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Is it just me, or has this post dropped from the front page suspiciously quickly? In just 2 hours it went from #1 to the second page I think. I'm trying to noti

Is it just me, or has this post dropped from the front page suspiciously quickly? In just 2 hours it went from #1 to the second page I think. I'm trying to notice these things more and more because we're seeing this "fake news" meme being pushed a lot recently and there have been accusations of bias on HN by the admins before. Supposedly, as part of the ranking algorithm at HN, there's a "flame war" detection feature that drops controversial items off of the front page quickly unless they're explicitly allowed to exist there. Having this feature in place is great for the admins as it gives them plausible deniability in terms of bias when items get ranked lower quickly, but not so good for users if it's inconsistently applied and the topics they see are for all intents and purposes controlled and guided towards certain viewpoints. You can see my previous post in this thread: I'm not even a fan of this article! I'm even saying this as somebody who (I think fairly reasonably) defended and criticized Amazon in my response. I don't fear anything from this article however and things can be gained by talking about this issue.

sctb 10y ago
This post got a lot of user flags (it currently appears as [flagged]) and was also penalized by the software flamewar detector. It wasn't touched by moderators.
- throwaway420 10y ago
  That it wasn't touched by mods was exactly my point. This feature that's ostensibly a "flame war detector" is effectively admins exercising editorial control over content if overriding it is inconsistently applied.
  - sctb 10y ago
    I'm not sure I see this as distinct from the standard moderation penalties that we do actively apply regularly. And when users ask in those cases we say we've done so (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20penalty&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20penalty&sort=byPopulari...). Another way of putting this is that plausible deniability isn't valuable to us. We're clear on what this site is for, and we're open about how moderation practices are intended to support that. Though we can't be perfect, we do actively strive to avoid bias that would take us away from the goals of the site and of the community.

sctb 10y ago

This post got a lot of user flags (it currently appears as [flagged]) and was also penalized by the software flamewar detector. It wasn't touched by moderators.

throwaway420 10y ago
That it wasn't touched by mods was exactly my point. This feature that's ostensibly a "flame war detector" is effectively admins exercising editorial control over content if overriding it is inconsistently applied.
- sctb 10y ago
  I'm not sure I see this as distinct from the standard moderation penalties that we do actively apply regularly. And when users ask in those cases we say we've done so (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20penalty&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20penalty&sort=byPopulari...). Another way of putting this is that plausible deniability isn't valuable to us. We're clear on what this site is for, and we're open about how moderation practices are intended to support that. Though we can't be perfect, we do actively strive to avoid bias that would take us away from the goals of the site and of the community.