3 ms·

Be nice to see an explanation from our moderating overlords

dang 10y ago
You mean your moderating servants? At the time, there were multiple posts of the same story competing for attention, so a mod marked all but one as a dupe. But then that surviving one got heavily flagged. We reduced them at one point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12534542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12534542) but the flags kept coming. I think what's going on here (and what I just told the other moderators) is that this is one of those times when our standard practices around things like dupes and downweights—e.g. for political controversies—don't apply. This doesn't happen very often, perhaps once every couple weeks. In such cases the community will is unmistakeable, the story will keep coming up until it gets an airing, and our job is to let that happen. I like it much better when we call these right from the beginning, but what are the odds that an r/conspiracy Hillary investigation would turn into a solid HN thread? Too small for the human eye, and no set of moderation rules can operate at that fine a grain.
- douche 10y ago
  This happens with every single story that touches on this subject. Over the course of the summer it's happened time after time - the flag brigade gets almost all of them. After the flag-killed story today was reset, it still never showed up on the main page, despite hundreds of votes, although it did show up on /classic.
  - dang 10y ago
    Sure; nearly all those stories are off topic for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I assume this one's different because of the Reddit connection.
    - Mao_Zedang 10y ago
      When content moderation rules like these are infrequently enforced they cant be taken seriously.
      - dang 10y ago
        If this is 'infrequently' I'm not sure what we do all day! Moderation consistency is impossible, because we can't come close to reading everything here. We do our best.
  - misja111 10y ago
    I noticed the same. For instance: not so long ago there was a story on HN that reported the fact that Google's autocomplete suggestions have a strange bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, which doesn't seem reflect the popularity of the suggested sentences. It got flagged quickly and removed. Probably because the source was sputnik.com, a Russian news site. But the phenomenon that was reported was true, it was easy to verify by yourself. I don't see why these kind of posts should be flagged and removed. Maybe you don't agree with their content, but then why not have a discussion about them? In this case I would have been interested in hearing an explanation for those autocomplete suggestions.

dang 10y ago

You mean your moderating servants? At the time, there were multiple posts of the same story competing for attention, so a mod marked all but one as a dupe. But then that surviving one got heavily flagged. We reduced them at one point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12534542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12534542) but the flags kept coming. I think what's going on here (and what I just told the other moderators) is that this is one of those times when our standard practices around things like dupes and downweights—e.g. for political controversies—don't apply. This doesn't happen very often, perhaps once every couple weeks. In such cases the community will is unmistakeable, the story will keep coming up until it gets an airing, and our job is to let that happen. I like it much better when we call these right from the beginning, but what are the odds that an r/conspiracy Hillary investigation would turn into a solid HN thread? Too small for the human eye, and no set of moderation rules can operate at that fine a grain.

douche 10y ago
This happens with every single story that touches on this subject. Over the course of the summer it's happened time after time - the flag brigade gets almost all of them. After the flag-killed story today was reset, it still never showed up on the main page, despite hundreds of votes, although it did show up on /classic.
- dang 10y ago
  Sure; nearly all those stories are off topic for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I assume this one's different because of the Reddit connection.
  - Mao_Zedang 10y ago
    When content moderation rules like these are infrequently enforced they cant be taken seriously.
    - dang 10y ago
      If this is 'infrequently' I'm not sure what we do all day! Moderation consistency is impossible, because we can't come close to reading everything here. We do our best.
- misja111 10y ago
  I noticed the same. For instance: not so long ago there was a story on HN that reported the fact that Google's autocomplete suggestions have a strange bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, which doesn't seem reflect the popularity of the suggested sentences. It got flagged quickly and removed. Probably because the source was sputnik.com, a Russian news site. But the phenomenon that was reported was true, it was easy to verify by yourself. I don't see why these kind of posts should be flagged and removed. Maybe you don't agree with their content, but then why not have a discussion about them? In this case I would have been interested in hearing an explanation for those autocomplete suggestions.