3 ms·

Honest question: Will this thread be quickly flagged by HN moderators or taken off the front page like many others on the topic (see https://news.ycombinator.co

by rsp1984 9y ago

Honest question: Will this thread be quickly flagged by HN moderators or taken off the front page like many others on the topic (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967819 for more info)? Or are there "exceptions"?

mberning 9y ago
This mostly supports a highly biased reading of the memo so it will definitely stay on the front page for hours. There have been at least 3 other considerably more interesting follow ups written by women ("these are not my people" essay, the one by the physicist, and the one yesterday from the google recruiter that was "sick" of it) and all three got flagged to hell and disappeared. Anybody compaining got the stock "you are just another idealogue" admonisminet from moderators.
dang 9y ago
You seem to be mistaken about what's been happening. Moderators haven't been flagging those articles; users have. That's what '[flagged]' means. The different outcome in this case is because of community response. There are still a lot of flags, but there are many more upvotes. That, plus the discussion quality (i.e. not a trainwreck) surprised us quite a bit. I emailed Cadran this morning that she should probably expect the post to get flagged the same way as others (by users) and that we wouldn't be able to intervene if that happened. Instead, it went straight to #1. That's fine by me because the discussion has remained relatively civil and substantive. For completeness I should mention that we did do one intervention: we turned off a software penalty called the 'flamewar detector' that kicks in on discussions that get a great many comments. But that's routine: we always turn off that penalty when the discussion isn't actually a flamewar, and this one qualifies. Other than that, moderators haven't touched the post at all, so yeah I think it's fair to say no exceptions.
- rsp1984 9y ago
  Thanks for taking the time to clarify.

mberning 9y ago

This mostly supports a highly biased reading of the memo so it will definitely stay on the front page for hours. There have been at least 3 other considerably more interesting follow ups written by women ("these are not my people" essay, the one by the physicist, and the one yesterday from the google recruiter that was "sick" of it) and all three got flagged to hell and disappeared. Anybody compaining got the stock "you are just another idealogue" admonisminet from moderators.

dang 9y ago

You seem to be mistaken about what's been happening. Moderators haven't been flagging those articles; users have. That's what '[flagged]' means. The different outcome in this case is because of community response. There are still a lot of flags, but there are many more upvotes. That, plus the discussion quality (i.e. not a trainwreck) surprised us quite a bit. I emailed Cadran this morning that she should probably expect the post to get flagged the same way as others (by users) and that we wouldn't be able to intervene if that happened. Instead, it went straight to #1. That's fine by me because the discussion has remained relatively civil and substantive. For completeness I should mention that we did do one intervention: we turned off a software penalty called the 'flamewar detector' that kicks in on discussions that get a great many comments. But that's routine: we always turn off that penalty when the discussion isn't actually a flamewar, and this one qualifies. Other than that, moderators haven't touched the post at all, so yeah I think it's fair to say no exceptions.

rsp1984 9y ago
Thanks for taking the time to clarify.