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Moderators: Why was this submission removed from the front page as soon as it started to gain traction? The risk of nationalistic flame wars needs to be weighe

Moderators: Why was this submission removed from the front page as soon as it started to gain traction? The risk of nationalistic flame wars needs to be weighed against important discussion potential. But the submission is interesting enough even if the comments are disabled. Is there any statistics on changes to Hacker News censorship since Sam Altman's China strategy was announced?

yorwba 8y ago
Stories gaining traction in the form of comments affects the ranking negatively if it's not upvoted at the same tame. It indicates that people are more interested in voicing their opinion than whatever the submission had to say. If you disagree with that reasoning and want to see lively discussions anyway, you should probably browse https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of or in addition to the traditional front page. We've also had plenty of China-related flame wars stay on the front page for longer, so I don't think you can accuse the moderators of applying a double standard compared to other political topics. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=China&dateRange=pastWeek https://hn.algolia.com/?query=China&dateRange=pastWeek
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  Having tracked the position of stories on the first 10 pages for a few weeks last December, I saw a lot of things flagged off the front page before they even had a chance to get comments. While I can't and don't blame HN for the flagging activity for users, I can and do blame it for not making flags public. Votes are one thing, but flagging articles isn't an expression of anything private, or at least it shouldn't be. If flags were public and came with a bunch of radio buttons and a text field for a reason for the flag, that'd be at least a start. "Send us an email when you see a pattern in the data we don't provide" doesn't really cut it.
- IntelAMDVia 8y ago
  Was the removal from the front page algorithmic or a manual step by moderators? The lack of transparency with the soft censorship is alarming, particularly given YC's financial conflict of interest.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    Since the article title is different now, I assume a moderator looked at it at some point. IIRC, they check all instances of the flame war detector firing, to prevent false positives. In this case, they probably didn't find the comments salvageable. On the other hand, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493033 is currently on the front page after previously disappearing, so the mods seem to have intervened in that case.
dang 8y ago
You posted three of these. Would you please not overdo it like that? I responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19496933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19496933.

yorwba 8y ago

Stories gaining traction in the form of comments affects the ranking negatively if it's not upvoted at the same tame. It indicates that people are more interested in voicing their opinion than whatever the submission had to say. If you disagree with that reasoning and want to see lively discussions anyway, you should probably browse https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of or in addition to the traditional front page. We've also had plenty of China-related flame wars stay on the front page for longer, so I don't think you can accuse the moderators of applying a double standard compared to other political topics. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=China&dateRange=pastWeek https://hn.algolia.com/?query=China&dateRange=pastWeek

PavlovsCat 8y ago
Having tracked the position of stories on the first 10 pages for a few weeks last December, I saw a lot of things flagged off the front page before they even had a chance to get comments. While I can't and don't blame HN for the flagging activity for users, I can and do blame it for not making flags public. Votes are one thing, but flagging articles isn't an expression of anything private, or at least it shouldn't be. If flags were public and came with a bunch of radio buttons and a text field for a reason for the flag, that'd be at least a start. "Send us an email when you see a pattern in the data we don't provide" doesn't really cut it.
IntelAMDVia 8y ago
Was the removal from the front page algorithmic or a manual step by moderators? The lack of transparency with the soft censorship is alarming, particularly given YC's financial conflict of interest.
- yorwba 8y ago
  Since the article title is different now, I assume a moderator looked at it at some point. IIRC, they check all instances of the flame war detector firing, to prevent false positives. In this case, they probably didn't find the comments salvageable. On the other hand, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19493033 is currently on the front page after previously disappearing, so the mods seem to have intervened in that case.

dang 8y ago

You posted three of these. Would you please not overdo it like that? I responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19496933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19496933.