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I'm normally not critical of mod behavior, so I don't make this point lightly: 1. The title was changed from something admittedly sensationalist, to something

by dsacco 10y ago

I'm normally not critical of mod behavior, so I don't make this point lightly: 1. The title was changed from something admittedly sensationalist, to something that is clearly antithetical to the point of the original title. "Trends in tech" completely lacks the tone of the original title. If you don't want to use a title with "horseshit" in it, fine, but change it to something that matches the intention of the author at least. "Trends in tech" could be anything from a VC thinkpiece, to technical language choices in startups, to what the author actually wrote. How do I know if it's worth my time or aligns with my interests if I'm a passing reader? This title manages to completely neutralize the author's point by robbing it of any interesting lead-in. If a mod did this, it's what I would call disingenuous curation of front page content. It's insidious because while clickbait titles get more attention than they should, and unfairly so, uninteresting titles receive proportionally less attention than they should. 2. This post has 92 points in less than an hour and is just barely on the front page (as of this writing). It will probably slip off imminently. The top post has less than 80 points and is over an hour old. Why? I understand there are algorithm nuances, but that utterly lacks transparency. I make these points because it raises an interesting juxtaposition between what the community wants and what is beneficial to Y Combinator. Some of the article could be interpreted as attacking Y Combinator's business model which provides a potential incentive for what I noted above. But that does not make it illegitimate given that it satisfies "intellectual curiosity" according to HN guidelines and is very well-upvoted. It appears suspicious to me that it is not higher up, and this is from someone who doesn't normally engage in this sort of criticism.

brad0 10y ago
Thanks for this. You've articulated how I've felt subconsciously about HN for a while now. HN used to be a place where I could be stimulated intellectually. Today it no longer seems to give me that. Where can I go now to get better content? Or should I give up on aggregation altogether?
- _jal 10y ago
  Every site seems to have a life cycle. I find that I prefer the early stages, before things settle down in to the predictable debating club between stable poles of opinion that define the acceptable range of discourse there. That stage can last a long time, but it doesn't last forever. This doesn't work for everyone (which is probably why it still works at all), but, at least for technical discussion, mailing lists are where I have the bulk of my quality online interaction. I've found fewer good public lists for wider intellectual discussion, but they're out there, too. The difference is that they tend to range from somewhat to very topically silo'ed. Well, and they're email, so the cool kids don't want to play. (Again, I think that's partly why it works.)
dccoolgai 10y ago
To provide some additional background: The title was initially "Silicon Valley: Making Life Worse for Regular People". It's certainly sensationalist from the point of view that it's something a lot of HN readers who work around SV probably don't want to think that much about, but I thought that's why it maybe deserves some attention. It's also consistent with the conclusion in the content of TFA: "That’s it. That’s all they are. That’s all they do. They are the final logic of late capitalism, the engine of human creativity applied to the essential work of making life worse for regular people."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
_jal 10y ago
Agree - I saw it with the title that conveyed actual semantic content, which is why I read it. So perhaps we'll need to acknowledge this sort of editorial control a kind of signaling - a meaningless, anodyne headline means "article YC doesn't like".
rndmize 10y ago
I'll be honest: I don't really like how you're approaching this. It feels like a higher class of conspiracy theorizing I often see on the web in its construction, so I'll run through my issues point by point. 1 - The original title was sensationalist (and so is the article, really), and changing titles to be more useful to the average HN reader/removing clickbait is something that happens fairly often here. I don't expect this process to be perfect, and I regularly see posts with somewhat useless or one-word titles. It happens. I have yet to see a post from Dang I'd consider unreasonable (in several years of reading HN) so I'm inclined to have some faith in the mod team here. Further, I also think you have a lack of faith in the readership here - title quality is less important on HN than on any other similar site I've used (though I favor accuracy and find the current policies regarding them reasonable). 2 - Generally this means some users are flagging the article. I've flagged articles on occasion before, and it can cause an instant drop of several places on the front page. This regularly happens for sensational or political articles - even things verging on political I find of interest and would like to see discussed more. I chalk it up to the nature of the community. As for this going against YC interests or business model - I don't really see it. This isn't even a good attack on YC, it's an attack on rent-seeking and/or the work culture of startups. YC is an effort to make startup funding more accessible, equitable, useful, and wide-ranging (or at least, that's how it looks to me from the outside). Heck, they have RFSs that go in direct opposition to the kind of startups talked about in the article (and their interest in funding these kinds of things + moonshots are increasing, not decreasing). In short - I think you're pretty far off here, but you're free to read into it what you want.
- dccoolgai 10y ago
  Sorry you got downvoted... I thought you made some good points, and since we're being introspective that's one of the practices I don't enjoy: people downvoting things they don't agree with instead of things that detract from the conversation. I feel like you made some thoughtful points that I don't really agree with but add to the discussion. As a corollary to your point: It's possible that the mods changed it _because_ it was getting flagged as titled originally and they _wanted_ more people to see it.
- dsacco 10y ago
antisthenes 10y ago
Now that I realize the original title was "Silicon Valley: Making Life Worse for Regular People", this is a clear cut case of censorship. I would hope that we're not at 1984 level yet, so something like a title change won't make people start engaging in SV doublethink, but you never know.
dang 10y ago
I can't find much to disagree with here, so have updated the title to add "A critique", removed the moderation penalty from it, and rolled back the clock on the story so it has more time on the front page. If I have time, I'll come back and add a fuller explanation of what happened, but the bottom line is: HN moderation is driven by trying to keep the community happy while staying within the mandate of the site (which is intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive discussion). That's the problem we're trying to solve, not anything directly to do with YC's business. A happy HN is worth more to YC than any other kind of HN, so it would be dumb to optimize for anything else. I'm marking this subthread offtopic now, which makes it fall to the bottom of the thread, because otherwise the meta conversation will dominate the discussion rather than the points raised by the article.
- dsacco 10y ago
  I appreciate the transparency, dang. Thanks for coming out to respond. What's more, I find that title agreeable without veering off in either direction. Cheers!
- _jal 10y ago
  Thanks, Dang. As someone who was a bit critical as well, I greatly appreciate the background on how you see your role. Oh, and, you know. Also that little detail about you actually doing all the work. Similar the cliche about the sysadmin[1], that you don't get enough credit demonstrates how well you do it, because situations like this are so rare. [1] That being: when systems are running poorly, everyone wonders why they employ such an incompetent sysadmin. When systems are running well, everyone wonders why they waste money on a sysadmin.

by dsacco 10y ago

brad0 10y ago

Thanks for this. You've articulated how I've felt subconsciously about HN for a while now. HN used to be a place where I could be stimulated intellectually. Today it no longer seems to give me that. Where can I go now to get better content? Or should I give up on aggregation altogether?

_jal 10y ago
Every site seems to have a life cycle. I find that I prefer the early stages, before things settle down in to the predictable debating club between stable poles of opinion that define the acceptable range of discourse there. That stage can last a long time, but it doesn't last forever. This doesn't work for everyone (which is probably why it still works at all), but, at least for technical discussion, mailing lists are where I have the bulk of my quality online interaction. I've found fewer good public lists for wider intellectual discussion, but they're out there, too. The difference is that they tend to range from somewhat to very topically silo'ed. Well, and they're email, so the cool kids don't want to play. (Again, I think that's partly why it works.)

dccoolgai 10y ago

To provide some additional background: The title was initially "Silicon Valley: Making Life Worse for Regular People". It's certainly sensationalist from the point of view that it's something a lot of HN readers who work around SV probably don't want to think that much about, but I thought that's why it maybe deserves some attention. It's also consistent with the conclusion in the content of TFA: "That’s it. That’s all they are. That’s all they do. They are the final logic of late capitalism, the engine of human creativity applied to the essential work of making life worse for regular people."

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

_jal 10y ago

Agree - I saw it with the title that conveyed actual semantic content, which is why I read it. So perhaps we'll need to acknowledge this sort of editorial control a kind of signaling - a meaningless, anodyne headline means "article YC doesn't like".

rndmize 10y ago

I'll be honest: I don't really like how you're approaching this. It feels like a higher class of conspiracy theorizing I often see on the web in its construction, so I'll run through my issues point by point. 1 - The original title was sensationalist (and so is the article, really), and changing titles to be more useful to the average HN reader/removing clickbait is something that happens fairly often here. I don't expect this process to be perfect, and I regularly see posts with somewhat useless or one-word titles. It happens. I have yet to see a post from Dang I'd consider unreasonable (in several years of reading HN) so I'm inclined to have some faith in the mod team here. Further, I also think you have a lack of faith in the readership here - title quality is less important on HN than on any other similar site I've used (though I favor accuracy and find the current policies regarding them reasonable). 2 - Generally this means some users are flagging the article. I've flagged articles on occasion before, and it can cause an instant drop of several places on the front page. This regularly happens for sensational or political articles - even things verging on political I find of interest and would like to see discussed more. I chalk it up to the nature of the community. As for this going against YC interests or business model - I don't really see it. This isn't even a good attack on YC, it's an attack on rent-seeking and/or the work culture of startups. YC is an effort to make startup funding more accessible, equitable, useful, and wide-ranging (or at least, that's how it looks to me from the outside). Heck, they have RFSs that go in direct opposition to the kind of startups talked about in the article (and their interest in funding these kinds of things + moonshots are increasing, not decreasing). In short - I think you're pretty far off here, but you're free to read into it what you want.

dccoolgai 10y ago
Sorry you got downvoted... I thought you made some good points, and since we're being introspective that's one of the practices I don't enjoy: people downvoting things they don't agree with instead of things that detract from the conversation. I feel like you made some thoughtful points that I don't really agree with but add to the discussion. As a corollary to your point: It's possible that the mods changed it _because_ it was getting flagged as titled originally and they _wanted_ more people to see it.
dsacco 10y ago

antisthenes 10y ago

Now that I realize the original title was "Silicon Valley: Making Life Worse for Regular People", this is a clear cut case of censorship. I would hope that we're not at 1984 level yet, so something like a title change won't make people start engaging in SV doublethink, but you never know.

dang 10y ago

I can't find much to disagree with here, so have updated the title to add "A critique", removed the moderation penalty from it, and rolled back the clock on the story so it has more time on the front page. If I have time, I'll come back and add a fuller explanation of what happened, but the bottom line is: HN moderation is driven by trying to keep the community happy while staying within the mandate of the site (which is intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive discussion). That's the problem we're trying to solve, not anything directly to do with YC's business. A happy HN is worth more to YC than any other kind of HN, so it would be dumb to optimize for anything else. I'm marking this subthread offtopic now, which makes it fall to the bottom of the thread, because otherwise the meta conversation will dominate the discussion rather than the points raised by the article.

dsacco 10y ago
I appreciate the transparency, dang. Thanks for coming out to respond. What's more, I find that title agreeable without veering off in either direction. Cheers!
_jal 10y ago
Thanks, Dang. As someone who was a bit critical as well, I greatly appreciate the background on how you see your role. Oh, and, you know. Also that little detail about you actually doing all the work. Similar the cliche about the sysadmin[1], that you don't get enough credit demonstrates how well you do it, because situations like this are so rare. [1] That being: when systems are running poorly, everyone wonders why they employ such an incompetent sysadmin. When systems are running well, everyone wonders why they waste money on a sysadmin.