4 ms·

There was a thread on this earlier today too, but it fell off the main page really quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770 https://news.ycombina

There was a thread on this earlier today too, but it fell off the main page really quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770

dang 7y ago
That one got both a software penalty (flamewar detector) and a moderator penalty (similar). But there have been so many submissions about this that it seems there's a community interest in discussing it that is more than just latest-routine-outrage. So we rolled back the clock on this one and put it in the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). Not sure if that was a good idea or not.
- guardiangod 7y ago
  Thank you for doing this. I thought i was stuck in a time loop aka Groundhog Day when I saw the thread in HN's front page, and my post was timestamped at 7 hours (instead of 2 days) ago. I believe this is an important issue. Regardless of whether SO is right or not, they do owe their community (of which I am not a part of) an explanation. Unlike the Google's gender controversy, SO is mostly operated by unpaid volunteers. If you are a paid worker, your share of responsibility and the expectation from/to your company is very different from community driven projects such as SO. tl:dr SO needs to be held to a higher standard than your usual commercial companies.
  - dang 7y ago
    (Yes, the software relativizes the timestamps on a thread while re-upping a submission; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20169818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20169818. It's confusing but keeping the original timestamps is worse and we've yet to figure out a better way to do it. I suppose this needs to go in the FAQ.)
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      I don't understand why you don't have banners, on stories that have had editorial changes, to say what the editorial changes are. For example (not suggestions for text) "story reposted with different timestamps", "title changed from 'X is the best thing eva'", "link changed from 'www.superspammy.co.net'", or whatever. Is transparency of editorial actions bad somehow?
      - tptacek 7y ago
        The more directly you surface moderator action, the more people want to discuss moderator actions (you can see a miniature version of this phenomenon in any comment about downvoting). Keeping this kind of metacommentary out of threads is a site goal.
      - dang 7y ago
        tptacek's reply is correct. The other thing is that we try to be careful about not compromising HN's minimalism, which would be so easy to do.
        pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        "no discussion of moderation" (like the rule on not discussing downvotes) seems to handle the first part. Often, but not consistently AFAICT, a moderator (such as yourself Dang) will add a comment to the effect that a title was changed or a link was rewritten, it's just hidden in the comments; that's a strange thing to do if you fear discussions devolving towards meta topics. Problems arise when people comment on a story when the substantive parts of the story then have been changed. As for the second part, surely optional features (as there are already, eg "display dead") don't _compromise_ minimalism.
- lesstenseflow 7y ago
  Why the moderator penalty? I ask because this is a case of someone being punished for discussing a topic (gender identity and the limits of one’s authority over the speech of others), and then it would seem discussion of the punishment is being suppressed on a second platform (here). Looks almost like “suppress the topic, then suppress the discussion of the suppression.” Got me thinking wow, some people really don’t want anyone discussing this topic! I wonder why. Anyway to the main point, why did this story get a mod point? Using a throwaway for obvious reason: it’s rational to be afraid to discuss the topic openly (see TFA), these folks will put you on a blacklist faster than you can say HUAC.
  - dang 7y ago
    Because hot, flamey, sensational threads are the cheetos of the internet, and if we didn't downweight them they would take over the site and make it a different kind of forum. On HN we're optimizing for one thing: intellectual curiosity [1, 2]. That means encouraging threads that satisfy that quality, but it also means weeding out most threads that don't satisfy that quality. Most riler-uppers [3] don't. That doesn't mean they aren't important. They have other qualities, just not the one we're optimizing for. Although this moderation strategy follows from the first principle of the site, it has many tricky aspects. Sometimes there are stories that have both qualities: intellectual interesting as well as rage-inducing or polarizing [4]. In those cases we tend to go by whether the community is able to have a discussion that at least doesn't burst completely into flames. We also consider whether the general topic has been discussed recently, since curiosity withers under repetition. Sometimes there are stories that don't really gratify intellectual curiosity, but contain such important news that users will submit them over and over again regardless of how much we downweight them. In that case we yield to the community and try, if possible, to consolidate the discussion of that story into one major thread. After that, we downweight reposts until there is significant new information [5]. This StackOverflow story seems to fall somewhere in the overlapping circles of that Venn diagram; it's not devoid of intellectual curiosity (rapidly changing social/political conditions; internet community management; etc.), and it's also something the community seemed determined to discuss (to judge by how often it kept getting reposted). That gave it enough energy to hop into a different orbit than your typical yet-another-angry-dispute would achieve under routine HN moderation. > Got me thinking wow, some people really don’t want anyone discussing this topic! I wonder why. When people hear about story X getting moderated, if story X is something they care about, it immediately feels like story X is being singled out for suppression. Then the question arises: why are you censoring X? If you only ask that question about X, it always seems arbitrary and unfair. From a moderation point of view, though, nothing is singled out—the strategy is systematic. We're basically like snow-ploughs or street-sweeping trucks that do their job every day to clear the roads. If we didn't, the roads would pile up with snow and/or trash, i.e. the site couldn't function as intended. There's never a particular intention to suppress a particular story—on the contrary, to the extent that a story gets particular attention, it's usually to decide whether a penalty should be waived, as in this case. If you want to understand HN moderation, you need to understand that all this takes place at scale. We make moderation calls like this dozens if not hundreds of times a day, mostly via pattern-matching and heuristics (including in software, when we can figure out how to write code to do it), because there isn't time to do it any other way. Invariably, we guess wrong in many cases, not because the strategy is wrong, but because no systematic strategy can bat 100. Plus there will always be borderline calls, which by definition are arbitrary. If you still have questions that aren't answered by the above, I'd be interested in hearing what they are. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 2. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curiosity%20optimiz&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... 3. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20rile&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... 4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 5. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query="significant%20new%20information"&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

There was a thread on this earlier today too, but it fell off the main page really quickly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21149770

dang 7y ago

That one got both a software penalty (flamewar detector) and a moderator penalty (similar). But there have been so many submissions about this that it seems there's a community interest in discussing it that is more than just latest-routine-outrage. So we rolled back the clock on this one and put it in the second-chance pool (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380). Not sure if that was a good idea or not.

guardiangod 7y ago
Thank you for doing this. I thought i was stuck in a time loop aka Groundhog Day when I saw the thread in HN's front page, and my post was timestamped at 7 hours (instead of 2 days) ago. I believe this is an important issue. Regardless of whether SO is right or not, they do owe their community (of which I am not a part of) an explanation. Unlike the Google's gender controversy, SO is mostly operated by unpaid volunteers. If you are a paid worker, your share of responsibility and the expectation from/to your company is very different from community driven projects such as SO. tl:dr SO needs to be held to a higher standard than your usual commercial companies.
- dang 7y ago
  (Yes, the software relativizes the timestamps on a thread while re-upping a submission; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20169818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20169818. It's confusing but keeping the original timestamps is worse and we've yet to figure out a better way to do it. I suppose this needs to go in the FAQ.)
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I don't understand why you don't have banners, on stories that have had editorial changes, to say what the editorial changes are. For example (not suggestions for text) "story reposted with different timestamps", "title changed from 'X is the best thing eva'", "link changed from 'www.superspammy.co.net'", or whatever. Is transparency of editorial actions bad somehow?
    - tptacek 7y ago
      The more directly you surface moderator action, the more people want to discuss moderator actions (you can see a miniature version of this phenomenon in any comment about downvoting). Keeping this kind of metacommentary out of threads is a site goal.
    - dang 7y ago
      tptacek's reply is correct. The other thing is that we try to be careful about not compromising HN's minimalism, which would be so easy to do.
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        "no discussion of moderation" (like the rule on not discussing downvotes) seems to handle the first part. Often, but not consistently AFAICT, a moderator (such as yourself Dang) will add a comment to the effect that a title was changed or a link was rewritten, it's just hidden in the comments; that's a strange thing to do if you fear discussions devolving towards meta topics. Problems arise when people comment on a story when the substantive parts of the story then have been changed. As for the second part, surely optional features (as there are already, eg "display dead") don't _compromise_ minimalism.
lesstenseflow 7y ago
Why the moderator penalty? I ask because this is a case of someone being punished for discussing a topic (gender identity and the limits of one’s authority over the speech of others), and then it would seem discussion of the punishment is being suppressed on a second platform (here). Looks almost like “suppress the topic, then suppress the discussion of the suppression.” Got me thinking wow, some people really don’t want anyone discussing this topic! I wonder why. Anyway to the main point, why did this story get a mod point? Using a throwaway for obvious reason: it’s rational to be afraid to discuss the topic openly (see TFA), these folks will put you on a blacklist faster than you can say HUAC.
- dang 7y ago
  Because hot, flamey, sensational threads are the cheetos of the internet, and if we didn't downweight them they would take over the site and make it a different kind of forum. On HN we're optimizing for one thing: intellectual curiosity [1, 2]. That means encouraging threads that satisfy that quality, but it also means weeding out most threads that don't satisfy that quality. Most riler-uppers [3] don't. That doesn't mean they aren't important. They have other qualities, just not the one we're optimizing for. Although this moderation strategy follows from the first principle of the site, it has many tricky aspects. Sometimes there are stories that have both qualities: intellectual interesting as well as rage-inducing or polarizing [4]. In those cases we tend to go by whether the community is able to have a discussion that at least doesn't burst completely into flames. We also consider whether the general topic has been discussed recently, since curiosity withers under repetition. Sometimes there are stories that don't really gratify intellectual curiosity, but contain such important news that users will submit them over and over again regardless of how much we downweight them. In that case we yield to the community and try, if possible, to consolidate the discussion of that story into one major thread. After that, we downweight reposts until there is significant new information [5]. This StackOverflow story seems to fall somewhere in the overlapping circles of that Venn diagram; it's not devoid of intellectual curiosity (rapidly changing social/political conditions; internet community management; etc.), and it's also something the community seemed determined to discuss (to judge by how often it kept getting reposted). That gave it enough energy to hop into a different orbit than your typical yet-another-angry-dispute would achieve under routine HN moderation. > Got me thinking wow, some people really don’t want anyone discussing this topic! I wonder why. When people hear about story X getting moderated, if story X is something they care about, it immediately feels like story X is being singled out for suppression. Then the question arises: why are you censoring X? If you only ask that question about X, it always seems arbitrary and unfair. From a moderation point of view, though, nothing is singled out—the strategy is systematic. We're basically like snow-ploughs or street-sweeping trucks that do their job every day to clear the roads. If we didn't, the roads would pile up with snow and/or trash, i.e. the site couldn't function as intended. There's never a particular intention to suppress a particular story—on the contrary, to the extent that a story gets particular attention, it's usually to decide whether a penalty should be waived, as in this case. If you want to understand HN moderation, you need to understand that all this takes place at scale. We make moderation calls like this dozens if not hundreds of times a day, mostly via pattern-matching and heuristics (including in software, when we can figure out how to write code to do it), because there isn't time to do it any other way. Invariably, we guess wrong in many cases, not because the strategy is wrong, but because no systematic strategy can bat 100. Plus there will always be borderline calls, which by definition are arbitrary. If you still have questions that aren't answered by the above, I'd be interested in hearing what they are. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 2. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curiosity%20optimiz&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... 3. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20rile&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... 4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 5. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query="significant%20new%20information"&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...