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I've found moderation on HN to be a bit heavy handed recently. Specifically when it comes to the issue of sexism in SV. No matter the opinion, posts on this see

I've found moderation on HN to be a bit heavy handed recently. Specifically when it comes to the issue of sexism in SV. No matter the opinion, posts on this seem to get removed shortly after reaching the front page. Question for the mods: Why? It doesn't appear to be a bias towards either side. Is the perception just that people are tied of hearing about it? Why not let the users decide that?

wvenable 9y ago
Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. If you want your forum to have some nutritional value than you can't let the candy topics run rampant no matter how much people seem to want them.
- andrewguenther 9y ago
  I think that makes sense. But how much is too much? Say you have a very high post volume on one side of an issue, so you start moderating more heavily. Do you allow posts through representing the other side? Is that "fair"?
  - wvenable 9y ago
    For the most part, the topic gathers posts from both sides regardless of the content of the linked article. So simply flagging the entire topic away is fair.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    The issue isn't really the one-sided-ness of the comments, or the volume of the comments. The issue is the quality of the comments. Even on a hot-button topic, there are quality comments made, by both sides. Those are worth reading, no matter which side you take on the issue. And then there are the "You're so stupid, how could you think something so idiotic, I hope you die in a fire" comments. Those comments don't add much except noise. If you want the quality comments to be visible among the noise, you need to weed out the noise comments. You need this more on hot-button topics, because they attract more noise comments.
  - dec0dedab0de 9y ago
    I believe there is an automatic penalty if the comment count goes above the vote count beyond a certain percentage
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      Makes sense. That's the clearest indication I've seen of contentious topics on HN (comment count higher than the topic vote count).
- zorpner 9y ago
  It should be noted that this is an explicit strategy by proponents of the status quo, to make any discussion of the topic so toxic that the topic itself becomes banned. It's possible to moderate a discussion forum to avoid this, but it requires a high level of involvement from the moderators and a willingness to aggressively recognize and prune divisive commentary regardless of the specific tone or content.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. Sez you. The unspoken premise is that nothing is so important that it's worth stopping to have an argument over. Perhaps I'm misreading your views, but when they're tossed out as an aphorism they come off as smug rather than substantive.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    There is a difference between an argument and having a knock down drag out fight. For example when parents have a disagreement about how to deal with catching their child sneaking in drunk after a party. This can go many ways but for the purpose of highlighting the difference take Chris and Pat. (argument) Chris: Pat, I can understand how you'd feel that way, but considering the family history of alcoholism, maybe we should take a more conservative approach with this. vs (flame war) Chris: Well, Pat... Maybe if your mother had cared half as much about you and your brother growing up as I'm trying to care about our kids and cracked down on you guys a little bit, maybe your brother would have stopped at that red light, and maybe your kids would have an Uncle.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Unpleasant as the flame war version is, it does cut to the heart of the matter rather than tiptoeing around it, which can perpetuate a problem. Both approaches have their place.
- j45 9y ago
  I like HN because it is more mature and there's lots of places for people to have fun like that.
aaron-lebo 9y ago
I flag almost every single one of those stories, because they stopped covering new ground after about the first day or two. I can't be the only one, maybe the users are deciding? Outside of flagging, behavior within the post itself (lots of comments?) probably penalize them. Really, really good stuff makes the frontpage, though. The issues at Uber, for example, were widely discussed.
- hsod 9y ago
  The first day or two of what?
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    Christmas of course. What I mean is if you read the comments on an article about James Damore the day it broke and read the comments were the article to be posted today, they haven't really evolved. It's the same canards over and over. Damore being an example of a story that users were indignant about getting knocked off the frontpage.
    - dhimes 9y ago
      It must have worked. I had to duckduckgo James Damore.
minimaxir 9y ago
Typically the mods unflagkill gender discussion threads if they notice in time.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bradleyjg 9y ago
The users are deciding. We are flagging these stories because we don't see the value in endless flamewars over the same subject. If you can't get enough of debates about sexism in SV there are lots of other places on the internet for that.
- matt4077 9y ago
  I understand how that is the right policy for HN. But I'm wondering if you consider it possible that you're in a position where you have a responsibility to sometimes surface these topics on HN? After all, for some of these topics it's exactly the people that won't go looking for them at other places on the internet where they may still make a difference. To use an example that's slightly less controversial: I think it's important for people working with lots of other people's data to have some fundamental sense of privacy rights. And HN is probably one of the best places to reach those actually in the trenches that are in the position to say 'no' when, for example, the CEO of Yahoo tells them to allow the NSA full access to their users' emails. Yet that's a topic that quickly turns to politics, so you'd probably have good reasons to wish those discussions happened elsewhere. Just to be clear: I think the mix of topics overall is mostly fine right now. But just like Facebook or Twitter, I think HN may be in a position where your "editorial responsibility" should be somewhere on your radar. Not because HN is the size of those, but because it caters to a readership that has certain powers far outstripping its size.
  - dang 9y ago
    I think that's about right. That's why we turn off user flags on articles that are particularly substantive or contain significant new information. It's mostly the copycat and follow-up articles (of which there are many more) that lead to the repetitive flamewars, arguably because they're so repetitive themselves.
  - brad_chad 9y ago
    I disagree. Most of the flagged topics are already being shoved in tech peoples' faces through Reddit, mainstream/tech news, their workplace and their social network (that is most likely liberal). Hacker News is a sort of safe space away from those topics. They are fully aware of the topics and choose to not participate in them. edit: not sure why this is getting downvotes when it's a direct counterargument/response to the parent
matt4077 9y ago
HN's readership is a bit less progressive than what you'd expect from the age/education demographics–or at least than what I'd expect. See, for example, this very article calling out the moderation of a submission on anti-white racism in the restaurant industry, while there are probably dozens of stories buried each week exploring racism or sexism on the tech sector. Yes, some of those do make it to the front page. But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem> you need about a thousand female Uber employees invited to a strip club for every alt-right Googler that gets fired for writing the wrong memo. It's also interesting to watch the insistence on "engaging with others' arguments" when it comes to literal mobs with torches calling for the next holocaust, yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.
- dang 9y ago
  > HN is far to the right compared even to Pretty sure that's not true. IMO you're falling into the cognitive bias we all seem to have, of seeing the community as dominated by your ideological opposite. The other side sees it just the other way. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15388778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15388778, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915, and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%2013110004 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20bias%20opposite https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=.... > But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem> We can't use such a metric. The magnitude of those problems is so large that there would be nothing else on the front page if we did. HN is trying to be a specific kind of site—one that gratifies intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I think it's ok for such a place to exist on the web, don't you? If so, many things follow. The site can't primarily be about litigating disputes or fighting for causes, even (especially) good causes. In fact it can't 'primarily' be about anything, because curiosity shrivels under repetition. Therefore HN's system (community + mods + software) is organized not to have too much, i.e. very much, of anything on the front page. The issue isn't that HN suppresses discussion of e.g. sexism/gender in tech; it doesn't—there have been tons of threads, often large, often on the front page. The issue is that <front page time>/<how much I care about X> is always, for any X, less than you would like. For most casual observers, "less than I would like" feels like "censored completely". Meanwhile the readers who don't like X have the mirror-image view and say "HN is overrun with X". It's all an undergraduate psych experiment basically.
cryoshon 9y ago
there are many issues where they are heavy handed, notably anything considered remotely "political" which could ostensibly contain most topics that arent strictly "THIS TECH THING X DOES THIS OTHER TECH THING Y IN THIS FRAMEWORK Z, ZOUNDS!" there's also a substantial amount of favoritism. i won't name names, of course.
avip 9y ago
Great. Let's keep this place technical. How is "sexism in SV" of any interest to a global tech-focused community?
- rukuu001 9y ago
  Besides the oft-quoted HN submission guidelines, another answer to your question is that women are usually the ones affected by sexism, and women read HN (no, really).
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    It's another example of women being sidelined. Most HN readers are male, and selfishly flag/downvote articles/comments about sexism because they want to read about the latest JavaScript framework instead.
    - dang 9y ago
      That's not a helpful ingredient to pour into the well. You're basically just repeating a mental mock-up you have, not backed by data, only snark. Anyone who looks sincerely and closely will see how much more complex the situation is. Moreover, there's evidence that repeating such generalizations—even though you intend them critically—makes the environment less welcoming and poisons it further for the equality you'd presumably like to see. When you do this, you (i.e. we—we nearly all do it) are valuing the rush of morally posturing above our peers more than the cause we care about. If we're going to actually make HN be the welcoming place we want it to be, we'll have to do something about this.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective? I have my doubts about how welcoming HN is for different demographics, and while the grandparent poster is handwaving things with a mental mockup as you say, absent transparency on moderation policies many people inevitably feel the same way about the moderation. I mean, at present you have a bunch of secret rules to make everything run better. That works OK as a practical strategy, but it also reduces buy-in - which is why I get heavily downvoted any time I suggest that government intelligence services are inevitably going to adopt utility-maximizing strategies at the expense of liberty, no matter how many times I qualify this by saying I'm trying to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Mz 9y ago
I don't believe this is going on. I believe most sexism posts get flagged by users, not downmodded by moderators. I strongly suspect that many users flag based on the title, without reading further. Most of the sexism focused pieces are pretty bad. I'm a woman and I tend to hate most of them. Once or twice, I emailed the mods when I felt a post on the subject was poorly titled, but had worthwhile content. On at least one occasion, they changed the title and, I think, turned off flags for the piece so it could be seen. I am careful to have a light hand. I seem to be the most prominent female member here and I can get accused of having an agenda for saying anything at all on the topic of sexism. * I have tried to write more evenhanded pieces on one of my blogs. Some of those have gone okay, but they never really get all that much traffic or response on HN. But, as I see it, some of the problems with this topic include: 1) It has a long track record of ugliness on both sides, so some people kneejerk flag anything that sounds like it touches on the topic because they are tired of these toxic, pointless discussions. 2) Most pieces are pretty man-bashing. The audience here is predominantly male. They get tired of being hated on for having been born male. (I am also tired of the misandry, so I don't think that is unreasonable.) 3) Most pieces on the topic aren't really all that good. They are typically histrionic and blamey. 4) If you don't use the usual catch phrases in the title, people won't recognize that it is pertinent to a topic they are interested in. If you do, you can't sidestep all the baggage it involves. So trying to do something better faces a huge uphill battle in terms of even being recognized as both relevant and not guilty of the usual issues. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486833
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

wvenable 9y ago

Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. If you want your forum to have some nutritional value than you can't let the candy topics run rampant no matter how much people seem to want them.

andrewguenther 9y ago
I think that makes sense. But how much is too much? Say you have a very high post volume on one side of an issue, so you start moderating more heavily. Do you allow posts through representing the other side? Is that "fair"?
- wvenable 9y ago
  For the most part, the topic gathers posts from both sides regardless of the content of the linked article. So simply flagging the entire topic away is fair.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  The issue isn't really the one-sided-ness of the comments, or the volume of the comments. The issue is the quality of the comments. Even on a hot-button topic, there are quality comments made, by both sides. Those are worth reading, no matter which side you take on the issue. And then there are the "You're so stupid, how could you think something so idiotic, I hope you die in a fire" comments. Those comments don't add much except noise. If you want the quality comments to be visible among the noise, you need to weed out the noise comments. You need this more on hot-button topics, because they attract more noise comments.
- dec0dedab0de 9y ago
  I believe there is an automatic penalty if the comment count goes above the vote count beyond a certain percentage
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Makes sense. That's the clearest indication I've seen of contentious topics on HN (comment count higher than the topic vote count).
zorpner 9y ago
It should be noted that this is an explicit strategy by proponents of the status quo, to make any discussion of the topic so toxic that the topic itself becomes banned. It's possible to moderate a discussion forum to avoid this, but it requires a high level of involvement from the moderators and a willingness to aggressively recognize and prune divisive commentary regardless of the specific tone or content.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. Sez you. The unspoken premise is that nothing is so important that it's worth stopping to have an argument over. Perhaps I'm misreading your views, but when they're tossed out as an aphorism they come off as smug rather than substantive.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  There is a difference between an argument and having a knock down drag out fight. For example when parents have a disagreement about how to deal with catching their child sneaking in drunk after a party. This can go many ways but for the purpose of highlighting the difference take Chris and Pat. (argument) Chris: Pat, I can understand how you'd feel that way, but considering the family history of alcoholism, maybe we should take a more conservative approach with this. vs (flame war) Chris: Well, Pat... Maybe if your mother had cared half as much about you and your brother growing up as I'm trying to care about our kids and cracked down on you guys a little bit, maybe your brother would have stopped at that red light, and maybe your kids would have an Uncle.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Unpleasant as the flame war version is, it does cut to the heart of the matter rather than tiptoeing around it, which can perpetuate a problem. Both approaches have their place.
j45 9y ago
I like HN because it is more mature and there's lots of places for people to have fun like that.

aaron-lebo 9y ago

I flag almost every single one of those stories, because they stopped covering new ground after about the first day or two. I can't be the only one, maybe the users are deciding? Outside of flagging, behavior within the post itself (lots of comments?) probably penalize them. Really, really good stuff makes the frontpage, though. The issues at Uber, for example, were widely discussed.

hsod 9y ago
The first day or two of what?
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Christmas of course. What I mean is if you read the comments on an article about James Damore the day it broke and read the comments were the article to be posted today, they haven't really evolved. It's the same canards over and over. Damore being an example of a story that users were indignant about getting knocked off the frontpage.
  - dhimes 9y ago
    It must have worked. I had to duckduckgo James Damore.

minimaxir 9y ago

Typically the mods unflagkill gender discussion threads if they notice in time.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

bradleyjg 9y ago

The users are deciding. We are flagging these stories because we don't see the value in endless flamewars over the same subject. If you can't get enough of debates about sexism in SV there are lots of other places on the internet for that.

matt4077 9y ago
I understand how that is the right policy for HN. But I'm wondering if you consider it possible that you're in a position where you have a responsibility to sometimes surface these topics on HN? After all, for some of these topics it's exactly the people that won't go looking for them at other places on the internet where they may still make a difference. To use an example that's slightly less controversial: I think it's important for people working with lots of other people's data to have some fundamental sense of privacy rights. And HN is probably one of the best places to reach those actually in the trenches that are in the position to say 'no' when, for example, the CEO of Yahoo tells them to allow the NSA full access to their users' emails. Yet that's a topic that quickly turns to politics, so you'd probably have good reasons to wish those discussions happened elsewhere. Just to be clear: I think the mix of topics overall is mostly fine right now. But just like Facebook or Twitter, I think HN may be in a position where your "editorial responsibility" should be somewhere on your radar. Not because HN is the size of those, but because it caters to a readership that has certain powers far outstripping its size.
- dang 9y ago
  I think that's about right. That's why we turn off user flags on articles that are particularly substantive or contain significant new information. It's mostly the copycat and follow-up articles (of which there are many more) that lead to the repetitive flamewars, arguably because they're so repetitive themselves.
- brad_chad 9y ago
  I disagree. Most of the flagged topics are already being shoved in tech peoples' faces through Reddit, mainstream/tech news, their workplace and their social network (that is most likely liberal). Hacker News is a sort of safe space away from those topics. They are fully aware of the topics and choose to not participate in them. edit: not sure why this is getting downvotes when it's a direct counterargument/response to the parent

matt4077 9y ago

HN's readership is a bit less progressive than what you'd expect from the age/education demographics–or at least than what I'd expect. See, for example, this very article calling out the moderation of a submission on anti-white racism in the restaurant industry, while there are probably dozens of stories buried each week exploring racism or sexism on the tech sector. Yes, some of those do make it to the front page. But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem> you need about a thousand female Uber employees invited to a strip club for every alt-right Googler that gets fired for writing the wrong memo. It's also interesting to watch the insistence on "engaging with others' arguments" when it comes to literal mobs with torches calling for the next holocaust, yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.

dang 9y ago
> HN is far to the right compared even to Pretty sure that's not true. IMO you're falling into the cognitive bias we all seem to have, of seeing the community as dominated by your ideological opposite. The other side sees it just the other way. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15388778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15388778, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915, and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%2013110004 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20bias%20opposite https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=.... > But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem> We can't use such a metric. The magnitude of those problems is so large that there would be nothing else on the front page if we did. HN is trying to be a specific kind of site—one that gratifies intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I think it's ok for such a place to exist on the web, don't you? If so, many things follow. The site can't primarily be about litigating disputes or fighting for causes, even (especially) good causes. In fact it can't 'primarily' be about anything, because curiosity shrivels under repetition. Therefore HN's system (community + mods + software) is organized not to have too much, i.e. very much, of anything on the front page. The issue isn't that HN suppresses discussion of e.g. sexism/gender in tech; it doesn't—there have been tons of threads, often large, often on the front page. The issue is that <front page time>/<how much I care about X> is always, for any X, less than you would like. For most casual observers, "less than I would like" feels like "censored completely". Meanwhile the readers who don't like X have the mirror-image view and say "HN is overrun with X". It's all an undergraduate psych experiment basically.

cryoshon 9y ago

there are many issues where they are heavy handed, notably anything considered remotely "political" which could ostensibly contain most topics that arent strictly "THIS TECH THING X DOES THIS OTHER TECH THING Y IN THIS FRAMEWORK Z, ZOUNDS!" there's also a substantial amount of favoritism. i won't name names, of course.

avip 9y ago

Great. Let's keep this place technical. How is "sexism in SV" of any interest to a global tech-focused community?

rukuu001 9y ago
Besides the oft-quoted HN submission guidelines, another answer to your question is that women are usually the ones affected by sexism, and women read HN (no, really).
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  It's another example of women being sidelined. Most HN readers are male, and selfishly flag/downvote articles/comments about sexism because they want to read about the latest JavaScript framework instead.
  - dang 9y ago
    That's not a helpful ingredient to pour into the well. You're basically just repeating a mental mock-up you have, not backed by data, only snark. Anyone who looks sincerely and closely will see how much more complex the situation is. Moreover, there's evidence that repeating such generalizations—even though you intend them critically—makes the environment less welcoming and poisons it further for the equality you'd presumably like to see. When you do this, you (i.e. we—we nearly all do it) are valuing the rush of morally posturing above our peers more than the cause we care about. If we're going to actually make HN be the welcoming place we want it to be, we'll have to do something about this.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective? I have my doubts about how welcoming HN is for different demographics, and while the grandparent poster is handwaving things with a mental mockup as you say, absent transparency on moderation policies many people inevitably feel the same way about the moderation. I mean, at present you have a bunch of secret rules to make everything run better. That works OK as a practical strategy, but it also reduces buy-in - which is why I get heavily downvoted any time I suggest that government intelligence services are inevitably going to adopt utility-maximizing strategies at the expense of liberty, no matter how many times I qualify this by saying I'm trying to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Mz 9y ago

I don't believe this is going on. I believe most sexism posts get flagged by users, not downmodded by moderators. I strongly suspect that many users flag based on the title, without reading further. Most of the sexism focused pieces are pretty bad. I'm a woman and I tend to hate most of them. Once or twice, I emailed the mods when I felt a post on the subject was poorly titled, but had worthwhile content. On at least one occasion, they changed the title and, I think, turned off flags for the piece so it could be seen. I am careful to have a light hand. I seem to be the most prominent female member here and I can get accused of having an agenda for saying anything at all on the topic of sexism. * I have tried to write more evenhanded pieces on one of my blogs. Some of those have gone okay, but they never really get all that much traffic or response on HN. But, as I see it, some of the problems with this topic include: 1) It has a long track record of ugliness on both sides, so some people kneejerk flag anything that sounds like it touches on the topic because they are tired of these toxic, pointless discussions. 2) Most pieces are pretty man-bashing. The audience here is predominantly male. They get tired of being hated on for having been born male. (I am also tired of the misandry, so I don't think that is unreasonable.) 3) Most pieces on the topic aren't really all that good. They are typically histrionic and blamey. 4) If you don't use the usual catch phrases in the title, people won't recognize that it is pertinent to a topic they are interested in. If you do, you can't sidestep all the baggage it involves. So trying to do something better faces a huge uphill battle in terms of even being recognized as both relevant and not guilty of the usual issues. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486833

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]