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Ask HN: Why was the recent Wired article about Fox News and Wikipedia flagged?

6 points by connorspeers 6y ago

^Title. Here’s the link to the flagged submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129479 I read the article in the submission, and I‘m just curious why it was flagged? Maybe I don’t understand flagging in general, but the submission seemed pretty relevant for HN, objectively speaking. What am I missing?

connorspeers 6y ago
Here’s the wired article the submission linked to: https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-calling-fox-a-reliable-source/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-ca... I got the submission in my RSS reader (Feedly) which regularly shows me posts that end up getting flagged for removal. After seeing the linked article elsewhere, this seemed like an odd submission to remove.
- gus_massa 6y ago
  Someone users flagged it. Send an email to the mods hn@ycombinator.com They sometime unkill the post.
- DanBC 6y ago
  Click the time-stamp of the submission. You should have a [vouch] link. Vouch for the post. If enough people vouch for the submission it should unkill itself.
  - connorspeers 6y ago
    Could be mobile safari but I still don’t see a vouch button. :( I have 4 karma, my guess is that HN admins restrict who can vouch, which would help stem the tide of spam. I’m not spam. If this is working as designed, I’d like anyone calling the shots at HN (if they read this) to know that I am vouching in spirit and wish I could vouch in reality. :) Update: I’m dumb, this comment explains what I’m too lazy to search for: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133425
    - dang 6y ago
      You need > 30 karma to vouch, same as to flag.
mrunkel 6y ago
I clicked on "vouch" and it removed the flag, but maybe just for me?
- connorspeers 6y ago
  Not just you! I’m just HN illiterate. Had no idea that was a thing. Thanks!
  - mrunkel 6y ago
    Until 5 minutes ago, me either. :)
  - gus_massa 6y ago
    You need a minimal amount of karma to get the "vouch" button, probably 200 or 500.
    - onyva 6y ago
      I have 800 and I don’t see such an option. Also, it’s still flagged.
      - zimpenfish 6y ago
        I think it's several thousand and/or some other combination of factors because I don't have the [vouch] button yet.
      - mrunkel 6y ago
        I have 932. Maybe 900 is the threshold?
      - dang 6y ago
        The threshold is > 30, same as for flagging. 'vouch' links only show up when an item is [dead], though.
    - connorspeers 6y ago
      I’m having trouble finding concrete information about the vouch button. Seems like it shows for some users but not all. Do you happen to know if there’s any official information on this? Thanks for your help! I will keep looking once I’m not on mobile.
onyva 6y ago
That’s interesting. It looks like there’s a concentrated effort on HN to remove articles critical of Drumpf and friends. I’ve seen this happening too often with perfectly legit sources, but this one in particular is obvious and worrying, since it’s very much of interest to a community like HN. By the way I don’t see a vouch option.
- connorspeers 6y ago
  I think it would be best to not poke bears and call him by his actual name. If users are instinctively flagging things they see as critical of someone they like, maybe the best way to ferry them back to reality is to provide them with information that, while truthful, doesn’t overtly denigrate their intellectuality. I myself am guilty of knee-jerk reactions when someone portrays me as stupid. That’s not to say I don’t agree with you, though. It would be a sad thing if the people of HN were taking advantage of anti-spam features to turn this space into something of an echo-sphere, regardless of political leanings. I also don’t see the vouch button. Sad that there’s a karma threshold for this kind of thing but I understand the purpose. Wish the barrier to entry was a tad lower though. Edit: I’d like to point out that the article in question has nothing to do with Donald Trump specifically, but it does discuss the reliability of Fox News, which has willfully linked itself to the president and his ideology/persona.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    When people think I'm stupid, I usually agree. I am stupid.
  - onyva 6y ago
    As per your edit, yes. That’s my point. Also, I remember a link in a comment (!) to a tweet praising AOC being voted down very quickly, for no apparent reason. Yes. I do think there’s a concentrated effort to influence content here. * I don’t see that I’ve used stupid anywhere. I’m not commenting in order to persuade anyone, and it’s not a knee jerk reaction. It’s raising awareness to something that might be a thing on HN.
    - 6y ago
waihtis 6y ago
Maybe a lot of users flagged it because they aren’t interested in having continuous political discourse also on HN.
- connorspeers 6y ago
  This isn’t about political discourse. It’s about information reliability and how websites are dealing with it. Don’t flag important conversation starters about problems endemic to the internet!
  - waihtis 6y ago
    'Fake news' stopped being newsworthy to anyone in tech probably many years ago. I find the following HN guideline to apply well to this: Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
    - connorspeers 6y ago
      Wikipedia questioning the reliability of a major cable news network is an interesting new phenomenon. Fake news is an incredibly important topic of discussion for anyone in the social media side of the tech world. I think you’re wrong. Debate me?
      - waihtis 6y ago
        You'd probably find me a disappointing debate opponent - my opinion of modern news is loosely the following: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/942367860709609472?lang=en https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/942367860709609472?lang=e...
        giantg2 6y ago
        Yep, that and it's all about money, which means ratings in this case. You get ratings by giving people what they want to see and supporting their existing views to avoid creating cognitive dissonance. The more passionate the content, the more validation the user receives. That's why the majority of the programs on news channels are not actually news, but rather lively opinion pieces or talk shows.
gadders 6y ago
Because it would turn into a dumpster fire argued along party political lines.
- connorspeers 6y ago
  Yeah this is probably true. I wish it weren’t, because seeing what non-political hackernews users think about this development would be very valuable. At least to me.
- non-entity 6y ago
  Then why don't we flag all political articles? I have yet to see what you describe not happen on any political threads and many of those make it to the front page with hundreds of upvotes. For better or worse, there seems to be enough people who want these discussions on HN.
dang 6y ago
A user emailed with the same question. I'll copy the answer here: Users flagged it. This is the usual tug of war between upvotes, flags, and vouches. We sometimes turn off flags if the article is substantive and we feel like it can support a thoughtful discussion. In this case, I'm wavering. I'm not sure how significant this information really is, given how many such things are happening right now (lots of moderation thoughts on that at [1] and [2]). The question is whether the resulting thread would be significantly different from previous discussions or not, or whether it would just get sucked into the nearest black hole, i.e. the nearest flamewar topic. Wavering isn't a strong enough reason to override the community verdict so I guess we'll leave it as is. Sorry to disappoint—there's lots of room for disagreement about this stuff, and lots of interpretation involved. I'm not saying we're right, and certainly not always right, but someone has to make these calls. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...
- connorspeers 6y ago
  Thanks for weighing in. Administering this stuff is undoubtedly exhausting, and I appreciate the honest explanation here. I agree that community rule should be rarely overridden, and to be honest, until I asked this question I was under the false impression that flagging was a moderator action. If I had done my homework and seen that it was the community who decided it wasn’t HN worthy, I wouldn’t have posted this. But I’m glad I did! Live and learn. The fact it got flagged is interesting all on its own. Maybe Wired is inviting flame wars by simply saying Fox News in the title? I wonder if it would’ve been flagged had they not. Food for thought. Thanks, dang!

connorspeers 6y ago

I totally agree with your opinion of modern news. Your opinion of HN and what deserves to be on here is what I take issue with. It felt initially like you argued that because Fox News was the subject of the link, it would start a shitstorm of garbage talk and therefore shouldn’t be on here. While it may start a shitstorm of garbage talk (it totally would, no doubt), I think this particular headline is interesting because it’s a move made by Wikipedia, one of the most widely used references on the internet. I would argue that despite the shitstorm, we should still be allowed to talk about it on HN because it’s relevant to policy makers at various internet companies. We can see that Wikipedia did something they haven’t done before, and it might influence how others move forward. i.e. “If the good folks at Wikipedia doubt Fox News’ credibility as an information resource, maybe we should too? Let’s talk about that.“ It wouldn’t matter to me if it was Fox or CNN or MSNBC or what have you. What matters (to me) is that it’s Wikipedia, and I would love to know what people smarter than me think about this situation. But how can I get their opinion if posts about this get flagged to oblivion? Edit: For example, if I could poll what information overlords at companies thought, here’s what I’d ask: - At what point does a particular information resource deserve to have its reliability status revoked? - What is a good summary of some of the internal discussions happening at Wikipedia regarding this problem and it’s surging importance? - How do you, as a company, respond when the mob attacks with something along the lines of “Leftist/Rightist bad people at company XYZ told me my favorite news entertainment network wasn’t truthful, let’s cancel them!” (Personally, my answer to this one would be: nothing.) - What do sociologists say about this, given historical context of misinformation and the cults that grow to protect it? How do we bridge existing knowledge about combating bad info with the instant-communication age we are in? Honestly, I could go on forever. Might not be the kinds of discussions you personally want to see on HN, but as a long time lurker, these are exactly the kinds of discussions I’m looking for, and it’s disheartening to see that other people think they shouldn’t happen just because it ruffles feathers.

waihtis 6y ago
Why not write a blog post about this yourself? It would be well received over here. It is obvious this is a topic you care about and have thought about through different angles, which is the type of thing HN folks love.