4 ms·

The email is real? That's a bit more interference than I would expect from HN moderators. You are basically letting your personal tastes govern what gets prefer

The email is real? That's a bit more interference than I would expect from HN moderators. You are basically letting your personal tastes govern what gets preferential treatment.

iudqnolq 7y ago
That's what moderation is. And HN is good because of moderation. The email is real. I see it as mostly Dan realizing that people might find it interesting. And the votes seem to suggest he was right.
- greatgib 7y ago
  Thank you for your detailed reply! I'm amazed to see that it is indeed really that the ranking system was gamed. I was supposing that it was only a mix of bad algorithm and a lot of votes of windows or photography fanboys. Or something like that.
  - kick 7y ago
    The ranking system wasn't really gamed. A single extra vote doesn't do much: it won't get you onto the front page, and it won't be a deciding factor in getting you there, either, at the hour this link was posted. Throwing something back into /new isn't gaming the system, and there's no reason why 'dang shouldn't get a vote as well. At minimum it's curation, at maximum it's just a retry with 'dang upmodding it. I say this as a person who read the post, didn't like it, thought about making a snarky comment about how the first time I saw it I thought the person's screen was covered in smudges, and refrained.
Stratoscope 7y ago
Instead of interference and preferential treatment, think of it as curation. There are many times that interesting stories are submitted but never happen to hit the right window on /new to get upvoted onto the front page. One of the things the mods look for is interesting articles that have been submitted by multiple people and still never made it to the front page. That is a sign that there may be community interest. My guess is that they have a script to find these articles, and then review them manually. Then they email the first person to have submitted it and ask them to re-submit. Daniel (dang) explained this in more detail on another "second chance" article earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852627
dang 7y ago
These links explain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508960 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22second%20chance%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20invited%20repost&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... HN's archives contain tons of good articles that fall through the cracks because they didn't get noticed on /newest. Giving some of those a second chance is one way to make HN more interesting, which is what we try to optimize for: 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.... Another word for "optimization" might be "interference"—it depends on your perspective. Without intervention from moderators (plus software), HN's content would consist mostly of the same few hot topics over and over, plus sensational stories and riler-uppers. Unregulated, the system optimizes itself not for curiosity but for indignation. That alas is what mass psychology is wired for. We try to be careful not to overdo it—our job is not to impose things on the community so much as to sense what it likes and provide more ways for it to have that. It's not our personal tastes that govern second-chance selections so much as our guess at what the community might find interesting. They get a brief placement on the front page. If we guess wrong, and the community doesn't find them interesting, they soon fall off. This post wasn't a wrong guess though—it was a rarer case where the community was split. Enough users liked it to upvote it to the top, while a bunch of other users didn't, and the thread contains comments from both camps. You can see a partial list of second-chance posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/invited https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are ones that were too old to put directly in the second-chance pool, so we emailed the submitter with a repost invitation instead. At some point we'll publish a more comprehensive list of all the stories that got given a second chance, but this one is representative. The holy grail of all this is to build software for the community to do all this instead. That would be perfect because first, it would no longer be just moderators and story reviewers doing it, but anyone who wants to. And second, it would be way less work for us! So that's definitely the plan. What we still haven't come up with is a way to do it that isn't somehow just a reimplementation of the voting system—which HN has already got one of. One extra aspect of this is that when we get there, it should be a nice new way for users to earn karma on the site. The user who finds an old submission that the community turns out to love, will get karma for it, in addition to the submitter. By the way, if you or anyone runs across a submission that is particularly good and didn't get attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the pool. We love getting these emails! Especially when they're something someone else posted and you just ran across it and found it interesting.

The email is real? That's a bit more interference than I would expect from HN moderators. You are basically letting your personal tastes govern what gets preferential treatment.

iudqnolq 7y ago

That's what moderation is. And HN is good because of moderation. The email is real. I see it as mostly Dan realizing that people might find it interesting. And the votes seem to suggest he was right.

greatgib 7y ago
Thank you for your detailed reply! I'm amazed to see that it is indeed really that the ranking system was gamed. I was supposing that it was only a mix of bad algorithm and a lot of votes of windows or photography fanboys. Or something like that.
- kick 7y ago
  The ranking system wasn't really gamed. A single extra vote doesn't do much: it won't get you onto the front page, and it won't be a deciding factor in getting you there, either, at the hour this link was posted. Throwing something back into /new isn't gaming the system, and there's no reason why 'dang shouldn't get a vote as well. At minimum it's curation, at maximum it's just a retry with 'dang upmodding it. I say this as a person who read the post, didn't like it, thought about making a snarky comment about how the first time I saw it I thought the person's screen was covered in smudges, and refrained.

Stratoscope 7y ago

Instead of interference and preferential treatment, think of it as curation. There are many times that interesting stories are submitted but never happen to hit the right window on /new to get upvoted onto the front page. One of the things the mods look for is interesting articles that have been submitted by multiple people and still never made it to the front page. That is a sign that there may be community interest. My guess is that they have a script to find these articles, and then review them manually. Then they email the first person to have submitted it and ask them to re-submit. Daniel (dang) explained this in more detail on another "second chance" article earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852627

dang 7y ago

These links explain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508960 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22second%20chance%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20invited%20repost&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... HN's archives contain tons of good articles that fall through the cracks because they didn't get noticed on /newest. Giving some of those a second chance is one way to make HN more interesting, which is what we try to optimize for: 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.... Another word for "optimization" might be "interference"—it depends on your perspective. Without intervention from moderators (plus software), HN's content would consist mostly of the same few hot topics over and over, plus sensational stories and riler-uppers. Unregulated, the system optimizes itself not for curiosity but for indignation. That alas is what mass psychology is wired for. We try to be careful not to overdo it—our job is not to impose things on the community so much as to sense what it likes and provide more ways for it to have that. It's not our personal tastes that govern second-chance selections so much as our guess at what the community might find interesting. They get a brief placement on the front page. If we guess wrong, and the community doesn't find them interesting, they soon fall off. This post wasn't a wrong guess though—it was a rarer case where the community was split. Enough users liked it to upvote it to the top, while a bunch of other users didn't, and the thread contains comments from both camps. You can see a partial list of second-chance posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/invited https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are ones that were too old to put directly in the second-chance pool, so we emailed the submitter with a repost invitation instead. At some point we'll publish a more comprehensive list of all the stories that got given a second chance, but this one is representative. The holy grail of all this is to build software for the community to do all this instead. That would be perfect because first, it would no longer be just moderators and story reviewers doing it, but anyone who wants to. And second, it would be way less work for us! So that's definitely the plan. What we still haven't come up with is a way to do it that isn't somehow just a reimplementation of the voting system—which HN has already got one of. One extra aspect of this is that when we get there, it should be a nice new way for users to earn karma on the site. The user who finds an old submission that the community turns out to love, will get karma for it, in addition to the submitter. By the way, if you or anyone runs across a submission that is particularly good and didn't get attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the pool. We love getting these emails! Especially when they're something someone else posted and you just ran across it and found it interesting.