7 ms·

Hey, dang. I've sent a letter to hn@ycombinator.com 5 hours ago, questioning why my AskHN submission "Self-censorship on HN" has been flagged and blocked for fu

• dang 6y ago
  I have not seen it yet. If you saw the inbox you'd understand why. I'll get to it as soon as I can. Edit: One not-so-obvious reason why subthreads like this are so disastrous for HN is that they suck up all the moderation resources. I haven't had a chance to even look at the rest of the HN front page yet, let alone the emails.
  • atomashpolskiy 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply. If subthreads like this happen at all (let alone, as you put it, are so disastrous), then it might be a good idea to revisit the moderation mechanisms, don't you think so? Ideally, with a public discussion. What I'd personally be happy to see being discussed: - abandoning downvoting of comments completely - introducing a compensation mechanism for flagging of comments (debatable) - displaying all flagged submissions in a separate page with a link in the header (like "new", "ask", etc.)
    • dang 6y ago
      No, because subthreads like this are eternal and no effort to prevent them can succeed. They can only be somewhat contained sometimes. If moderation mechanisms need to be changed, it needs to be for more substantial reasons. Each generation of internet users thinks they're the first to come up with these things, and in a way they are, it's just that every previous generation was also the first to come up with them. It's an eternal cycle of internet forum life. The points you raise have been raised on HN for over a decade (HN Search is your friend!) and if they weren't those points they'd be others. That probably sounds too dismissive. I don't mean that we're uninterested in hearing from users, getting suggestions, and answering questions. We do that all the time, and it's welcome. But making meta-posts to HN is not the best way to do it, especially in any inflammatory context, where they are almost guaranteed to blow up like the gas station in Zoolander—and then consume all our limited resources for the day, which ought to be going into making the site better.
      • atomashpolskiy 6y ago
        I completely understand that it's an eternal issue. That does not automatically mean that it does not merit a yet another discussion. Downvote hell is real. Targeted censorship by (possibly coordinated) flagging is real (I presume so). I would love to read HN users' opinion on Bill Gates driving the world into a nightmarish dystopia, but can't do so, because some of the users think, that it's conspiracy bullshit (even if backed up by facts to some degree)? Might very well be so, but the fact, that we can't have such a discussion at all, has far-reaching implications, given the status of HN in the eye of the Internet crowd. It would be different, if all politics related subjects were outlawed here, but that is not the case. Rather, only some subjects are selectively and very opaquely (for the majority of users, who don't even get to see, that such a subject has been brought into their attention) dismissed as flamebait/propaganda/conspiracy/whatever. Why is that necessary?
        • jb775 6y ago
          Could not agree more, HN is taking the "we know best, so we ask that you blindly listen to us" highbrow approach. I lost 20% of my karma because I took a non-popular stance within a single thread lol. My stance was backed up by references/facts/data, but none of that mattered. In a comment above, I mentioned the possible solution (to the issue discussed in above thread) that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions. I feel like HN could squash 90% of these concerns with that simple feature.
          • atomashpolskiy 6y ago
            > that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions totally agree overall (implementation details are debatable)
          • dang 6y ago
            The question is whether it would squash 90% of those concerns or blow them up 900x. I don't know the answer to that, but I fear the latter. Everything we do as moderators is defensible—it's our core principle not to do things that we can't defend to the community, with confidence that the majority would support it. But that doesn't mean that everything we do explains itself. On the contrary: it's all prone to misinterpretation, accusations of sinister manipulation, secret communist or nazi sympathies—I mean, you name it, we get accused of it. The bottom of that barrel is large, and at any moment there are hundreds if not thousands of readers raring to go there. Posting explanations as I've been doing in this thread is by far the highest-energy-expending thing that we have to do. We don't have the capacity to do significantly more—that's a recipe for burnout. Moreover, the litigious sort of users who would post most of the meta complaints are also the least likely to ever be satisfied by the explanations. Why would it be a good idea to give them more material to work with and a single place to go get it? If, on the other hand, the goal is to keep the majority of the community satisfied—well, the majority of the community is already satisfied: the clear majority, and clearly so. If that weren't the case, believe me, we'd know it, and we'd already have adjusted. That's how we keep the community satisfied in the first place. This doesn't mean we don't want to be transparent. But we take an ad hoc approach to that by answering questions as they come up. There's no specific question you can't get an answer to.
  • jb775 6y ago
    Definitely agree it's not sustainable to moderate these issues individually. But maybe it's a red flag that HN needs to change their approach to this issue? It feels like a "guilty until proven innocent" setup.