5 ms·

Why is this story already off the front page? Currently 117 points in 1 hour, yet somehow behind “The Origin of the Foot Rail” with 39 points in 7 hours.

nneonneo 7y ago
If I had to guess, the mods are bending the scoring to avoid controversial topics again. They’ve done it before with US politics. Lately there’s been a slew of China news and some of the comments have been incredibly vitriolic. I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment. As long as the insanity is technology or hacker-related it is fine for you? Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is. It is also dishonest (because politics is everywhere). In fact, the very thing I quote from you is a political statement by itself. Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is. That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News. > Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read. This is coincidentally how you deal with spam without a spam filter. At some point, it's not very productive to have to wade through a content stream that's 50% chaff.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      > That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News. They decided that not only they do not want to see it on HN; they don't want anyone to see it on HN. > You're free to use a website which uses an API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila. It is a practical solution which does not require third party tools. Also, it is about more than you; it allows you to cast your vote, thereby taking part of the community. You're free to use a website which uses HN API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila, problem solved for you. Because of the sheer amount of volume, this approach (which is easy to make with a blacklist) works quite well with RSS in general.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        > They decided that not only they do not want to see it on HN; they don't want anyone to see it on HN. Right, which as far as I can tell is essentially the Kacker News guidelines in what to submit.
        Fnoord 7y ago
        > Right, which as far as I can tell is essentially the Kacker News guidelines in what to submit. Or perhaps your (wishful) interpretation of the guidelines? Quoting [1]: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, the value of the site. (Emphasis mine.) This is also my last post on this subject with you. Have a good one. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  The Blizzard equivalent of this article is on Page 2 (currently #42): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207057
  - dang 7y ago
    That's a follow-up. The primary Blizzard story was the #1 story on HN yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08
rubatuga 7y ago
These articles are sent lower in the ranking because the mods feel they aren't very constructive
- newscracker 7y ago
  That doesn't explain other submissions on the same topic floating up and remaining on the front page. It also doesn't explain the Blizzard story being/was very active and is now only on the second page (for me) at this moment.
  - dang 7y ago
    There's no "the" Blizzard story—there has been a blizzard of them. The main one was the #1 story on HN yesterday by quite a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08. As I explained upthread, we tend to downweight follow-up stories unless they contain significant new information. More explanation on that: 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...
- dang 7y ago
  I wouldn't put it that way. It has more to do with avoiding too much repetition and making sure the front page isn't completely dominated by hot controversies, which would defeat the purpose of the site. (I hope everyone remembers what the purpose is: intellectual curiosity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.) Here are some recent explanations I've written about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771 HN has been flooded with China-related stories in the last couple months and most especially the last few days. They have been far and away the dominant topic recently, quite understandably as they are some of the leading events in world affairs right now. Important as these stories are, HN's core value being intellectual curiosity requires going easy on repetition—any repetition about anything. There's a power-law dropoff in curiosity as a thing gets repeated. Other emotions—such as indignation—work the opposite way, so this is an existential issue for this site: the more repetition we have, the more HN's purpose gets drowned out and replaced by something that is inimical to it. This is the explanation of hamandcheese's conundrum upthread, about how a story about the ongoing struggle in Hong Kong, with lots of upvotes, can possibly be ranked lower than something called "The Origin of the Foot Rail". The answer is that indignation is by far the most powerful force on the internet, and as moderators our main job is literally to moderate that, so quieter, odder, less important but more curious stories have a chance to flourish. If we didn't do that, HN would simply become a political outrage site like most other places. The front page would always be the top 30 outrages in the world, or more likely the top 5 outrages repeated 6 times each. That's the default, so if you want to run a site for intellectual curiosity, you need countervailing mechanisms. Here the countervailing mechanisms are software and moderators. But software+moderators also get many of these calls wrong, and we rely on users to let us know about those cases. I know that users who feel strongly about these stories still feel like they're under-represented. But it always feels that way about any topic on HN that you feel strongly about. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource here, and there's never enough to go around. Even if your story is the most-covered story on HN, if you feel strongly about it, you will probably feel like it's being unfairly suppressed. As I've said too many times already: even Rust hackers probably feel that way. If you read about the significant-new-information test in the first link above, the best way to help us with this is to let us know which stories have the most significant new information, relative to which are the follow-ups and copycat pieces. Then we can downweight the latter and help attention focus on what's significant. hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to let us know things; if you try to tell us things in the comments, odds are we won't see it.
epaga 7y ago
Probably 1. flagged by a number of Chinese users and 2. auto-detected as “controversial” which often are more noise than signal. I hope this is manually set as an exception. This is an extremely important topic in the tech world and needs to be discussed.
- belltaco 7y ago
  Could be Apple fans flagging it too, but usually I see negative Google stories get flagged off really fast.
  - dang 7y ago
    Everyone sees stories they prefer getting flagged really fast and stories they dislike hanging around. This is a mechanical consequence of HN's frontpage space being so limited, combined with the human tendency to pay more attention to negatives.
- dang 7y ago
  Yes, we've manually set this as an exception. The problem is that we can't set every story as exception, or even every important story. So the complaint—"why is X, which is important, off the front page with massive points while Y, which is trivial, is on the front page with pathetic points?"—will ever be with us.
  - epaga 7y ago
    Totally agree with the rule of thumb and deeply appreciate the decision to make an exception in this case.
__m 7y ago
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, the value of the site.
- cf141q5325 7y ago
  Its not really a political topic, its an alarm clock that went off. With the big tech firms openly collaborating with regimes that dont shy away from military solutions to democratic self determination the future of the internet looks rather bleak. Its one step further to no longer being able to share information on the internet that powerful regimes dont want to be found. That your ability to share information is at will in a lot of platforms should interest the users here. Its the core problem we are facing if we want to keep any free software ideas alive in todays internet. Differently put, this news is about Apple and the state of the internet, not the CCP.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  It doesn't appear there's much battling here. It seems to be nearly unanimous opposition to Apple's decision. Ideological battle seems to imply two competing and popular opinions. We rarely classify things that are bi-partisan as political. And Blizzard (which carries a substantially analogous version of events) has been condemned for their actions from Democrats and Republicans alike.
- self_awareness 7y ago
  HN is pretty much a mono-ideological site, from what I've witnessed. Any topic which triggers ideological discussion could be good for HN in my opinion.
dang 7y ago
I've answered your question as part of a longer post—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211658.

nneonneo 7y ago

If I had to guess, the mods are bending the scoring to avoid controversial topics again. They’ve done it before with US politics. Lately there’s been a slew of China news and some of the comments have been incredibly vitriolic. I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment.

Fnoord 7y ago
> I for one would support this - I like HN being a hacker’s paradise. People grousing over the latest insanity in world news can always find somewhere else to comment. As long as the insanity is technology or hacker-related it is fine for you? Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is. It is also dishonest (because politics is everywhere). In fact, the very thing I quote from you is a political statement by itself. Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Saying you do not want to see anything political, is apathic and shows you lean towards whatever the status quo is. That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News. > Here's how to deal with the issue instead: upvote stories you enjoyed and/or press hide on the links you do not want to read. This is coincidentally how you deal with spam without a spam filter. At some point, it's not very productive to have to wade through a content stream that's 50% chaff.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    > That's not what they're saying: they just don't want it on Hacker News. They decided that not only they do not want to see it on HN; they don't want anyone to see it on HN. > You're free to use a website which uses an API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila. It is a practical solution which does not require third party tools. Also, it is about more than you; it allows you to cast your vote, thereby taking part of the community. You're free to use a website which uses HN API to include/exclude based on a whitelist or blacklist. Use RSS with it, et voila, problem solved for you. Because of the sheer amount of volume, this approach (which is easy to make with a blacklist) works quite well with RSS in general.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > They decided that not only they do not want to see it on HN; they don't want anyone to see it on HN. Right, which as far as I can tell is essentially the Kacker News guidelines in what to submit.
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        > Right, which as far as I can tell is essentially the Kacker News guidelines in what to submit. Or perhaps your (wishful) interpretation of the guidelines? Quoting [1]: > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, the value of the site. (Emphasis mine.) This is also my last post on this subject with you. Have a good one. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
The Blizzard equivalent of this article is on Page 2 (currently #42): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207057
- dang 7y ago
  That's a follow-up. The primary Blizzard story was the #1 story on HN yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08

rubatuga 7y ago

These articles are sent lower in the ranking because the mods feel they aren't very constructive

newscracker 7y ago
That doesn't explain other submissions on the same topic floating up and remaining on the front page. It also doesn't explain the Blizzard story being/was very active and is now only on the second page (for me) at this moment.
- dang 7y ago
  There's no "the" Blizzard story—there has been a blizzard of them. The main one was the #1 story on HN yesterday by quite a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08. As I explained upthread, we tend to downweight follow-up stories unless they contain significant new information. More explanation on that: 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...
dang 7y ago
I wouldn't put it that way. It has more to do with avoiding too much repetition and making sure the front page isn't completely dominated by hot controversies, which would defeat the purpose of the site. (I hope everyone remembers what the purpose is: intellectual curiosity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.) Here are some recent explanations I've written about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771 HN has been flooded with China-related stories in the last couple months and most especially the last few days. They have been far and away the dominant topic recently, quite understandably as they are some of the leading events in world affairs right now. Important as these stories are, HN's core value being intellectual curiosity requires going easy on repetition—any repetition about anything. There's a power-law dropoff in curiosity as a thing gets repeated. Other emotions—such as indignation—work the opposite way, so this is an existential issue for this site: the more repetition we have, the more HN's purpose gets drowned out and replaced by something that is inimical to it. This is the explanation of hamandcheese's conundrum upthread, about how a story about the ongoing struggle in Hong Kong, with lots of upvotes, can possibly be ranked lower than something called "The Origin of the Foot Rail". The answer is that indignation is by far the most powerful force on the internet, and as moderators our main job is literally to moderate that, so quieter, odder, less important but more curious stories have a chance to flourish. If we didn't do that, HN would simply become a political outrage site like most other places. The front page would always be the top 30 outrages in the world, or more likely the top 5 outrages repeated 6 times each. That's the default, so if you want to run a site for intellectual curiosity, you need countervailing mechanisms. Here the countervailing mechanisms are software and moderators. But software+moderators also get many of these calls wrong, and we rely on users to let us know about those cases. I know that users who feel strongly about these stories still feel like they're under-represented. But it always feels that way about any topic on HN that you feel strongly about. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource here, and there's never enough to go around. Even if your story is the most-covered story on HN, if you feel strongly about it, you will probably feel like it's being unfairly suppressed. As I've said too many times already: even Rust hackers probably feel that way. If you read about the significant-new-information test in the first link above, the best way to help us with this is to let us know which stories have the most significant new information, relative to which are the follow-ups and copycat pieces. Then we can downweight the latter and help attention focus on what's significant. hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to let us know things; if you try to tell us things in the comments, odds are we won't see it.

epaga 7y ago

Probably 1. flagged by a number of Chinese users and 2. auto-detected as “controversial” which often are more noise than signal. I hope this is manually set as an exception. This is an extremely important topic in the tech world and needs to be discussed.

belltaco 7y ago
Could be Apple fans flagging it too, but usually I see negative Google stories get flagged off really fast.
- dang 7y ago
  Everyone sees stories they prefer getting flagged really fast and stories they dislike hanging around. This is a mechanical consequence of HN's frontpage space being so limited, combined with the human tendency to pay more attention to negatives.
dang 7y ago
Yes, we've manually set this as an exception. The problem is that we can't set every story as exception, or even every important story. So the complaint—"why is X, which is important, off the front page with massive points while Y, which is trivial, is on the front page with pathetic points?"—will ever be with us.
- epaga 7y ago
  Totally agree with the rule of thumb and deeply appreciate the decision to make an exception in this case.

__m 7y ago

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, the value of the site.

cf141q5325 7y ago
Its not really a political topic, its an alarm clock that went off. With the big tech firms openly collaborating with regimes that dont shy away from military solutions to democratic self determination the future of the internet looks rather bleak. Its one step further to no longer being able to share information on the internet that powerful regimes dont want to be found. That your ability to share information is at will in a lot of platforms should interest the users here. Its the core problem we are facing if we want to keep any free software ideas alive in todays internet. Differently put, this news is about Apple and the state of the internet, not the CCP.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
It doesn't appear there's much battling here. It seems to be nearly unanimous opposition to Apple's decision. Ideological battle seems to imply two competing and popular opinions. We rarely classify things that are bi-partisan as political. And Blizzard (which carries a substantially analogous version of events) has been condemned for their actions from Democrats and Republicans alike.
self_awareness 7y ago
HN is pretty much a mono-ideological site, from what I've witnessed. Any topic which triggers ideological discussion could be good for HN in my opinion.

dang 7y ago

I've answered your question as part of a longer post—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211658.