imgur.com/yAEimmZ

Which is why I submitted it. I simply thought it was interesting.

However, although all the comments agreed with it (there was no flaming) and it was getting traction, the comments were simply not very high quality or generating any good discussion. It simply wasn't worthy of the front page despite getting voted there organically. I have no problem with it being buried.

Re: Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page

#80

Post by Broken_Hippo »

rimliu wrote: post #27
laurent123456 wrote: post #12

As 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…

I've got my account (with 9+k point) banned. Which is, of course, annoying, but the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well. There was also a lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the guidelines, so… And while some of my comments might be harsh I sometimes wonder if overzealous moderation leads…

To be fair, sometimes this is a security feature so that folks don't go off hating one individual moderator. I've seen this in games more often, but I imagine it works out here as well. It sucks for normal folks, but sometimes that's the way it works.
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