24 ms·

Analyzing HN moderation and censorship

264 points by ddevault 9y ago

call_out 9y ago
test
epx 9y ago
I used to worry about downvotes, now I find solace in having annoyed the downvoters.
- dogruck 9y ago
  I agree that if you never get down votes, then you're not adding maximum value.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    What good is karma if you never spend it!
  - epx 9y ago
    That was inspiring! Thank you for that.
oftenbanned 9y ago
Article doesn’t mention what I believe is one mod tool: shadow banning accounts based on IP. I had a bunch of accounts get shadowbanned for no evident reason and after a while I deduced it was based on using the account from a particular cafe’s WiFi. I just created this account and if I go use it from that place I will be banned again by some automated process.
- willvarfar 9y ago
  Why did you have so many accounts in the first place? How many is "a bunch"?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - have_faith 9y ago
    Is it against the rules? I can think of lots of legitimate (and obviously nefarious) reasons someone would.
  - oftenbanned 9y ago
    Well only one at a time. Then as each gets banned I make another one. Note that they get banned if I just visit HN from the IP in question no posting required.
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      ... if all of your nyms get banned, it might be that you are consistently behaving in a way that the moderators don't like. Have you considered, perhaps, changing your behavior?
      - oftenbanned 9y ago
        You’re not really comprehending what I am saying. If I create an account, never post or comment, and just browse HN from the IP in question, that account will be banned. It has nothing to do with behavior.
        dsr_ 9y ago
        Yeah, that didn't come through at all. My apologies.
        dang 9y ago
        Nobody gets banned just by browsing. If you're concerned about a specific IP, and haven't been abusing HN, it should be easy to clear up by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. And even if you have been abusing HN, we're always happy to unban people (and/or their IPs) if they give us reason to believe that they've taken https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to heart and will follow the rules in the future.
- ionised 9y ago
  > I had a bunch of accounts Maybe that is the problem.
  - joering2 9y ago
    He said he registered them from Public Wifi. So anyone registering first account on HN from said cafee will be banned? Why are you so surprised he might have multiple accounts? You really have one email account? How about work-related email? Company-facing related email? If anything, its actually good he has multiple accounts and stuff related to / from his company account he is posting from company, and private is private.
    - ionised 9y ago
      > You really have one email account? No, I have 5, but I only have one HN account. Why would I need more? I was thinking more that he might have been identified as being the same person posting from multiple accounts, and activating some kind of spam/abuse protection.
      - joering2 9y ago
        > Why would I need more? For same reason you have multiple email addresses no?
        ionised 9y ago
        I have multiple email address for different purposes. I don't need multiple HN accounts for different purposes. Others might but I can't think why off the top of my head. The only time I've seen an obvious alternate account is the throw-away accounts opened just to troll/spam the site.
        joering2 9y ago
        One example would be is that you might work for a company and have their point of view expressed on HN all the time; meanwhile you want to have your own account personal one that regardless if you continue working for said company or not, you still continue to use. Sort of like TV anchors have their own private twitter hints and then they have their work ones too.
- krapp 9y ago
  Banning by IP is so commonplace that it shouldn't need to be mentioned.
  - oftenbanned 9y ago
    I mention it because the article says shadowbanning is rare. It’s not that rare if they’ve got some kind of stored procedure that just goes around doing it.
    - krapp 9y ago
      It would make no sense to ban an IP for only a single session. Shadowbanning can still be rare (for whatever value of rare) when an IP ban is persistent.
      - oftenbanned 9y ago
        If you want to ban some IP, just serve 403 to that IP. Deleting all of the accounts of people who like to order toast and eggs in the morning at the same place is what makes no sense.
        detaro 9y ago
        have you contacted the mods about this? It should be a fairly easy to verify and fix.
        krapp 9y ago
        > Deleting all of the accounts of people who like to order toast and eggs in the morning at the same place is what makes no sense. Shadowbans are reversible by users and can be appealed to the mods, assuming you notice it (which, by design, you're not supposed to.) This is supposed to ensure that only accounts which should be banned remained banned. It's not perfect, but it does make sense - the only real options for banning are by IP and by account, so if you want to prevent a banned user from just making a new account, you have to ban the IP as well. Maybe someone was a troll and got that IP banned, maybe it appears on a blacklist (assuming HN checks that,) who knows? It's not random and arbitrary, though.
- uzoodoo 9y ago
  Another shadowbanned user here. Used to be an occasional poster, made posts if I had something meaningful to add. At some point I noticed that I never got replies, but didn't think much of it, continued posting. Then, one day I looked at my profile while I was logged out, and surprise - the the posts for the last few months are no longer there. Like OP, I went through a few accounts. They worked for a bit, and then responses dropped off. Eventually, I realized that apparently, my new apartment's IP is toxic. Not sure who a shadow ban is supposed to punish since any spam bot can check just as trivially of they're banned. On the other hand, legitimate users have no idea keep wasting their time submitting their comments to /dev/null. By now I have given up on trying to comment on HN. I can use my time on better things. Ironic that a the site like HN can't get a proper quoting markup, can't fix the pre-block scroll, took forever to add support for mobile and comment collapsing, and used blanket IP bans...
minimaxir 9y ago
Another HN tool moderators use that isn't mentioned in the post is the second-chance pool, where moderators will rescue a post which did not receive many upvotes and give it placement on the front page for a bit of time.
- alekratz 9y ago
  Where is this documented? Not trying to be snippy - I have no idea what powers the moderators have in this realm. Maybe HN could benefit from some lobste.rs-esque moderation transparency.
  - minimaxir 9y ago
    dang made a full writeup here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 I agree it (along with other moderation behaviors described in the article) should be documented more explicitly in the guidelines/FAQ
    - alexandercrohde 9y ago
      I think HN is factoring in that transparency can also be a weakness too. When google released its page-rank algorithm it became a target for manipulation and entire forums got wrecked (until nofollow) with the wave of consequences it created. I think the threat of user manipulation will always outweigh that of mod manipulation. Worth considering.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        There are layers to HN's transparency. Some policy is in the guidelines. Some policy is described in moderator comments, so if you want to keep up with it, you have to follow 'dang and 'sctb. Some policy is "public" but you'll only learn about it if you mail hn@yc and ask. Some policy won't be made public. There's no master plan behind it all, but each of these ways of handling policy has a purpose. Describing evolving policy in comments allows the moderators to be responsive and flexible without overrunning the site with metadiscussion like they would if every new decision they made was accompanied by a formal change in the guidelines. Relating policy in email discussion gives them a chance to explain it in context and to take feedback from the people most impacted or interested in that policy --- we all know votes on this site wouldn't generate that set of users. The stuff they don't make public is generally stuff we don't want made public. We forget that there are just a couple (I think literally) people running this site, and they're up against waves of people trying to create schemes to sell front page rank to spammers. They've got a sort of equilibrium that gives them a chance --- something Reddit seems to be failing at despite a much large team --- while still having the time to type out individualized contextualized explanations for all their routine moderating actions on threads (seriously, mods, figure out TextExpander or build something like it into your moderating tools).
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vormalpg 9y ago
Moderators should in no way be able to bury posts or even nudge them downwards. This is a cowardly way to try to control discussion. If it isn't explicitly against the site rules, let the readers decide.
- eterm 9y ago
  I've long come to accept that HN is a curated source, the voting is a kind of false-democracy to make it appear more democratic than it is. Yes, likely >90% of the site is done through voting, but a significant amount of pruning and bumping clearly also occurs.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    It's not a democracy at all. User votes are one signal the site uses among many. It's been like that since day one.
    - rtpg 9y ago
      Sure... it's still mostly about votes right? "Popular things go to the top" is a pretty good first approximation of the algorithm. You have things getting flagged to death for generating bad conversation/flamewars (kinda like parents telling kids to stop playing rough since people are getting hurt). There's the hiring posts. At least to me, it's always felt like moderation is happening at the margins.
      - tptacek 9y ago
        Votes are a powerful signal here because they're the easiest signal to automate. That leads people to believe their HN votes are more sacred than they are. There has never been a point in the history of the site where it's ever been unclear that the site is ultimately run by the mods. People complaining now should find someone who's been on here for a long time and ask what it was like under Paul Graham. Hint: not better.
        9y ago
chasing 9y ago
"Censorship by moderators" How about: "Curation by moderators"
- spash 9y ago
  "Censorship by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China" How about: "Curation by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China"
  - a13xb 9y ago
    HN is not a government or a political party, it's a privately run link aggregator.
    - spash 9y ago
      Is this definiton of censorship from Wikipedia incorrect then? "Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions"
      - peterwwillis 9y ago
        That's not the point. They just don't want to think censorship is an accepted part of their daily lives because censorship often implies oppression. But censorship is part and parcel of almost every forum. The social values of the people who own the forum, as well as incentives behind their operating it, determine what kind of censorship is applied. For example, on YouTube, hate speech [which I know isn't actually a thing] is commonplace - they don't feel the need (or perhaps don't have the resources) to censor comments which certain people find detestable. But they have created complex systems to analyze videos so that they can identify certain ones and remove them automatically. The end result is that censorship isn't applied uniformly. In one example, a YouTube account that was documenting videos of attacks on the people of Raqqa was flagged for spreading terrorist propaganda. You could make the argument that while the hate speech didn't impact their bottom line, the videos could, so they accept a certain amount of unequal and unintentional censorship in order to maintain their business position, defend their corporate values, and of course, retain their user base. Moderation is a more nuanced and human approach to censorship. By giving people second chances, answering emails, giving the occasional explanation, etc they build social capital and prevent emotional backlash that could threaten the status of the forum. By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves, they can't be accused of unfair treatment. But they are indeed imposing specific social and political values on their users, to the point of hiding or removing the post or user when it doesn't align with their values. This shapes not only the quality of the dialogue, but its content. This is the essence of censorship. To severely paraphrase 1984: "To control speech you control language, as controlling language controls thought."
angersock 9y ago
There are two other features not listed: submission throttling for comments (which I suspect mods have some influence on) and slow banning (making the site slow for flagged users). For a different approach to moderation, check out Lobsters.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 9y ago
  Re rate-limiting see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513929. Slow-banning was dropped years ago.
tptacek 9y ago
Paywalled articles are explicitly not against the rules.
- SloopJon 9y ago
  "It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds." With the weakening of the Google workaround that's baked into the HN header, more and more submissions are going to run afoul of that condition.
alekratz 9y ago
I've noticed that a lot of submissions have had their titles changed recently (past month or two). I wasn't aware that users were allowed to change their own titles - I was chalking this up to moderators "curating" articles. How often do users change the titles of their submissions? There's no way to tell.
deadmetheny 9y ago
>Consider appointing one or two moderators from the community, ideally people with less bias towards SV or startup culture While I agree that this would be a great idea, it's laughable in that, as a service run by Y Combinator, it's always going to be for startup hucksters primarily and for the rest of the tech industry and Internet at large secondarily.
- tptacek 9y ago
  This site is overwhelmingly populated by people outside of startupland.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
timthelion 9y ago
In my opinion, far more than moderation, HN is effected by who votes for the new articles. If you look at the "new" page then most stories never even get one upvote. Those who do go over there and upvote stories have far more power than those who only ever look at the front page. Sadly, it seems that there are too many stories on "new" for a person to sit there, read each one, and upvote, so the only real way to get a story on the front page is to get lucky or gang up with your friends.
- rqs 9y ago
  And also, I wonder what if some people just use proxies to register a bunch of HN accounts and use them to promote their items. It seems not very hard to register an HN account.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    A bunch of new accounts, going via known proxy sites, all voting for the same item? There won't even be a human involved in the ban decision. If you don't have showdead on, you might not notice that many posts by new accounts are marked as dead immediately, and it's usually justified.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 9y ago
  And as mentioned, people will definitely use the flag feature to get rid of controversial articles they don't like. Anything about sexism will get flagged into oblivion, for example.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Plenty of people who are deeply concerned about sexism in this industry also flag those stories, because it only takes 2-3 misogynist trolls to create a 300-comment shitshow out of them. There are still kinds of threads that this site simply can't do well, and it's better we not pretend we can until the guidelines and mod tools evolve to actually make them work here.
ploggingdev 9y ago
The voting ring detector is in need of a serious upgrade. There are so many cases of vote solicitation by people with meaningful social media following and their posts even make the front page. It's mostly the Product Hunt style "Hey we launched on HN, check us out" which is code for "upvote my post". People have stopped directly linking to the post submission for fear of tripping the voting ring detector, but they either just say "We launched on HN" or link to /newest. Seeing such posts make the front page makes me question the effectiveness of the voting ring detector beyond catching the obvious ones. A shoutout to `minimaxir for being one of the only people constantly calling out others for such bs. As you can imagine, people get offended for being called out and I remember at least 2 instances of him being treated rudely for doing so on twitter. If anyone comes across such submissions, please report them to the mods by sending them an email. I'll admit I have not been doing what I suggested, but going forward I will.
- mnglkhn2 9y ago
  The "voting ring" is an essential tool when you need to promote links from certain media orgs (most of them paywalled). How else can you ensure the front page placement for links that you are getting paid (or have an interest in) to promote. The question is: should these deals be disclosed upfront, something along the lines of: "this is a paid submission" ?!
  - krapp 9y ago
    >How else can you ensure the front page placement for links that you are getting paid (or have an interest in) to promote. You're not supposed to be able to ensure front page placement. Your content is supposed to rise and fall based solely on its merit, as determined by (unpaid and unaffiliated) users and the moderators.
    - mnglkhn2 9y ago
      Not when the party wanting to ensure it is YC and HN.
singularity2001 9y ago
#MeToo just recently I had my first comment on HN 'flagged'. It had several upvotes 19 constructive comments and was perfectly reasonable IMHO. What gives, not a big drama. I shrugged it off, though it left a negative taste of things to come.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Many of us seek to avoid controversy by hiding in technical details. These controversies are mind numbing because all answers are blatantly obvious and there is nothing to compute; merely humans being awful humans.
ibebnndagan 9y ago
Shadow banning isn't rare. I've had accounts banned for no apparent reason, or for laughable reasons that are not even in the poorly written guidelines. Moderators also have been repeatedly caught about heavy handed moderation. They control the platform, they control the message, they do not allow meta discussion, why believe anything they say?
flavio81 9y ago
In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesting, sometimes exciting news, posts, articles and "Show HN"s. As for comment moderation, I think that HN is a community with the least amount of moderation i've seen. Which makes me really happy. I have submitted only three or four things here, so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.
- wyager 9y ago
  > I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. The Reddit mods and admins are notoriously censorious. If you want minimal moderation, you would need to go to the anonymous imageboards. The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.
  - TACIXAT 9y ago
    Agree so much. Any voting system is going to create bubbles. Head over to 4chan and you will get to interact with all sorts of different opinions.
    - ivm 9y ago
      Imageboards have a clickbait-based bubble. To survive on a busy board, you need to create a post that captures attention. Hence, the effect of 4chan on the Internet — its top posters are the edge of the troll evolution.
  - maccard 9y ago
    > The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many. Could you provide some examples of how the content is better there? I'd be interested, but any time I've ever tried to investigate, I can't get past all the unfettered crap
mcguire 9y ago
Then, there is the case of 'On Whose Authority (http://z.caudate.me/on-whose-authority/ http://z.caudate.me/on-whose-authority/), the HN discussion of which was killed while the discussion of Rich Hickey's response (https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_authority/do1olag https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au...) was ongoing and both were on the front page.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Interpersonal drama gets flagged off the site routinely. You see the same thing happen when a "story" is really an extrapolation of one person's tweet. I remember flagging that post myself.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Did you also flag the response?
    - tptacek 9y ago
      I don't remember, but if I saw it, I did. I try to flag all drama stories.
      - mcguire 9y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425632
ahdiheje 9y ago
I am being auto shadow banned. Just look at dead comments to know how heavy moderated opinion is on HN. HN controls what views they allow on their forum, certainly not a place to have a free and open discussion.
- beingmyself2 9y ago
  I've noticed over the years that comments seem to be moderated with political bias. I've been shadowbanned before for expressing conservative viewpoints (without breaking rules). Mods like their echochambers.
ahdiheje 9y ago
Also posts I made were deleted, not even allowed to be seen even as 'dead'
- sctb 9y ago
  If you would email us links to those comments at hn@ycombinator.com we can take a look. That's not a moderation practice.
interfixus 9y ago
The harsh and angry negativity of some comments in this thread is difficult to understand. As others have pointed out, and as should go without saying, this is a private site with whichever ruleset its owners choose to impose, take it or leave it. And besides, the mods are making a tremendous job of it. I wildly disagree with lots of their decisions, and probably with great part of their general outlook on life, but I really can't fault their taste or professionalism, so thank you, guys. The one cowardly thing going on here is the doing of users, not of moderators: The sad and unworthy tendency of some to downvote comments to oblivion purely for opinions expressed. Now that is a kind of grassroots censorship which we could do without.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >"The harsh and angry negativity of some comments in this thread is difficult to understand. As others have pointed out, and as should go without saying, this is a private site with whichever ruleset its owners choose to impose, take it or leave it." I find this comment difficult to understand. The success and value of a site like HN largely depends on a community who submits stories and engages in discussion about those stories. Stating "This is a private site" and "take it or leave it" is not only unnecessarily dismissive but its a false dichotomy. Liking something and wanting to see it improve are not mutually exclusive.
throw2016 9y ago
A larger wordview beyond a group think bubble of SV is needed to represent the tech industry. A lack of transparency always ends up empowering people behind the scenes who then have to make casual judgements of entire swaths of people and opinion. This is bad both for moderators and discussion. Fortunately its relatively easy to launch a site like HN. A problem is a solution waiting to happen. If there is competition and it affects HN they are not going to sit back, there will be more transparency. However good something is competition is essential to keep people on their toes, so there is a largish lacuna here for the health of the industry. Having said that any popular site will have the exact same issues HN does, so if the point is merely to change decision makers by those jockeying for influence then its a pointless exercise of exaggerating issues to gain influence, ironically how most new products are launched on HN these days.
harlanji 9y ago
It's ridiculous that mods can hide my comments but I can't delete them. If a post is removed, I should have the anility to revoke my license to tue copy and have it removed. Would DMCA cover that?
- striking 9y ago
  There's the EU right to be forgotten if a company does business in the EU, and the ability to ask the mods to delete things, which they do.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
The website that publishes my stats (https://hn.0x2237.club https://hn.0x2237.club) is getting smashed. This is largely because collecting stats is expensive and I devote most of the CPU time to that. Rest assured, stats are still being gathered, and you should be able to browse them when it cools down a bit. Sorry for the inconvenience!
mlvljr 9y ago
..and oppression! (look -- they hell-bannned me :))
mschuster91 9y ago
What I personally dislike is the "spam filter". I sometimes hit it when participating in multiple threads and it says "You're submitting too fast, please slow down" - and it does not reset itself after sometimes over 8 hours.
- dang 9y ago
  That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site. I took a quick look at your recent history and it seems fine, so I'll take the rate limit off. But to prevent it from kicking in again, please stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I recall that we had to ask you many times in the past not to violate that, but hopefully it's all in the past now and things will be nice and guideliney going forward.
losteverything 9y ago
I never gave thought to the moderator position till this analysis. I wonder if it is a full time job. Do other sites have full time moderators? Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past. To compare and contrast, if you are a construction worker making residential housing, you and see its effect on people and humanity. Year after year and perhaps decade after decade you can drive by and know your work helped a family. Yet the effort of a moderator goes away within hours and is hard (for me) to see the long lasting value. This write up helped me think about a topic i never thought of before. Thanks (HN moderators: i know u make this site a good read. Thanks)
- j_s 9y ago
  Meet the People Taking over Hacker News | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856 (Mar 2014, 286 comments) Tell HN: New features and a moderator | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 (Jul 2016, 451 comments)
- ansible 9y ago
  Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past. I'm one of the moderators over on reddit.com/r/AskEngineers. It is work... that I don't get paid for. Or any kind of reward, really. But I'm doing it because I want to promote high-quality discussion on various engineering topics. I'm glad when we can help each other out by answering questions. To be a moderator, ideally you're in it for the long term, by trying to guide your community in a good direction, educate people, uphold standards of good and civil discussion.
  - losteverything 9y ago
    Do you manage time so that there is planned downtime? Like no moderating weekends or 8/40/5? Or is it a mostly 24/7 look-at-all-new-posts thing
matt4077 9y ago
Moderators don't "censor". They moderate.
Kiro 9y ago
> title change and derank I don't understand why the articles shown that had to their titles changed also were deranked.
trgv 9y ago
Here are some posts whose flags I consider questionable: Harvey, the Storm That Humans Helped Cause (23 points) ES6 imports syntax considered harmful (12 points) White-Owned Restaurants Shamed for Serving Ethnic Food (33 points) The evidence is piling up – Silicon Valley is being destroyed (27 points) Personally I'm glad all of these posts were flagged.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  You might disagree with them, but were they violating the guidelines? Rules should not be selectively enforced, and made-up rules should definitely not be enforced.
  - trgv 9y ago
    I think they were violating guidelines in that they qualified as off-topic. Is that worth a flag? I'm not sure. But I don't think they should have been flagged "because I disagree with them."
    - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
      They're not off-topic according to the guidelines so far as I understand them.
MichaelMoser123 9y ago
Each news outlet serves some purpose, that's why people bother to maintain it; so it has some degree of editorial policy (determined by the collective action of the editors). I for one think that I am spending too much time here (relative to the stuff that I learn). (Lets see how long I can keep off site, after all this is adictive ;-) I would appreciate it if someone would come up with a filter, HN on tech subjects only, and no politics and business stories - a mere title line is not enough to figure out the context (but they do that on purpose, to involve more people that way, don't they :-) actually I guess that would be easy to do with NLP tagging... One thing that I dislike with both HN and reddit style moderation system is that the subject of the editorial action has no idea that he/she has been edited out. I think that actually gives the pleasant feeling of being in an insane asylum. Anybody can relate ti this sentiment?
gnicholas 9y ago
I was actually going to build a tool that scrapes HN every couple minutes and looks for stories that were hot (on the front page) and then drops by 20+ slots. I've happened to be involved in a couple threads where this inexplicably happened, and I was unhappy to see the discussion being muted (people previously involved continued commenting, but no new people saw/joined the thread). I was going to show the buried posts on a site called toohotforhn.com, so that people could go to find the discussions that they might have otherwise missed. These days, much of it is around silicon valley and the treatment of women/minorities, but it could also include stories that are negative on YC companies that get buried (inadvertently, perhaps) as well. Others have pointed out that if you want more discussion on X, you can go find it elsewhere. The point is that I want to see what HNers think about X — which is why I think a tool like this would be useful.
- sizzle 9y ago
  Please build this
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    seconded
  - gnicholas 9y ago
    I'm going to reach out to the OP and see if he'd like to collaborate on it, to basically just put a good front-end on the analytics he's already pulling. Fingers crossed — hope to have a Show HN for y'all sometime soon!
- dang 9y ago
  Why don't you just look at https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active? (via https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists). Most if not almost all of those stories show up there. Btw since you brought up the point, we moderate stories less, not more, when they're about YC or YC-funded companies. That's literally the first rule of HN moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20yc%20less%20not%20more https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all, since the internet would drive a truck through a cheap ploy like that. But we do err on that side, since keeping the good faith of the community is more important than any particular story.
demonshalo 9y ago
HN does a ton of censorship. Ex. Communism is responsible for 100s of millions of deaths world wide, it is way more vicious and evil than say Nazism or any other ism. Yet somehow if I post a communist opinion here (on a political topic) or actively say that I am a communists while bashing capitalism, that goes under the title of free speech and moderators do nothing about that (as far as I can see). Now, imagine if I came out in that same political discussion saying that I am a Nazi. That would get flagged and removed right away even though that's a much less evil position to hold. It is clear to me that HN moderation is biased. I am for 100% total and free speech. The worst and the best of humanity should be able to say their piece. But in my mind there is no denying the fact that HN moderators are biased. Merely mentioning the evils of communism is sufficient at times to get your comments removed and give you warnings -.-
timcederman 9y ago
Interesting to see the ability to take away downvoting is not mentioned. After downvoting one person (who made multiple offensive contributions) in a single thread, I noticed later I could no longer downvote comments (but the downvote button still appeared). Ultimately, I think the secretive and subjective approach to moderation at Hacker News has resulted in a positive outcome, but it's still surprising to run into the limits on occasion.
nickjj 9y ago
I always felt like there was something weird about rankings when it came to HN. I recall submitting something that got around 7 upvotes in 30 minutes but it got dead and buried and never presented itself on the front page. The content wasn't edgy and it wasn't clickbait. But a few days later I saw an unrelated post with 2 upvotes after 1 full hour and it was magically on the front page. If a post with 2 upvotes after 1 hour can be on the front page but a post with 7 upvotes in 30 minutes is not, then surely there needs to be some type of manual intervention happening. Glad to see there's data showing this now and I'm not going crazy.
grandalf 9y ago
This a great analysis. I would love to see a public page displaying title changes so that I could click "request explanation" and the mods could offer an explanation for those every day based on reader interest. Whatever is going on to achieve it, HN is a great online community, and so maybe that is due to the moderation. Sometimes I wonder if it might be in spite of the moderation, but who knows :) the precipitous drop that happens to stories after their titles have been changed shows a very strong editorial bias going on. I think there is a general strategy of keeping highly controversial political topics off of HN. The question is, when does this sort of censorship constitute an ideological crackdown in its own right.

264 points by ddevault 9y ago

call_out 9y ago

test

epx 9y ago

I used to worry about downvotes, now I find solace in having annoyed the downvoters.

dogruck 9y ago
I agree that if you never get down votes, then you're not adding maximum value.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  What good is karma if you never spend it!
- epx 9y ago
  That was inspiring! Thank you for that.

oftenbanned 9y ago

Article doesn’t mention what I believe is one mod tool: shadow banning accounts based on IP. I had a bunch of accounts get shadowbanned for no evident reason and after a while I deduced it was based on using the account from a particular cafe’s WiFi. I just created this account and if I go use it from that place I will be banned again by some automated process.

willvarfar 9y ago
Why did you have so many accounts in the first place? How many is "a bunch"?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- have_faith 9y ago
  Is it against the rules? I can think of lots of legitimate (and obviously nefarious) reasons someone would.
- oftenbanned 9y ago
  Well only one at a time. Then as each gets banned I make another one. Note that they get banned if I just visit HN from the IP in question no posting required.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    ... if all of your nyms get banned, it might be that you are consistently behaving in a way that the moderators don't like. Have you considered, perhaps, changing your behavior?
    - oftenbanned 9y ago
      You’re not really comprehending what I am saying. If I create an account, never post or comment, and just browse HN from the IP in question, that account will be banned. It has nothing to do with behavior.
      - dsr_ 9y ago
        Yeah, that didn't come through at all. My apologies.
      - dang 9y ago
        Nobody gets banned just by browsing. If you're concerned about a specific IP, and haven't been abusing HN, it should be easy to clear up by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. And even if you have been abusing HN, we're always happy to unban people (and/or their IPs) if they give us reason to believe that they've taken https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to heart and will follow the rules in the future.
ionised 9y ago
> I had a bunch of accounts Maybe that is the problem.
- joering2 9y ago
  He said he registered them from Public Wifi. So anyone registering first account on HN from said cafee will be banned? Why are you so surprised he might have multiple accounts? You really have one email account? How about work-related email? Company-facing related email? If anything, its actually good he has multiple accounts and stuff related to / from his company account he is posting from company, and private is private.
  - ionised 9y ago
    > You really have one email account? No, I have 5, but I only have one HN account. Why would I need more? I was thinking more that he might have been identified as being the same person posting from multiple accounts, and activating some kind of spam/abuse protection.
    - joering2 9y ago
      > Why would I need more? For same reason you have multiple email addresses no?
      - ionised 9y ago
        I have multiple email address for different purposes. I don't need multiple HN accounts for different purposes. Others might but I can't think why off the top of my head. The only time I've seen an obvious alternate account is the throw-away accounts opened just to troll/spam the site.
        joering2 9y ago
        One example would be is that you might work for a company and have their point of view expressed on HN all the time; meanwhile you want to have your own account personal one that regardless if you continue working for said company or not, you still continue to use. Sort of like TV anchors have their own private twitter hints and then they have their work ones too.
krapp 9y ago
Banning by IP is so commonplace that it shouldn't need to be mentioned.
- oftenbanned 9y ago
  I mention it because the article says shadowbanning is rare. It’s not that rare if they’ve got some kind of stored procedure that just goes around doing it.
  - krapp 9y ago
    It would make no sense to ban an IP for only a single session. Shadowbanning can still be rare (for whatever value of rare) when an IP ban is persistent.
    - oftenbanned 9y ago
      If you want to ban some IP, just serve 403 to that IP. Deleting all of the accounts of people who like to order toast and eggs in the morning at the same place is what makes no sense.
      - detaro 9y ago
        have you contacted the mods about this? It should be a fairly easy to verify and fix.
      - krapp 9y ago
        > Deleting all of the accounts of people who like to order toast and eggs in the morning at the same place is what makes no sense. Shadowbans are reversible by users and can be appealed to the mods, assuming you notice it (which, by design, you're not supposed to.) This is supposed to ensure that only accounts which should be banned remained banned. It's not perfect, but it does make sense - the only real options for banning are by IP and by account, so if you want to prevent a banned user from just making a new account, you have to ban the IP as well. Maybe someone was a troll and got that IP banned, maybe it appears on a blacklist (assuming HN checks that,) who knows? It's not random and arbitrary, though.
uzoodoo 9y ago
Another shadowbanned user here. Used to be an occasional poster, made posts if I had something meaningful to add. At some point I noticed that I never got replies, but didn't think much of it, continued posting. Then, one day I looked at my profile while I was logged out, and surprise - the the posts for the last few months are no longer there. Like OP, I went through a few accounts. They worked for a bit, and then responses dropped off. Eventually, I realized that apparently, my new apartment's IP is toxic. Not sure who a shadow ban is supposed to punish since any spam bot can check just as trivially of they're banned. On the other hand, legitimate users have no idea keep wasting their time submitting their comments to /dev/null. By now I have given up on trying to comment on HN. I can use my time on better things. Ironic that a the site like HN can't get a proper quoting markup, can't fix the pre-block scroll, took forever to add support for mobile and comment collapsing, and used blanket IP bans...

minimaxir 9y ago

Another HN tool moderators use that isn't mentioned in the post is the second-chance pool, where moderators will rescue a post which did not receive many upvotes and give it placement on the front page for a bit of time.

alekratz 9y ago
Where is this documented? Not trying to be snippy - I have no idea what powers the moderators have in this realm. Maybe HN could benefit from some lobste.rs-esque moderation transparency.
- minimaxir 9y ago
  dang made a full writeup here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 I agree it (along with other moderation behaviors described in the article) should be documented more explicitly in the guidelines/FAQ
  - alexandercrohde 9y ago
    I think HN is factoring in that transparency can also be a weakness too. When google released its page-rank algorithm it became a target for manipulation and entire forums got wrecked (until nofollow) with the wave of consequences it created. I think the threat of user manipulation will always outweigh that of mod manipulation. Worth considering.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      There are layers to HN's transparency. Some policy is in the guidelines. Some policy is described in moderator comments, so if you want to keep up with it, you have to follow 'dang and 'sctb. Some policy is "public" but you'll only learn about it if you mail hn@yc and ask. Some policy won't be made public. There's no master plan behind it all, but each of these ways of handling policy has a purpose. Describing evolving policy in comments allows the moderators to be responsive and flexible without overrunning the site with metadiscussion like they would if every new decision they made was accompanied by a formal change in the guidelines. Relating policy in email discussion gives them a chance to explain it in context and to take feedback from the people most impacted or interested in that policy --- we all know votes on this site wouldn't generate that set of users. The stuff they don't make public is generally stuff we don't want made public. We forget that there are just a couple (I think literally) people running this site, and they're up against waves of people trying to create schemes to sell front page rank to spammers. They've got a sort of equilibrium that gives them a chance --- something Reddit seems to be failing at despite a much large team --- while still having the time to type out individualized contextualized explanations for all their routine moderating actions on threads (seriously, mods, figure out TextExpander or build something like it into your moderating tools).

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

vormalpg 9y ago

Moderators should in no way be able to bury posts or even nudge them downwards. This is a cowardly way to try to control discussion. If it isn't explicitly against the site rules, let the readers decide.

eterm 9y ago
I've long come to accept that HN is a curated source, the voting is a kind of false-democracy to make it appear more democratic than it is. Yes, likely >90% of the site is done through voting, but a significant amount of pruning and bumping clearly also occurs.
- tptacek 9y ago
  It's not a democracy at all. User votes are one signal the site uses among many. It's been like that since day one.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    Sure... it's still mostly about votes right? "Popular things go to the top" is a pretty good first approximation of the algorithm. You have things getting flagged to death for generating bad conversation/flamewars (kinda like parents telling kids to stop playing rough since people are getting hurt). There's the hiring posts. At least to me, it's always felt like moderation is happening at the margins.
    - tptacek 9y ago
      Votes are a powerful signal here because they're the easiest signal to automate. That leads people to believe their HN votes are more sacred than they are. There has never been a point in the history of the site where it's ever been unclear that the site is ultimately run by the mods. People complaining now should find someone who's been on here for a long time and ask what it was like under Paul Graham. Hint: not better.
      - 9y ago

chasing 9y ago

"Censorship by moderators" How about: "Curation by moderators"

spash 9y ago
"Censorship by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China" How about: "Curation by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China"
- a13xb 9y ago
  HN is not a government or a political party, it's a privately run link aggregator.
  - spash 9y ago
    Is this definiton of censorship from Wikipedia incorrect then? "Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions"
    - peterwwillis 9y ago
      That's not the point. They just don't want to think censorship is an accepted part of their daily lives because censorship often implies oppression. But censorship is part and parcel of almost every forum. The social values of the people who own the forum, as well as incentives behind their operating it, determine what kind of censorship is applied. For example, on YouTube, hate speech [which I know isn't actually a thing] is commonplace - they don't feel the need (or perhaps don't have the resources) to censor comments which certain people find detestable. But they have created complex systems to analyze videos so that they can identify certain ones and remove them automatically. The end result is that censorship isn't applied uniformly. In one example, a YouTube account that was documenting videos of attacks on the people of Raqqa was flagged for spreading terrorist propaganda. You could make the argument that while the hate speech didn't impact their bottom line, the videos could, so they accept a certain amount of unequal and unintentional censorship in order to maintain their business position, defend their corporate values, and of course, retain their user base. Moderation is a more nuanced and human approach to censorship. By giving people second chances, answering emails, giving the occasional explanation, etc they build social capital and prevent emotional backlash that could threaten the status of the forum. By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves, they can't be accused of unfair treatment. But they are indeed imposing specific social and political values on their users, to the point of hiding or removing the post or user when it doesn't align with their values. This shapes not only the quality of the dialogue, but its content. This is the essence of censorship. To severely paraphrase 1984: "To control speech you control language, as controlling language controls thought."

angersock 9y ago

There are two other features not listed: submission throttling for comments (which I suspect mods have some influence on) and slow banning (making the site slow for flagged users). For a different approach to moderation, check out Lobsters.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dang 9y ago
Re rate-limiting see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15513929. Slow-banning was dropped years ago.

tptacek 9y ago

Paywalled articles are explicitly not against the rules.

SloopJon 9y ago
"It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds." With the weakening of the Google workaround that's baked into the HN header, more and more submissions are going to run afoul of that condition.

alekratz 9y ago

I've noticed that a lot of submissions have had their titles changed recently (past month or two). I wasn't aware that users were allowed to change their own titles - I was chalking this up to moderators "curating" articles. How often do users change the titles of their submissions? There's no way to tell.

deadmetheny 9y ago

>Consider appointing one or two moderators from the community, ideally people with less bias towards SV or startup culture While I agree that this would be a great idea, it's laughable in that, as a service run by Y Combinator, it's always going to be for startup hucksters primarily and for the rest of the tech industry and Internet at large secondarily.

tptacek 9y ago
This site is overwhelmingly populated by people outside of startupland.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

timthelion 9y ago

In my opinion, far more than moderation, HN is effected by who votes for the new articles. If you look at the "new" page then most stories never even get one upvote. Those who do go over there and upvote stories have far more power than those who only ever look at the front page. Sadly, it seems that there are too many stories on "new" for a person to sit there, read each one, and upvote, so the only real way to get a story on the front page is to get lucky or gang up with your friends.

rqs 9y ago
And also, I wonder what if some people just use proxies to register a bunch of HN accounts and use them to promote their items. It seems not very hard to register an HN account.
- yorwba 9y ago
  A bunch of new accounts, going via known proxy sites, all voting for the same item? There won't even be a human involved in the ban decision. If you don't have showdead on, you might not notice that many posts by new accounts are marked as dead immediately, and it's usually justified.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 9y ago
And as mentioned, people will definitely use the flag feature to get rid of controversial articles they don't like. Anything about sexism will get flagged into oblivion, for example.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Plenty of people who are deeply concerned about sexism in this industry also flag those stories, because it only takes 2-3 misogynist trolls to create a 300-comment shitshow out of them. There are still kinds of threads that this site simply can't do well, and it's better we not pretend we can until the guidelines and mod tools evolve to actually make them work here.

ploggingdev 9y ago

The voting ring detector is in need of a serious upgrade. There are so many cases of vote solicitation by people with meaningful social media following and their posts even make the front page. It's mostly the Product Hunt style "Hey we launched on HN, check us out" which is code for "upvote my post". People have stopped directly linking to the post submission for fear of tripping the voting ring detector, but they either just say "We launched on HN" or link to /newest. Seeing such posts make the front page makes me question the effectiveness of the voting ring detector beyond catching the obvious ones. A shoutout to `minimaxir for being one of the only people constantly calling out others for such bs. As you can imagine, people get offended for being called out and I remember at least 2 instances of him being treated rudely for doing so on twitter. If anyone comes across such submissions, please report them to the mods by sending them an email. I'll admit I have not been doing what I suggested, but going forward I will.

mnglkhn2 9y ago
The "voting ring" is an essential tool when you need to promote links from certain media orgs (most of them paywalled). How else can you ensure the front page placement for links that you are getting paid (or have an interest in) to promote. The question is: should these deals be disclosed upfront, something along the lines of: "this is a paid submission" ?!
- krapp 9y ago
  >How else can you ensure the front page placement for links that you are getting paid (or have an interest in) to promote. You're not supposed to be able to ensure front page placement. Your content is supposed to rise and fall based solely on its merit, as determined by (unpaid and unaffiliated) users and the moderators.
  - mnglkhn2 9y ago
    Not when the party wanting to ensure it is YC and HN.

singularity2001 9y ago

#MeToo just recently I had my first comment on HN 'flagged'. It had several upvotes 19 constructive comments and was perfectly reasonable IMHO. What gives, not a big drama. I shrugged it off, though it left a negative taste of things to come.

stephengillie 9y ago
Many of us seek to avoid controversy by hiding in technical details. These controversies are mind numbing because all answers are blatantly obvious and there is nothing to compute; merely humans being awful humans.

ibebnndagan 9y ago

Shadow banning isn't rare. I've had accounts banned for no apparent reason, or for laughable reasons that are not even in the poorly written guidelines. Moderators also have been repeatedly caught about heavy handed moderation. They control the platform, they control the message, they do not allow meta discussion, why believe anything they say?

flavio81 9y ago

In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesting, sometimes exciting news, posts, articles and "Show HN"s. As for comment moderation, I think that HN is a community with the least amount of moderation i've seen. Which makes me really happy. I have submitted only three or four things here, so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.

wyager 9y ago
> I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. The Reddit mods and admins are notoriously censorious. If you want minimal moderation, you would need to go to the anonymous imageboards. The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.
- TACIXAT 9y ago
  Agree so much. Any voting system is going to create bubbles. Head over to 4chan and you will get to interact with all sorts of different opinions.
  - ivm 9y ago
    Imageboards have a clickbait-based bubble. To survive on a busy board, you need to create a post that captures attention. Hence, the effect of 4chan on the Internet — its top posters are the edge of the troll evolution.
- maccard 9y ago
  > The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many. Could you provide some examples of how the content is better there? I'd be interested, but any time I've ever tried to investigate, I can't get past all the unfettered crap

mcguire 9y ago

Then, there is the case of 'On Whose Authority (http://z.caudate.me/on-whose-authority/ http://z.caudate.me/on-whose-authority/), the HN discussion of which was killed while the discussion of Rich Hickey's response (https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_authority/do1olag https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au...) was ongoing and both were on the front page.

tptacek 9y ago
Interpersonal drama gets flagged off the site routinely. You see the same thing happen when a "story" is really an extrapolation of one person's tweet. I remember flagging that post myself.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Did you also flag the response?
  - tptacek 9y ago
    I don't remember, but if I saw it, I did. I try to flag all drama stories.
    - mcguire 9y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15425632

ahdiheje 9y ago

I am being auto shadow banned. Just look at dead comments to know how heavy moderated opinion is on HN. HN controls what views they allow on their forum, certainly not a place to have a free and open discussion.

beingmyself2 9y ago
I've noticed over the years that comments seem to be moderated with political bias. I've been shadowbanned before for expressing conservative viewpoints (without breaking rules). Mods like their echochambers.

ahdiheje 9y ago

Also posts I made were deleted, not even allowed to be seen even as 'dead'

sctb 9y ago
If you would email us links to those comments at hn@ycombinator.com we can take a look. That's not a moderation practice.

interfixus 9y ago

The harsh and angry negativity of some comments in this thread is difficult to understand. As others have pointed out, and as should go without saying, this is a private site with whichever ruleset its owners choose to impose, take it or leave it. And besides, the mods are making a tremendous job of it. I wildly disagree with lots of their decisions, and probably with great part of their general outlook on life, but I really can't fault their taste or professionalism, so thank you, guys. The one cowardly thing going on here is the doing of users, not of moderators: The sad and unworthy tendency of some to downvote comments to oblivion purely for opinions expressed. Now that is a kind of grassroots censorship which we could do without.

bogomipz 9y ago
>"The harsh and angry negativity of some comments in this thread is difficult to understand. As others have pointed out, and as should go without saying, this is a private site with whichever ruleset its owners choose to impose, take it or leave it." I find this comment difficult to understand. The success and value of a site like HN largely depends on a community who submits stories and engages in discussion about those stories. Stating "This is a private site" and "take it or leave it" is not only unnecessarily dismissive but its a false dichotomy. Liking something and wanting to see it improve are not mutually exclusive.

throw2016 9y ago

A larger wordview beyond a group think bubble of SV is needed to represent the tech industry. A lack of transparency always ends up empowering people behind the scenes who then have to make casual judgements of entire swaths of people and opinion. This is bad both for moderators and discussion. Fortunately its relatively easy to launch a site like HN. A problem is a solution waiting to happen. If there is competition and it affects HN they are not going to sit back, there will be more transparency. However good something is competition is essential to keep people on their toes, so there is a largish lacuna here for the health of the industry. Having said that any popular site will have the exact same issues HN does, so if the point is merely to change decision makers by those jockeying for influence then its a pointless exercise of exaggerating issues to gain influence, ironically how most new products are launched on HN these days.

harlanji 9y ago

It's ridiculous that mods can hide my comments but I can't delete them. If a post is removed, I should have the anility to revoke my license to tue copy and have it removed. Would DMCA cover that?

striking 9y ago
There's the EU right to be forgotten if a company does business in the EU, and the ability to ask the mods to delete things, which they do.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

The website that publishes my stats (https://hn.0x2237.club https://hn.0x2237.club) is getting smashed. This is largely because collecting stats is expensive and I devote most of the CPU time to that. Rest assured, stats are still being gathered, and you should be able to browse them when it cools down a bit. Sorry for the inconvenience!

mlvljr 9y ago

..and oppression! (look -- they hell-bannned me :))

mschuster91 9y ago

What I personally dislike is the "spam filter". I sometimes hit it when participating in multiple threads and it says "You're submitting too fast, please slow down" - and it does not reset itself after sometimes over 8 hours.

dang 9y ago
That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site. I took a quick look at your recent history and it seems fine, so I'll take the rate limit off. But to prevent it from kicking in again, please stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I recall that we had to ask you many times in the past not to violate that, but hopefully it's all in the past now and things will be nice and guideliney going forward.

losteverything 9y ago

I never gave thought to the moderator position till this analysis. I wonder if it is a full time job. Do other sites have full time moderators? Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past. To compare and contrast, if you are a construction worker making residential housing, you and see its effect on people and humanity. Year after year and perhaps decade after decade you can drive by and know your work helped a family. Yet the effort of a moderator goes away within hours and is hard (for me) to see the long lasting value. This write up helped me think about a topic i never thought of before. Thanks (HN moderators: i know u make this site a good read. Thanks)

j_s 9y ago
Meet the People Taking over Hacker News | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7493856 (Mar 2014, 286 comments) Tell HN: New features and a moderator | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675 (Jul 2016, 451 comments)
ansible 9y ago
Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past. I'm one of the moderators over on reddit.com/r/AskEngineers. It is work... that I don't get paid for. Or any kind of reward, really. But I'm doing it because I want to promote high-quality discussion on various engineering topics. I'm glad when we can help each other out by answering questions. To be a moderator, ideally you're in it for the long term, by trying to guide your community in a good direction, educate people, uphold standards of good and civil discussion.
- losteverything 9y ago
  Do you manage time so that there is planned downtime? Like no moderating weekends or 8/40/5? Or is it a mostly 24/7 look-at-all-new-posts thing

matt4077 9y ago

Moderators don't "censor". They moderate.

Kiro 9y ago

> title change and derank I don't understand why the articles shown that had to their titles changed also were deranked.

trgv 9y ago

Here are some posts whose flags I consider questionable: Harvey, the Storm That Humans Helped Cause (23 points) ES6 imports syntax considered harmful (12 points) White-Owned Restaurants Shamed for Serving Ethnic Food (33 points) The evidence is piling up – Silicon Valley is being destroyed (27 points) Personally I'm glad all of these posts were flagged.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
You might disagree with them, but were they violating the guidelines? Rules should not be selectively enforced, and made-up rules should definitely not be enforced.
- trgv 9y ago
  I think they were violating guidelines in that they qualified as off-topic. Is that worth a flag? I'm not sure. But I don't think they should have been flagged "because I disagree with them."
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    They're not off-topic according to the guidelines so far as I understand them.

MichaelMoser123 9y ago

Each news outlet serves some purpose, that's why people bother to maintain it; so it has some degree of editorial policy (determined by the collective action of the editors). I for one think that I am spending too much time here (relative to the stuff that I learn). (Lets see how long I can keep off site, after all this is adictive ;-) I would appreciate it if someone would come up with a filter, HN on tech subjects only, and no politics and business stories - a mere title line is not enough to figure out the context (but they do that on purpose, to involve more people that way, don't they :-) actually I guess that would be easy to do with NLP tagging... One thing that I dislike with both HN and reddit style moderation system is that the subject of the editorial action has no idea that he/she has been edited out. I think that actually gives the pleasant feeling of being in an insane asylum. Anybody can relate ti this sentiment?

gnicholas 9y ago

I was actually going to build a tool that scrapes HN every couple minutes and looks for stories that were hot (on the front page) and then drops by 20+ slots. I've happened to be involved in a couple threads where this inexplicably happened, and I was unhappy to see the discussion being muted (people previously involved continued commenting, but no new people saw/joined the thread). I was going to show the buried posts on a site called toohotforhn.com, so that people could go to find the discussions that they might have otherwise missed. These days, much of it is around silicon valley and the treatment of women/minorities, but it could also include stories that are negative on YC companies that get buried (inadvertently, perhaps) as well. Others have pointed out that if you want more discussion on X, you can go find it elsewhere. The point is that I want to see what HNers think about X — which is why I think a tool like this would be useful.

sizzle 9y ago
Please build this
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  seconded
- gnicholas 9y ago
  I'm going to reach out to the OP and see if he'd like to collaborate on it, to basically just put a good front-end on the analytics he's already pulling. Fingers crossed — hope to have a Show HN for y'all sometime soon!
dang 9y ago
Why don't you just look at https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active? (via https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists). Most if not almost all of those stories show up there. Btw since you brought up the point, we moderate stories less, not more, when they're about YC or YC-funded companies. That's literally the first rule of HN moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20yc%20less%20not%20more https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all, since the internet would drive a truck through a cheap ploy like that. But we do err on that side, since keeping the good faith of the community is more important than any particular story.

demonshalo 9y ago

HN does a ton of censorship. Ex. Communism is responsible for 100s of millions of deaths world wide, it is way more vicious and evil than say Nazism or any other ism. Yet somehow if I post a communist opinion here (on a political topic) or actively say that I am a communists while bashing capitalism, that goes under the title of free speech and moderators do nothing about that (as far as I can see). Now, imagine if I came out in that same political discussion saying that I am a Nazi. That would get flagged and removed right away even though that's a much less evil position to hold. It is clear to me that HN moderation is biased. I am for 100% total and free speech. The worst and the best of humanity should be able to say their piece. But in my mind there is no denying the fact that HN moderators are biased. Merely mentioning the evils of communism is sufficient at times to get your comments removed and give you warnings -.-

timcederman 9y ago

Interesting to see the ability to take away downvoting is not mentioned. After downvoting one person (who made multiple offensive contributions) in a single thread, I noticed later I could no longer downvote comments (but the downvote button still appeared). Ultimately, I think the secretive and subjective approach to moderation at Hacker News has resulted in a positive outcome, but it's still surprising to run into the limits on occasion.

nickjj 9y ago

I always felt like there was something weird about rankings when it came to HN. I recall submitting something that got around 7 upvotes in 30 minutes but it got dead and buried and never presented itself on the front page. The content wasn't edgy and it wasn't clickbait. But a few days later I saw an unrelated post with 2 upvotes after 1 full hour and it was magically on the front page. If a post with 2 upvotes after 1 hour can be on the front page but a post with 7 upvotes in 30 minutes is not, then surely there needs to be some type of manual intervention happening. Glad to see there's data showing this now and I'm not going crazy.

grandalf 9y ago

This a great analysis. I would love to see a public page displaying title changes so that I could click "request explanation" and the mods could offer an explanation for those every day based on reader interest. Whatever is going on to achieve it, HN is a great online community, and so maybe that is due to the moderation. Sometimes I wonder if it might be in spite of the moderation, but who knows :) the precipitous drop that happens to stories after their titles have been changed shows a very strong editorial bias going on. I think there is a general strategy of keeping highly controversial political topics off of HN. The question is, when does this sort of censorship constitute an ideological crackdown in its own right.