4 ms·

As cool as it is you guys are giving good stories a better chance of hitting the front page. I can't help but wonder: 1. How a post is determined to be "good"?

As cool as it is you guys are giving good stories a better chance of hitting the front page. I can't help but wonder: 1. How a post is determined to be "good"? - Is it just if any of the moderators like it? - Is there a voting system for mods to determine this? - Would these not require a lot more work for the mods for possibly little benefit? 2. How do you ensure that feature isn't abused by a "bad" mod to promote their own content or views?

striking 11y ago
In the linked comment, dang writes: >> We use a combination of software filters and human review to find good-but-overlooked stories. "Good" here means by HN's definition of "gratifying intellectual curiosity". Hopefully that answers your first point. Second, HN mods are hired to work full-time on improving and polishing HN. This requires that they be professional, and professionalism in this sense requires ignoring your personal views. Having any kind of motive not based on improving HN would be unprofessional. This is a way in which HN is distinguished from Reddit: YC puts money into guaranteeing that HN works well. Only well-known people can be mods, not everyone on the Internet. These people have reputations for being "good," being fair and impartial. Mods have something at stake (jobs, reputation). So does YC. They're not going to make a mistake. And in my experience, (although I realize that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data") dang et al. have been nothing but totally neutral in every action (that I've seen, so far) on HN.
- l33tbro 11y ago
  Just curious if you guys have also tried seeing what happens when you run the meritocracy approach to articles? Ie, let the upvotes decide. I think most of the inmates here would be surprised that they're not running the asylum :)
  - striking 11y ago
    The upvotes do decide here, though. Mods rarely manually pull posts that aren't spam. Most are flagged by users, which either kills them or pushes them into the bottom of the rankings. And at least HN is clear about where the moderators stand. Meritocracy doesn't function. Either you have reddit, where users circlejerk into oblivion in smaller communities because votes don't matter (and larger communities don't work either, because their bigger mod teams do things like [1,2,3]) or you have StackOverflow, where upvotes and downvotes are extremely powerful and either allow you a lot of power or allow you to zap others and keep them in line. HN allows you to easily amass some karma so you can say something that isn't in line with others' opinions. Sometimes people will even upvote you and make your minority opinion prominent. Downvoting requires at least 500 karma, making sure you have the lay of the land down (and prevents spam accounts from taking down comments immediately). HN has a lot of transparency. Try enabling "showdead" in your profile. Forget uneddit, that's built in on HN. We're not inmates. We're here for the conversation. We like cool stuff and we like to talk about it. [1]: https://archive.is/CFKgq https://archive.is/CFKgq [2]: https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc_i_was_banned_from_roffmychest_for_submitting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc...
    - l33tbro 11y ago
      Steady on, didn't mean to "trigger" you. My comment was genuinely curious about the various approaches to moderating. I actually agree with you about the circlejerk analogy you make. But this place isn't Reddit, which is precisely why I was interested to see if it had been applied here. Oh, and If you can't see that my "inmates" comment was in jest then, as Arnold Schwartzenegger (as Dr Freeze) once declared, "You need to chill out".
  - derefr 11y ago
    Taking a sorting algorithm that cares about absolute vote displacement, and then using it on a site where more people are exposed to higher-ranked things, and more "voters" are online at particular times of day, is not a recipe for meritocracy. Just putting it like that (while also in election season) gives me an idea, though: a site where members must either give a vote to everything that has touched the front/new page within the last 24 hours, or nothing. (Maybe even having them sort the page to provide IRV rankings rather than a sign vector.) Way fewer people would bother, but as long as it was still a representative sampling...

striking 11y ago

In the linked comment, dang writes: >> We use a combination of software filters and human review to find good-but-overlooked stories. "Good" here means by HN's definition of "gratifying intellectual curiosity". Hopefully that answers your first point. Second, HN mods are hired to work full-time on improving and polishing HN. This requires that they be professional, and professionalism in this sense requires ignoring your personal views. Having any kind of motive not based on improving HN would be unprofessional. This is a way in which HN is distinguished from Reddit: YC puts money into guaranteeing that HN works well. Only well-known people can be mods, not everyone on the Internet. These people have reputations for being "good," being fair and impartial. Mods have something at stake (jobs, reputation). So does YC. They're not going to make a mistake. And in my experience, (although I realize that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data") dang et al. have been nothing but totally neutral in every action (that I've seen, so far) on HN.

l33tbro 11y ago
Just curious if you guys have also tried seeing what happens when you run the meritocracy approach to articles? Ie, let the upvotes decide. I think most of the inmates here would be surprised that they're not running the asylum :)
- striking 11y ago
  The upvotes do decide here, though. Mods rarely manually pull posts that aren't spam. Most are flagged by users, which either kills them or pushes them into the bottom of the rankings. And at least HN is clear about where the moderators stand. Meritocracy doesn't function. Either you have reddit, where users circlejerk into oblivion in smaller communities because votes don't matter (and larger communities don't work either, because their bigger mod teams do things like [1,2,3]) or you have StackOverflow, where upvotes and downvotes are extremely powerful and either allow you a lot of power or allow you to zap others and keep them in line. HN allows you to easily amass some karma so you can say something that isn't in line with others' opinions. Sometimes people will even upvote you and make your minority opinion prominent. Downvoting requires at least 500 karma, making sure you have the lay of the land down (and prevents spam accounts from taking down comments immediately). HN has a lot of transparency. Try enabling "showdead" in your profile. Forget uneddit, that's built in on HN. We're not inmates. We're here for the conversation. We like cool stuff and we like to talk about it. [1]: https://archive.is/CFKgq https://archive.is/CFKgq [2]: https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg https://i.imgur.com/EWVH9RW.jpg [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc_i_was_banned_from_roffmychest_for_submitting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3hewwm/misc...
  - l33tbro 11y ago
    Steady on, didn't mean to "trigger" you. My comment was genuinely curious about the various approaches to moderating. I actually agree with you about the circlejerk analogy you make. But this place isn't Reddit, which is precisely why I was interested to see if it had been applied here. Oh, and If you can't see that my "inmates" comment was in jest then, as Arnold Schwartzenegger (as Dr Freeze) once declared, "You need to chill out".
- derefr 11y ago
  Taking a sorting algorithm that cares about absolute vote displacement, and then using it on a site where more people are exposed to higher-ranked things, and more "voters" are online at particular times of day, is not a recipe for meritocracy. Just putting it like that (while also in election season) gives me an idea, though: a site where members must either give a vote to everything that has touched the front/new page within the last 24 hours, or nothing. (Maybe even having them sort the page to provide IRV rankings rather than a sign vector.) Way fewer people would bother, but as long as it was still a representative sampling...