6 ms·

Hcrknews.com (Flagged / Censored content can be seen)

75 points by mzh0 9y ago

albertgoeswoof 9y ago
Oh wow even this fucking comment will show up then. Just to be sure: Cunt!
amingilani 9y ago
If you want to see flagged or censored comments, you can enable those in your profile settings, just change showdead to yes
- daxorid 9y ago
  Yes, but it's rather difficult to find censored articles in the first place, once they've gone dead.
md224 9y ago
I'd love to get a discussion going on whether people support or oppose the flagging (and subsequent disappearance) of politically charged topics on HN. While HN is not a politics site, some of these censored topics have been tech-related. I guess it comes down to a value judgement: is it worth discussing tech politics even if it spawns flamewars and heated arguments? I think it's worth it, but this is certainly debatable. Curious what other HN users think. My own thinking is that political discussion between opposing factions is always going to be contentious, but that doesn't mean it should be suppressed. However, angry rhetoric can lead to further polarization, so I'm not sure what the right approach is. Edit: funny enough, this topic itself was flagged and killed! I've vouched it, but I'm open to hearing arguments for why this link doesn't belong.
- reitanqild 9y ago
  I thing some of these topics are the most interestng we have. I mostly accept that they don’t belong on HN though. But it feels deeply hypocritical when some political stories stay on the front page for hours until more information starts to arrive and they get flagged off swiftly.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  So, I've vouched for it too, mainly because it would be nice to have the option on HN to simply ignore the flags for those who feel they can handle it and don't need to be told by others what they can and can not discuss. It would be a pretty simple affair software wise, those that need it can have their safe space and those that don't can discuss whatever they want without being shouted down. Seems like the optimal solution to me.
  - stormbrew 9y ago
    The thing about no moderation spaces (above and beyond legal requirements) is that they become tools of organized trolling efforts (harassment campaigns and the like). Having an unmoderated space on the internet is basically the social equivalent of having an open smtp relay. But if this "ignore flags" version of hackernews were to have any moderation at all to prevent the above, it would basically mean forcing extra work on the moderators of hackernews to cater to a handful of people interested in genuine discussion and a vast army of people interested in using it to troll, harass, and generally be awful to people.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      > But if this "ignore flags" version of hackernews were to have any moderation at all to prevent the above, it would basically mean forcing extra work on the moderators of hackernews to cater to a handful of people interested in genuine discussion and a vast army of people interested in using it to troll, harass, and generally be awful to people. I highly doubt that. Typically a normal discussion (such as this one) is underway and the suddenly the whole thing is killed. That's rude, to put it mildly and I see absolutely no harm in letting those discussions continue with the normal 'up/down' vote mechanism taking care of the moderation. Flagging just affects the ordering of the stories and does not have anything to do with the comments within those stories. Note that there is no reason that you would not be able to discuss this site and yet the discussion is flagged so the majority of HN will never see it. I don't like that, I think it puts too much weight to the flags in relation to the upvotes.
      - deleted 9y ago
- DanBC 9y ago
  > funny enough, this topic itself was flagged and killed! Flagged because of the stupid -rule breaking- title.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    What is rule breaking about it?
    - DanBC 9y ago
      Come off it, you've been here long enough to know that it's an editorialised title.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        Ah in that sense. Oh golly, you're right. Well best we don't discuss that then, who knows what kind of subversive stuff might be said.
        mzh0 9y ago
        No, i can ensure you the title is same as what i submitted
- john_moscow 9y ago
  Maybe just add a special topic flag "politics" and let everyone have a convenient switch in the profile settings whether they want to see those topics in the feed or not?
  - forthefuture 9y ago
    That topic flag is called reddit.com/r/politics. We are already choosing to come here instead of there.
    - DanielBMarkham 9y ago
      I have always bowed to the wishes of PG and the mods when it comes to calling out articles as too "hot" This is a funky one, though. The issue itself is about how politics affects what we can say and not say online. In that way, it's a "meta" issue. I can still understand the flagging and death, but damn. Google, Apple, and Facebook are huge monsters that control hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and virtually everything a huge chunk of the world's population sees and does. This is a tech story. It's a politics story. It's a story about business. It's all of that. This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their head in the sand. For ten or twenty years, we've created the internet and all the things people use today. When asked about morals, ethics, and politics, we've just said something like "We make the tools. We're not responsible for their use" And here we are in a security and surveillance state that we've created. We're refusing to even talk about Google's desired monoculture because we're unable to maintain civil discourse. I get it. But fuck me. Something's really wrong here. I can't help but feel that the tech community at large -- and HN in particular -- is no longer working towards the betterment of mankind. Something is terribly broken. And we had a big part in breaking it.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        > This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their head in the sand. This happens all the time. Techies being 'apolitical' is a huge problem, and of course those very same techies then turn around and scream blue murder when laws are made that hurt their interests or when their tech is used to further some political goal they do not agree with.
- mzh0 9y ago
  Mysteriously, many thread, including this thread itself, has been revived from dead (but could possibly still be flagged): For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14961857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14961857 And it seems this thread itself is excluded in HN top
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  The problem that HN faces is the fact that as social news aggregators become larger and larger the quality and type of user changes. To enforce this we have flagging and removal of content. The problem with this aggregators is enforcement and policing doesn't scale. Also, as the aggregator becomes larger people want to discuss more and more topics. Personally I would rather have a HN that doesn't have politically charged topics. Although some of those topics are relevant to the community if we start letting more and more political topics then we can have factions of users and once that starts HN won't be fun to read anymore. Reddit attempted to solve this through subreddits but that didn't work. Slashdot used moderation. Digg died because they released a new version. I suppose either the censorship or the flagging and removal of political topics and otherwise will be the thing that eliminates HN. I think that any social news aggregator has a shelf life and you can't keep it from degrading to either something you hate and or something that doesn't serve the people who run the site.
as1mov 9y ago
FYI you can view dead/flagged submissions by going to your profile and enabling showdead. I don't know if this is the correct place to criticize HN's moderation policies, it's kinda disheartening to see the list of submissions that were removed. News articles regarding the diversity memo were allowed but submissions linking to the actual memo were removed for some reason. If the actual memo is sexist/bigoted, then people can read it directly and decide it for themselves, instead of relying on second hand information. I mean even if you agree with what Google did, isn't it good that we discuss about it and point out the things that were problematic with that memo. What good does it do if we just try to shove the incident into a closet and pretend that it never happened? Edit: Even this post was flagged :/
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Yes, but the discussion instantly dies and when flagged to death you can't even comment anymore.
  - as1mov 9y ago
    That's just abuse of the flagging system. I don't get why people want to hide something that they don't agree with from everyone's eyes. Why not just ignore the post if you don't want to participate in the discussion. If someone wants an echochamber where only things that you agree with are visible, reddit is much better place for that, regardless of which side of the debate you are on, you'll find a subreddit that fits you.
- greenyoda 9y ago
  "News articles regarding the diversity memo were allowed but submissions linking to the actual memo were removed for some reason." No, this article, the first one to publish the full text of the memo, got 353 points and received 616 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895 Several subsequent submissions of the same content were flagged as duplicates.
  - as1mov 9y ago
JSONwebtoken 9y ago
HN's flagging algorithm wasn't built to withstand mass false positives from people who would rather shout down, silence, and blow up certain conversations when they realize they lack the mental fortitude to do battle with the same scientific truth of which they mock the low-hanging-fruit of middle America for not comprehending.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
ComputerGuru 9y ago
Meh, the stories were killed for a reason. Thanks @dang and the rest of the team for keeping HN relevant and sane. It's never a fully objective decision, but I'm glad to leave that to them rather than have to dig through crap to find something good (cough unlike reddit cough).
beaner 9y ago
When posts are flagged, is there a reason that is provided and is it viewable somewhere? It seems like there's a lot of legit, even large threads that have been flagged and removed. Even ones that don't seem offensive, they're just related to or covering news on some things that perhaps some people find offensive. Seems crazy that they'd disappear. I'd be interested in reading the justifications for removal.
- DanBC 9y ago
  Users flag posts. It's not a moderator action. There's a setting called showdead that you can change to see all the flagged posts.
  - beaner 9y ago
    Ah, thanks. Sometimes I see mods intervene on comments and that kind of thing, so I figured flagged posts went into a queue before removal.
forthefuture 9y ago
The flagging isn't a rogue algorithm. It's the majority of the sites users saying they don't want to keep seeing the same two toxic viewpoints throwing shit at each other.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  If that were the only way it was used it would be fine. But it is also used to simply shut down rational discussion on subjects the flaggers don't like.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - forthefuture 9y ago
    I use hckrnews myself and don't see this happening. Would you mind identifying which threads you think have been incorrectly flagged?
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      In the last 24 hours you'll find plenty of those about the Google affair, most likely shut down by Googlers flagging those links to shut down any discussion. Hard to tell without knowing who the flaggers are, which is one reason I don't like flagging.
      - wvl 9y ago
        I find the chronological history of hckrnews.com adds context to why many things get flagged. For example, immediately after the bloomberg article was posted about Google firing the memo author, were several other articles with the same content (from arstechnica and nymag) which were immediately flagged. Any time an inflammatory subject gets beat to death, the same process happens. So in that respect, I often agree with the submissions that get flagged (including this one), but I do think news.ycombinator.com could do a better job of collecting and displaying these flagged submissions. For example, duplicate submissions could be made children of the submission that was allowed to stay.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
venning 9y ago
To create an intentional false dichotomy: if I have to choose between a site that surfaces all content regardless of controversy but accepts that related discussions will be lower-quality, and a site that directly or indirectly suppresses some content to maintain higher-quality discussion overall, I will choose the latter. I appreciate that some people feel that the "loss" of some submissions due to automatic flamewar detection algorithms or user flagging is a problem, but I, for one, appreciate that the discussions that remain on the front page (for a long time) have a reasonable guarantee of being high quality. Relatedly, it may also have an effect on the non-controversial submissions by establishing that flamewars will not remain in high positions for long. (I realize that's a bit of a "broken windows theory".)
- as1mov 9y ago
  Most of the recently flagged submissions were related to the diversity memo. I don't mind if fluff articles from dailydot are removed. But then when a verbatim copy of the memo was posted, and even that was flagged. I highly doubt that was flagged because it would have low quality discussions. People just abuse the flagging system to hide content that they don't agree with.
  - venning 9y ago
    I also doubt that it was flagged because it would generate low-quality discussion. But I do not doubt that low-quality discussion would have followed had it not been flagged off the front page. I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are going to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more powerful tool (comments) poorly.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      > I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are going to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more powerful tool (comments) poorly. Flags are the more powerful tool. A single flag is the equivalent of many upvotes and annihilates the whole discussion. That's a lot more power than a comment, which can be dealt with on an individual basis.
wvl 9y ago
As an aside, I do find it interesting that this submission is nowhere to be found from the main page itself (or at least 5 pages back, despite 50 points and 17 comments. I guess it was flagged/vouched back, but having showdead on in your hacker news profile does nothing to help if the algorithm drops the submission into nowhereland. That is reason enough for the existence of hckrnews.com, imo.
Artemis2 9y ago
Besides the flagging, I really like hckrnews as a daily reader. The ability to see immediately what is new since my last visit (and to tune the number of posts I want to see) is a huge timesaver.
- madmax108 9y ago
  Absolutely absolutely agree with this! hckrnews is what I use to keep track of what's new on HN since I last visited!

75 points by mzh0 9y ago

Oh wow even this fucking comment will show up then. Just to be sure: Cunt!

If you want to see flagged or censored comments, you can enable those in your profile settings, just change showdead to yes

daxorid 9y ago
Yes, but it's rather difficult to find censored articles in the first place, once they've gone dead.

md224 9y ago

I'd love to get a discussion going on whether people support or oppose the flagging (and subsequent disappearance) of politically charged topics on HN. While HN is not a politics site, some of these censored topics have been tech-related. I guess it comes down to a value judgement: is it worth discussing tech politics even if it spawns flamewars and heated arguments? I think it's worth it, but this is certainly debatable. Curious what other HN users think. My own thinking is that political discussion between opposing factions is always going to be contentious, but that doesn't mean it should be suppressed. However, angry rhetoric can lead to further polarization, so I'm not sure what the right approach is. Edit: funny enough, this topic itself was flagged and killed! I've vouched it, but I'm open to hearing arguments for why this link doesn't belong.

reitanqild 9y ago
I thing some of these topics are the most interestng we have. I mostly accept that they don’t belong on HN though. But it feels deeply hypocritical when some political stories stay on the front page for hours until more information starts to arrive and they get flagged off swiftly.
jacquesm 9y ago
So, I've vouched for it too, mainly because it would be nice to have the option on HN to simply ignore the flags for those who feel they can handle it and don't need to be told by others what they can and can not discuss. It would be a pretty simple affair software wise, those that need it can have their safe space and those that don't can discuss whatever they want without being shouted down. Seems like the optimal solution to me.
- stormbrew 9y ago
  The thing about no moderation spaces (above and beyond legal requirements) is that they become tools of organized trolling efforts (harassment campaigns and the like). Having an unmoderated space on the internet is basically the social equivalent of having an open smtp relay. But if this "ignore flags" version of hackernews were to have any moderation at all to prevent the above, it would basically mean forcing extra work on the moderators of hackernews to cater to a handful of people interested in genuine discussion and a vast army of people interested in using it to troll, harass, and generally be awful to people.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > But if this "ignore flags" version of hackernews were to have any moderation at all to prevent the above, it would basically mean forcing extra work on the moderators of hackernews to cater to a handful of people interested in genuine discussion and a vast army of people interested in using it to troll, harass, and generally be awful to people. I highly doubt that. Typically a normal discussion (such as this one) is underway and the suddenly the whole thing is killed. That's rude, to put it mildly and I see absolutely no harm in letting those discussions continue with the normal 'up/down' vote mechanism taking care of the moderation. Flagging just affects the ordering of the stories and does not have anything to do with the comments within those stories. Note that there is no reason that you would not be able to discuss this site and yet the discussion is flagged so the majority of HN will never see it. I don't like that, I think it puts too much weight to the flags in relation to the upvotes.
    - deleted 9y ago
DanBC 9y ago
> funny enough, this topic itself was flagged and killed! Flagged because of the stupid -rule breaking- title.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  What is rule breaking about it?
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Come off it, you've been here long enough to know that it's an editorialised title.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Ah in that sense. Oh golly, you're right. Well best we don't discuss that then, who knows what kind of subversive stuff might be said.
      - mzh0 9y ago
        No, i can ensure you the title is same as what i submitted
john_moscow 9y ago
Maybe just add a special topic flag "politics" and let everyone have a convenient switch in the profile settings whether they want to see those topics in the feed or not?
- forthefuture 9y ago
  That topic flag is called reddit.com/r/politics. We are already choosing to come here instead of there.
  - DanielBMarkham 9y ago
    I have always bowed to the wishes of PG and the mods when it comes to calling out articles as too "hot" This is a funky one, though. The issue itself is about how politics affects what we can say and not say online. In that way, it's a "meta" issue. I can still understand the flagging and death, but damn. Google, Apple, and Facebook are huge monsters that control hundreds of billions of dollars in cash and virtually everything a huge chunk of the world's population sees and does. This is a tech story. It's a politics story. It's a story about business. It's all of that. This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their head in the sand. For ten or twenty years, we've created the internet and all the things people use today. When asked about morals, ethics, and politics, we've just said something like "We make the tools. We're not responsible for their use" And here we are in a security and surveillance state that we've created. We're refusing to even talk about Google's desired monoculture because we're unable to maintain civil discourse. I get it. But fuck me. Something's really wrong here. I can't help but feel that the tech community at large -- and HN in particular -- is no longer working towards the betterment of mankind. Something is terribly broken. And we had a big part in breaking it.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      > This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their head in the sand. This happens all the time. Techies being 'apolitical' is a huge problem, and of course those very same techies then turn around and scream blue murder when laws are made that hurt their interests or when their tech is used to further some political goal they do not agree with.
mzh0 9y ago
Mysteriously, many thread, including this thread itself, has been revived from dead (but could possibly still be flagged): For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14961857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14961857 And it seems this thread itself is excluded in HN top
zitterbewegung 9y ago
The problem that HN faces is the fact that as social news aggregators become larger and larger the quality and type of user changes. To enforce this we have flagging and removal of content. The problem with this aggregators is enforcement and policing doesn't scale. Also, as the aggregator becomes larger people want to discuss more and more topics. Personally I would rather have a HN that doesn't have politically charged topics. Although some of those topics are relevant to the community if we start letting more and more political topics then we can have factions of users and once that starts HN won't be fun to read anymore. Reddit attempted to solve this through subreddits but that didn't work. Slashdot used moderation. Digg died because they released a new version. I suppose either the censorship or the flagging and removal of political topics and otherwise will be the thing that eliminates HN. I think that any social news aggregator has a shelf life and you can't keep it from degrading to either something you hate and or something that doesn't serve the people who run the site.

as1mov 9y ago

FYI you can view dead/flagged submissions by going to your profile and enabling showdead. I don't know if this is the correct place to criticize HN's moderation policies, it's kinda disheartening to see the list of submissions that were removed. News articles regarding the diversity memo were allowed but submissions linking to the actual memo were removed for some reason. If the actual memo is sexist/bigoted, then people can read it directly and decide it for themselves, instead of relying on second hand information. I mean even if you agree with what Google did, isn't it good that we discuss about it and point out the things that were problematic with that memo. What good does it do if we just try to shove the incident into a closet and pretend that it never happened? Edit: Even this post was flagged :/

jacquesm 9y ago
Yes, but the discussion instantly dies and when flagged to death you can't even comment anymore.
- as1mov 9y ago
  That's just abuse of the flagging system. I don't get why people want to hide something that they don't agree with from everyone's eyes. Why not just ignore the post if you don't want to participate in the discussion. If someone wants an echochamber where only things that you agree with are visible, reddit is much better place for that, regardless of which side of the debate you are on, you'll find a subreddit that fits you.
greenyoda 9y ago
"News articles regarding the diversity memo were allowed but submissions linking to the actual memo were removed for some reason." No, this article, the first one to publish the full text of the memo, got 353 points and received 616 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895 Several subsequent submissions of the same content were flagged as duplicates.
- as1mov 9y ago

JSONwebtoken 9y ago

HN's flagging algorithm wasn't built to withstand mass false positives from people who would rather shout down, silence, and blow up certain conversations when they realize they lack the mental fortitude to do battle with the same scientific truth of which they mock the low-hanging-fruit of middle America for not comprehending.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

ComputerGuru 9y ago

Meh, the stories were killed for a reason. Thanks @dang and the rest of the team for keeping HN relevant and sane. It's never a fully objective decision, but I'm glad to leave that to them rather than have to dig through crap to find something good (cough unlike reddit cough).

beaner 9y ago

When posts are flagged, is there a reason that is provided and is it viewable somewhere? It seems like there's a lot of legit, even large threads that have been flagged and removed. Even ones that don't seem offensive, they're just related to or covering news on some things that perhaps some people find offensive. Seems crazy that they'd disappear. I'd be interested in reading the justifications for removal.

DanBC 9y ago
Users flag posts. It's not a moderator action. There's a setting called showdead that you can change to see all the flagged posts.
- beaner 9y ago
  Ah, thanks. Sometimes I see mods intervene on comments and that kind of thing, so I figured flagged posts went into a queue before removal.

forthefuture 9y ago

The flagging isn't a rogue algorithm. It's the majority of the sites users saying they don't want to keep seeing the same two toxic viewpoints throwing shit at each other.

jacquesm 9y ago
If that were the only way it was used it would be fine. But it is also used to simply shut down rational discussion on subjects the flaggers don't like.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- forthefuture 9y ago
  I use hckrnews myself and don't see this happening. Would you mind identifying which threads you think have been incorrectly flagged?
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    In the last 24 hours you'll find plenty of those about the Google affair, most likely shut down by Googlers flagging those links to shut down any discussion. Hard to tell without knowing who the flaggers are, which is one reason I don't like flagging.
    - wvl 9y ago
      I find the chronological history of hckrnews.com adds context to why many things get flagged. For example, immediately after the bloomberg article was posted about Google firing the memo author, were several other articles with the same content (from arstechnica and nymag) which were immediately flagged. Any time an inflammatory subject gets beat to death, the same process happens. So in that respect, I often agree with the submissions that get flagged (including this one), but I do think news.ycombinator.com could do a better job of collecting and displaying these flagged submissions. For example, duplicate submissions could be made children of the submission that was allowed to stay.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

venning 9y ago

To create an intentional false dichotomy: if I have to choose between a site that surfaces all content regardless of controversy but accepts that related discussions will be lower-quality, and a site that directly or indirectly suppresses some content to maintain higher-quality discussion overall, I will choose the latter. I appreciate that some people feel that the "loss" of some submissions due to automatic flamewar detection algorithms or user flagging is a problem, but I, for one, appreciate that the discussions that remain on the front page (for a long time) have a reasonable guarantee of being high quality. Relatedly, it may also have an effect on the non-controversial submissions by establishing that flamewars will not remain in high positions for long. (I realize that's a bit of a "broken windows theory".)

as1mov 9y ago
Most of the recently flagged submissions were related to the diversity memo. I don't mind if fluff articles from dailydot are removed. But then when a verbatim copy of the memo was posted, and even that was flagged. I highly doubt that was flagged because it would have low quality discussions. People just abuse the flagging system to hide content that they don't agree with.
- venning 9y ago
  I also doubt that it was flagged because it would generate low-quality discussion. But I do not doubt that low-quality discussion would have followed had it not been flagged off the front page. I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are going to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more powerful tool (comments) poorly.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are going to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more powerful tool (comments) poorly. Flags are the more powerful tool. A single flag is the equivalent of many upvotes and annihilates the whole discussion. That's a lot more power than a comment, which can be dealt with on an individual basis.

wvl 9y ago

As an aside, I do find it interesting that this submission is nowhere to be found from the main page itself (or at least 5 pages back, despite 50 points and 17 comments. I guess it was flagged/vouched back, but having showdead on in your hacker news profile does nothing to help if the algorithm drops the submission into nowhereland. That is reason enough for the existence of hckrnews.com, imo.

Artemis2 9y ago

Besides the flagging, I really like hckrnews as a daily reader. The ability to see immediately what is new since my last visit (and to tune the number of posts I want to see) is a huge timesaver.

madmax108 9y ago
Absolutely absolutely agree with this! hckrnews is what I use to keep track of what's new on HN since I last visited!