5 ms·

Why are articles like these yanked so quickly from the front page of HN?

by ronnier 8y ago

freyir 8y ago
I see at least two [flagged] comments. Do flagged comments cause the article to get buried?
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Comments in general cause articles to rank lower.
  - Melchizedek 8y ago
    Which is strange, since that means a comment is also a down vote. That is surely not the intention of the commenter.
- dang 8y ago
  Not currently, no.
novia 8y ago
Because people like me flag them. If you want an actual explanation: I am a woman and this does not match with my lived experiences. In fact, the article seems to dehumanize women in a lot of places. I'm really tired of the incel narrative and the sorts of moral arguments that come along with articles of this type in the comment section. Seeing us represented this way really stresses me out. I'm just here to learn about tech stuff, geez.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  I don't mean to belittle your decision to flag the article, but the flagging button is not a downvote button, and it is not there to hide things we personally disagree with. Flagging an article because it does not corroborate your personal experiences is somewhat irresponsible, especially for this community. There needs to be a better reason for flagging an article other than "my single data point says otherwise".
  - novia 8y ago
    Hacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. -------------- To me (and many others) this topic is political in nature and controversial. See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre. It does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. In fact, it only briefly pretends to be a data driven piece by including a graph at the beginning and citing an informal social media poll. It might be something interesting to discuss, but in my opinion this is not the forum for it.
    - anonytrary 8y ago
      Population dynamics and sexual activity statistics is arguably something that "good hackers would find interesting". If those statistics are changing significantly, then I'd definitely consider that something "that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Edit: And to clarify, lots of science can be political, but that doesn't make it not-science. For example, breaking news about a new discovery in climate change projections is inherently political but it is also inherently interesting from an intellectual standpoint. Something purely political and not intellectually interesting to hackers might be news about what's happening in the White House right now. In my opinion, anything that falls under the science category is fair game for this community because plenty of people who are hackers are also very interested in science and technology.
      - novia 8y ago
        Yes climate change is political, but would the comment section to a climate change article on this site be full of the types of comments we see in here? Would it be an actually divisive topic for the users of this site? What I love about Hacker News (usually) is the lack of flame-wars. I know they exist, but they get hidden very quickly. After reading the article in full, and finding it sparse in actual data, I decided it would most likely generate the sort of discussion that does not belong on the site. Edit to add: If it is merely the "population dynamics and sexual activity statistics" that we should be interested in, why not link directly to the study instead of this meandering commentary on it?
- taxicabjesus 8y ago
  Men and women are wired to go about relationships differently. One problem is that people don't come with clear instruction manuals to help us understand how the relationship game works. > I'm really tired of the incel narrative Men generally play a numbers game, where their romantic overtures get rejected most of the time. It doesn't help that a lot of the time their romantic overtures are annoying [1]. Supposed "incels" just have no idea what it is that makes them so obnoxious [2]. Women have to screen candidates until they find someone they think is interesting. > Seeing us represented this way really stresses me out. Maybe the comment section on these types of articles 'stress you out' because you see a bunch of men debating their "flat earth" theories of how women go about relationships, you can tell that their theories are clearly wrong, but there's no point in even trying to expand their 'flat earth relationship' theories? Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate. > I'm just here to learn about tech stuff, geez. Interpersonal relationships can be hacked too. Women especially need constructive strategies to better deal with unwanted overtures from the other gender. I try to provide constructive comments on the topic. This comment was about how my passengers helped me figure out "attraction": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17810906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17810906 (this one got lots of upvotes and downvotes). For the record, I never hit on my passengers, but sometimes they were intrigued by me... [1] "As a woman, is it simply 'understood' that you’ll have to contend with inappropriate male advances & suggestive language?" - https://www.quora.com/As-a-woman-is-it-simply-understood-that-you-ll-have-to-contend-with-inappropriate-male-advances-suggestive-language/answer/Molly-Carter-2 https://www.quora.com/As-a-woman-is-it-simply-understood-tha... [2] my comment ending with "Relationship coaching for men is mostly about teaching them how to be less obnoxious." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503 [3] "But around the time I turned 29 or 30 I rapidly began to lose interest in sex." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19602351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19602351
  - novia 8y ago
    > Women have to screen candidates until they find someone they think is interesting. This is exactly the kind of harmful narrative I'm talking about. > Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate. The stress has absolutely NOTHING to do with that. BUT, since you brought it up, OkCupid had a pretty detailed analysis that showed much the opposite when it comes to the age that people are interested. Linking because you might be interested, not because it's relevant. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*q95i3Ma24k-hxBtK.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*q95i3Ma24k-hxBtK.... https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8cabacdf5 https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8...
- the-great-assyr 8y ago
  As a matter of fact, your lived experience is nothing and count nothing in this contest, because the article talk about statistics and statistics don't care about your personal lived experience; so your rant is totally misplaced and your flag was just showed the snowflake you are. What about behave like a mature adult and take the figures and numbers for what they are and not as a personal attack? "incel narrative"? Really?? Are you a sjw reeeeeeing for whatever, by any chance? Go get a soy latte, some homeopathic sedative and some yoga, you oversensitive snowflake.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  I am honestly still trying to figure out how the male 9s and 10s are supposed to be monopolizing all the female 1s-3s when they wont look at them. I swear everyone I have ever conversed with that believes that attractive men were monopolizing all the women was a 2 with a really negative attitude towards women. The best part is where they diss the kind of woman they actually COULD potentially date as fat or dumpy and ergo beneath them. My theory is its a perception and attitude problem not societies problem. The internet shows them an entire planet full of women that are out of their league and they fail to chase the people who actually could be their mates.
  - novia 8y ago
    I like your theory about entitlement issues, but in the future could you please try to make it without resorting to reducing humans to numbers? This is the sort of rhetoric that leads to comments like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601799 I know it's basically part of the language at this point, and I'm definitely guilty of it too, but really, it's dehumanizing and implies a static unchanging nature to attractiveness that really isn't there. Women aren't the borg. We're a collection of individuals, each with our own personal preferences, which can and do vary wildly from the personal preferences of other women.
anonytrary 8y ago
Because they lead to controversial comments which get flagged at a higher rate and either one or both of the following are true: 1. The algorithm is designed to automatically bump threads down when the number of flagged comments exceeds a certain amount or rate. 2. The moderators want to simplify their moderation duties and manually bump the post down to lower the comment flux.
- dang 8y ago
  We don't do #2. We do downweight flamewar threads, i.e. threads in which people aren't following the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
hansflying 8y ago
CENSORSHIP
dang 8y ago
Users flag them, and sometimes flags win the tug-of-war against upvotes; also HN has software that penalizes overheated discussions, which tend to be flamewars. But we also monitor the list and sometimes take penalties off a story when both it and the comments fit the site guidelines.
anonlastname 8y ago
probably because a large portion of HN users are basically STEM nerd incels

Why are articles like these yanked so quickly from the front page of HN?

freyir 8y ago

I see at least two [flagged] comments. Do flagged comments cause the article to get buried?

saagarjha 8y ago
Comments in general cause articles to rank lower.
- Melchizedek 8y ago
  Which is strange, since that means a comment is also a down vote. That is surely not the intention of the commenter.
dang 8y ago
Not currently, no.

novia 8y ago

Because people like me flag them. If you want an actual explanation: I am a woman and this does not match with my lived experiences. In fact, the article seems to dehumanize women in a lot of places. I'm really tired of the incel narrative and the sorts of moral arguments that come along with articles of this type in the comment section. Seeing us represented this way really stresses me out. I'm just here to learn about tech stuff, geez.

anonytrary 8y ago
I don't mean to belittle your decision to flag the article, but the flagging button is not a downvote button, and it is not there to hide things we personally disagree with. Flagging an article because it does not corroborate your personal experiences is somewhat irresponsible, especially for this community. There needs to be a better reason for flagging an article other than "my single data point says otherwise".
- novia 8y ago
  Hacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. -------------- To me (and many others) this topic is political in nature and controversial. See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre. It does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. In fact, it only briefly pretends to be a data driven piece by including a graph at the beginning and citing an informal social media poll. It might be something interesting to discuss, but in my opinion this is not the forum for it.
  - anonytrary 8y ago
    Population dynamics and sexual activity statistics is arguably something that "good hackers would find interesting". If those statistics are changing significantly, then I'd definitely consider that something "that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Edit: And to clarify, lots of science can be political, but that doesn't make it not-science. For example, breaking news about a new discovery in climate change projections is inherently political but it is also inherently interesting from an intellectual standpoint. Something purely political and not intellectually interesting to hackers might be news about what's happening in the White House right now. In my opinion, anything that falls under the science category is fair game for this community because plenty of people who are hackers are also very interested in science and technology.
    - novia 8y ago
      Yes climate change is political, but would the comment section to a climate change article on this site be full of the types of comments we see in here? Would it be an actually divisive topic for the users of this site? What I love about Hacker News (usually) is the lack of flame-wars. I know they exist, but they get hidden very quickly. After reading the article in full, and finding it sparse in actual data, I decided it would most likely generate the sort of discussion that does not belong on the site. Edit to add: If it is merely the "population dynamics and sexual activity statistics" that we should be interested in, why not link directly to the study instead of this meandering commentary on it?
taxicabjesus 8y ago
Men and women are wired to go about relationships differently. One problem is that people don't come with clear instruction manuals to help us understand how the relationship game works. > I'm really tired of the incel narrative Men generally play a numbers game, where their romantic overtures get rejected most of the time. It doesn't help that a lot of the time their romantic overtures are annoying [1]. Supposed "incels" just have no idea what it is that makes them so obnoxious [2]. Women have to screen candidates until they find someone they think is interesting. > Seeing us represented this way really stresses me out. Maybe the comment section on these types of articles 'stress you out' because you see a bunch of men debating their "flat earth" theories of how women go about relationships, you can tell that their theories are clearly wrong, but there's no point in even trying to expand their 'flat earth relationship' theories? Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate. > I'm just here to learn about tech stuff, geez. Interpersonal relationships can be hacked too. Women especially need constructive strategies to better deal with unwanted overtures from the other gender. I try to provide constructive comments on the topic. This comment was about how my passengers helped me figure out "attraction": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17810906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17810906 (this one got lots of upvotes and downvotes). For the record, I never hit on my passengers, but sometimes they were intrigued by me... [1] "As a woman, is it simply 'understood' that you’ll have to contend with inappropriate male advances & suggestive language?" - https://www.quora.com/As-a-woman-is-it-simply-understood-that-you-ll-have-to-contend-with-inappropriate-male-advances-suggestive-language/answer/Molly-Carter-2 https://www.quora.com/As-a-woman-is-it-simply-understood-tha... [2] my comment ending with "Relationship coaching for men is mostly about teaching them how to be less obnoxious." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503 [3] "But around the time I turned 29 or 30 I rapidly began to lose interest in sex." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19602351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19602351
- novia 8y ago
  > Women have to screen candidates until they find someone they think is interesting. This is exactly the kind of harmful narrative I'm talking about. > Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate. The stress has absolutely NOTHING to do with that. BUT, since you brought it up, OkCupid had a pretty detailed analysis that showed much the opposite when it comes to the age that people are interested. Linking because you might be interested, not because it's relevant. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*q95i3Ma24k-hxBtK.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*q95i3Ma24k-hxBtK.... https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8cabacdf5 https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8...
the-great-assyr 8y ago
As a matter of fact, your lived experience is nothing and count nothing in this contest, because the article talk about statistics and statistics don't care about your personal lived experience; so your rant is totally misplaced and your flag was just showed the snowflake you are. What about behave like a mature adult and take the figures and numbers for what they are and not as a personal attack? "incel narrative"? Really?? Are you a sjw reeeeeeing for whatever, by any chance? Go get a soy latte, some homeopathic sedative and some yoga, you oversensitive snowflake.
michaelmrose 8y ago
I am honestly still trying to figure out how the male 9s and 10s are supposed to be monopolizing all the female 1s-3s when they wont look at them. I swear everyone I have ever conversed with that believes that attractive men were monopolizing all the women was a 2 with a really negative attitude towards women. The best part is where they diss the kind of woman they actually COULD potentially date as fat or dumpy and ergo beneath them. My theory is its a perception and attitude problem not societies problem. The internet shows them an entire planet full of women that are out of their league and they fail to chase the people who actually could be their mates.
- novia 8y ago
  I like your theory about entitlement issues, but in the future could you please try to make it without resorting to reducing humans to numbers? This is the sort of rhetoric that leads to comments like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601799 I know it's basically part of the language at this point, and I'm definitely guilty of it too, but really, it's dehumanizing and implies a static unchanging nature to attractiveness that really isn't there. Women aren't the borg. We're a collection of individuals, each with our own personal preferences, which can and do vary wildly from the personal preferences of other women.

anonytrary 8y ago

Because they lead to controversial comments which get flagged at a higher rate and either one or both of the following are true: 1. The algorithm is designed to automatically bump threads down when the number of flagged comments exceeds a certain amount or rate. 2. The moderators want to simplify their moderation duties and manually bump the post down to lower the comment flux.

dang 8y ago
We don't do #2. We do downweight flamewar threads, i.e. threads in which people aren't following the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

hansflying 8y ago

CENSORSHIP

dang 8y ago

Users flag them, and sometimes flags win the tug-of-war against upvotes; also HN has software that penalizes overheated discussions, which tend to be flamewars. But we also monitor the list and sometimes take penalties off a story when both it and the comments fit the site guidelines.

anonlastname 8y ago

probably because a large portion of HN users are basically STEM nerd incels