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I visit "New" occasionally but I find it often disappointing because it is full of flagged submissions. Many of them seem reasonable submissions (not on TV, not

I visit "New" occasionally but I find it often disappointing because it is full of flagged submissions. Many of them seem reasonable submissions (not on TV, not click bait), so I keep wondering why they are flagged. Not sure if some people flag duplicates, but finding out whether it is duplicate takes quite a while, especially on a phone.

gus_massa 6y ago
Most of the [dead] post are just spam. Some are just off topic. If you see one that is not spam, you can vouch them, and if it is really great you can write an email to the mods. (It's a manual process, so only write about the very good post.) There are some corner case, like people that make very simple technical post like "How to sort a list in Python using the standard sort function", and submit every day one of them. A good discussion about different sorting algorithms is nice, but a two lines post about [1 4 2 3].sort is not. It would be nice if you link 2 or 3 examples.
- monopoledance 6y ago
  And anything political that doesn't meet the hivemind's right-leaning, libertarian political mindset. At least those who downvote and flag posts and comments, tend to effectively cancel particular views a lot. Pretty sad state of affairs, as the hivemind remains a political bias, as new users don't have the same rights to manage visibility. Even on Reddit the Hivemind can't kill a comment completely. IMO comments/posts should never fall below 1 karma points, karma shouldn't be visible, just affect ranking, and comments only be removed by moderators, with an explanation, which community rule was broken.
  - dang 6y ago
    This is an inaccurate view of HN. It has to be, because the people on the opposite side have an identical view, only with the high-order political bit flipped. That is, they're wrong in an exactly symmetrical way. Here's a taste—there are many more where these came from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25427915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25427915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779614 In reality, HN is divided on any topic that is divisive in society at large, including all the variations across the different countries represented here. That's a lot of variation. Once you get over how both $X and anti-$X users pronounce HN to be an "echo chamber" (or "cesspool", an old favorite) controlled by their opponents, it's a bit of a puzzle how that is even possible. How can people come up with 100% opposite views of exactly the same thing? I think these false feelings of generality are generated by the mind because the comments one dislikes make a much stronger (and more painful) impression on it than anything one likes or agrees with. The more one dislikes those, the more pain they cause, and the mind responds by creating an image, almost like an organ might secrete a membrane to protect itself. This explains both why these views are so identical (except for the high-order bit) and why they're most often posted by the people who have the strongest feelings for or against $X. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=notice%20dislike%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... Unfortunately this creates a situation where everyone with strong passions feels like the site is dominated by their enemies and they're basically surrounded by demons when they spend time here. That's not so good for community. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=demons%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... In reality, HN is probably less hostile than similar places of comparable size on the internet. It's just that it's organized in a way that keeps everyone together, so you're much more likely to randomly bump into remarks that you passionately disagree with. On other sites people protect themselves from this by subscribing or following or connecting primarily with users of their own tribe, and come into contact with the other tribe only when going out on skirmishes. I wrote a mini-essay about that if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
    - monopoledance 6y ago
      And yet these comments are not downvoted or dead. Just the claim of bias isn't evidence of bias. I would also confidently say, the nature of the comments you linked are very much different: I didn't merely stated "but the other side!1!!", but argued about the inherent power dynamics of HN's workings. Let me ask you, should my comment be flagged and downvoted? The right has adapted a generalized "No U!" line of discourse, most prominent in the moral panic of "cancel culture". It's always based on the distortion of semantics and therefor false equivalency, ignoring context. Please show me examples of actual arguments leaning politically left, which got upvoted and tolerated by the Hivemind. Please, try it yourself. It is not both sides. There is a difference in intention and semantics.
      - dang 6y ago
        The comments I linked to above were downvoted and dead. I unkilled them so that readers who clicked on the link (and don't have 'showdead' turned on in their profile) could read what they were linking to. > Let me ask you, should my comment be flagged and downvoted? If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903933, of course it should! It breaks more than one of the site guidelines, e.g. the ones that ask you please not to use HN for ideological battle and please not to go on about downvotes. I'm sorry, but the phenomenon I'm talking about could hardly be clearer: the hivemind, to use your term, has both right-leaning and left-leaning devotees, some of whom are extremely passionate; the deep irony of the situation is how much they resemble each other. Both show up a lot on HN—their presence in the comments is likely far greater than their numbers in the community, because passion makes one more likely to comment on the internet. Both deny that their side is as common or as influential as it really is, and both make out that the other side is the dominant one and that therefore HN is under its control or in its pocket. All that is just empirical observation. Whether the psychological mechanism I'm proposing to explain it is true or not, I don't know, but the empirical observation is the important part. No one can look at these things objectively and not see the similarity, indeed the isomorphism, between them.
        monopoledance 6y ago
ddevault 6y ago
Flagging is entirely broken on Hacker News, which is a problem I've pointed out to the moderators before. It's basically a super-downvote and allows people to censor opinions that they don't like. Comparing with downvotes: - Flags work on comments and posts, but you can only downvote comments. - Flags work on replies to your comments; downvotes don't. - A few flags will remove a comment entirely, downvotes can only make it grey. - A few flags will remove a post entirely, and even with showdead enabled you have to see it in /new or at the last page of /hot, then choose to vouch for it to rescue it. This almost never happens. A flagged post is basically a death sentence for that post. - You get flags at 31 karma, but can't downvote until 501. So the answer is that flags are utterly broken and vulnerable to abuse, and /new is where it shows most strongly. Tons of posts are killed there. Controversial topics almost cannot be discussed on HN because it only takes a few people to vanish the post for good.
- Lewton 6y ago
  > Controversial topics almost cannot be discussed on HN because it only takes a few people to vanish the post for good. feature not a bug
  - jb775 6y ago
    This works for technical topics, but quickly falls apart in certain topics of conversation. When a user-base skews one way politically, this is a terrible feature. People are blind to the fact they're chiseling their own echo chamber. Edit: how is downvoting political opinions (and therefore reducing the post's visibility) beneficial to anyone? It's a shallow way to make the down-voter feel good temporarily, and dissuades actual discussion of other philosophies. At the very least, political downvotes should require a response.
- polote 6y ago
  > Controversial topics almost cannot be discussed on HN because it only takes a few people to vanish the post for good. Yes but that's a choice, because these topics tend to create flame war discussion, so they don't belong to HN. It doesn't mean, these topics should not be discussed. Hn is just not the right place for it. > This almost never happens. A flagged post is basically a death sentence for that post. I'm not sure for that. I've rescued post, and I've seen post being rescued. But it could be easier to rescue a post, I agree. Hn works as a filter for submitted content, which works pretty well but tend to filter always the same kind of posts
usr1106 6y ago
Would it work better to have at least 3 categories * off-topic: On TV, get rich schemes etc, daily politics * on topic but lacking news value. Trivial computing problems everyone can lookup on stackoverflow should they need to look it up * duplicate or not original, ideally with a link to the original one
polote 6y ago
> so I keep wondering why they are flagged Some people have their post automatically flagged, because of their bad behavior in the past. (mod correctly if I'm wrong)
jb775 6y ago
They probably auto-flag duplicates and known spam. Whenever I look at the "new" page, it seems like a firehose of posts. I'd imagine there's luck involved with how many people happen to visit the "New" page before a post is pushed into the abyss. I'd also imagine there's a certain time-frame where a post is more likely to catch traction.

gus_massa 6y ago

Most of the [dead] post are just spam. Some are just off topic. If you see one that is not spam, you can vouch them, and if it is really great you can write an email to the mods. (It's a manual process, so only write about the very good post.) There are some corner case, like people that make very simple technical post like "How to sort a list in Python using the standard sort function", and submit every day one of them. A good discussion about different sorting algorithms is nice, but a two lines post about [1 4 2 3].sort is not. It would be nice if you link 2 or 3 examples.

monopoledance 6y ago
And anything political that doesn't meet the hivemind's right-leaning, libertarian political mindset. At least those who downvote and flag posts and comments, tend to effectively cancel particular views a lot. Pretty sad state of affairs, as the hivemind remains a political bias, as new users don't have the same rights to manage visibility. Even on Reddit the Hivemind can't kill a comment completely. IMO comments/posts should never fall below 1 karma points, karma shouldn't be visible, just affect ranking, and comments only be removed by moderators, with an explanation, which community rule was broken.
- dang 6y ago
  This is an inaccurate view of HN. It has to be, because the people on the opposite side have an identical view, only with the high-order political bit flipped. That is, they're wrong in an exactly symmetrical way. Here's a taste—there are many more where these came from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25427915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25427915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25779614 In reality, HN is divided on any topic that is divisive in society at large, including all the variations across the different countries represented here. That's a lot of variation. Once you get over how both $X and anti-$X users pronounce HN to be an "echo chamber" (or "cesspool", an old favorite) controlled by their opponents, it's a bit of a puzzle how that is even possible. How can people come up with 100% opposite views of exactly the same thing? I think these false feelings of generality are generated by the mind because the comments one dislikes make a much stronger (and more painful) impression on it than anything one likes or agrees with. The more one dislikes those, the more pain they cause, and the mind responds by creating an image, almost like an organ might secrete a membrane to protect itself. This explains both why these views are so identical (except for the high-order bit) and why they're most often posted by the people who have the strongest feelings for or against $X. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=notice%20dislike%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... Unfortunately this creates a situation where everyone with strong passions feels like the site is dominated by their enemies and they're basically surrounded by demons when they spend time here. That's not so good for community. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=demons%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... In reality, HN is probably less hostile than similar places of comparable size on the internet. It's just that it's organized in a way that keeps everyone together, so you're much more likely to randomly bump into remarks that you passionately disagree with. On other sites people protect themselves from this by subscribing or following or connecting primarily with users of their own tribe, and come into contact with the other tribe only when going out on skirmishes. I wrote a mini-essay about that if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
  - monopoledance 6y ago
    And yet these comments are not downvoted or dead. Just the claim of bias isn't evidence of bias. I would also confidently say, the nature of the comments you linked are very much different: I didn't merely stated "but the other side!1!!", but argued about the inherent power dynamics of HN's workings. Let me ask you, should my comment be flagged and downvoted? The right has adapted a generalized "No U!" line of discourse, most prominent in the moral panic of "cancel culture". It's always based on the distortion of semantics and therefor false equivalency, ignoring context. Please show me examples of actual arguments leaning politically left, which got upvoted and tolerated by the Hivemind. Please, try it yourself. It is not both sides. There is a difference in intention and semantics.
    - dang 6y ago
      The comments I linked to above were downvoted and dead. I unkilled them so that readers who clicked on the link (and don't have 'showdead' turned on in their profile) could read what they were linking to. > Let me ask you, should my comment be flagged and downvoted? If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903933, of course it should! It breaks more than one of the site guidelines, e.g. the ones that ask you please not to use HN for ideological battle and please not to go on about downvotes. I'm sorry, but the phenomenon I'm talking about could hardly be clearer: the hivemind, to use your term, has both right-leaning and left-leaning devotees, some of whom are extremely passionate; the deep irony of the situation is how much they resemble each other. Both show up a lot on HN—their presence in the comments is likely far greater than their numbers in the community, because passion makes one more likely to comment on the internet. Both deny that their side is as common or as influential as it really is, and both make out that the other side is the dominant one and that therefore HN is under its control or in its pocket. All that is just empirical observation. Whether the psychological mechanism I'm proposing to explain it is true or not, I don't know, but the empirical observation is the important part. No one can look at these things objectively and not see the similarity, indeed the isomorphism, between them.
      - monopoledance 6y ago

ddevault 6y ago

Flagging is entirely broken on Hacker News, which is a problem I've pointed out to the moderators before. It's basically a super-downvote and allows people to censor opinions that they don't like. Comparing with downvotes: - Flags work on comments and posts, but you can only downvote comments. - Flags work on replies to your comments; downvotes don't. - A few flags will remove a comment entirely, downvotes can only make it grey. - A few flags will remove a post entirely, and even with showdead enabled you have to see it in /new or at the last page of /hot, then choose to vouch for it to rescue it. This almost never happens. A flagged post is basically a death sentence for that post. - You get flags at 31 karma, but can't downvote until 501. So the answer is that flags are utterly broken and vulnerable to abuse, and /new is where it shows most strongly. Tons of posts are killed there. Controversial topics almost cannot be discussed on HN because it only takes a few people to vanish the post for good.

Lewton 6y ago
> Controversial topics almost cannot be discussed on HN because it only takes a few people to vanish the post for good. feature not a bug
- jb775 6y ago
  This works for technical topics, but quickly falls apart in certain topics of conversation. When a user-base skews one way politically, this is a terrible feature. People are blind to the fact they're chiseling their own echo chamber. Edit: how is downvoting political opinions (and therefore reducing the post's visibility) beneficial to anyone? It's a shallow way to make the down-voter feel good temporarily, and dissuades actual discussion of other philosophies. At the very least, political downvotes should require a response.
polote 6y ago
> Controversial topics almost cannot be discussed on HN because it only takes a few people to vanish the post for good. Yes but that's a choice, because these topics tend to create flame war discussion, so they don't belong to HN. It doesn't mean, these topics should not be discussed. Hn is just not the right place for it. > This almost never happens. A flagged post is basically a death sentence for that post. I'm not sure for that. I've rescued post, and I've seen post being rescued. But it could be easier to rescue a post, I agree. Hn works as a filter for submitted content, which works pretty well but tend to filter always the same kind of posts

usr1106 6y ago

Would it work better to have at least 3 categories * off-topic: On TV, get rich schemes etc, daily politics * on topic but lacking news value. Trivial computing problems everyone can lookup on stackoverflow should they need to look it up * duplicate or not original, ideally with a link to the original one

polote 6y ago

> so I keep wondering why they are flagged Some people have their post automatically flagged, because of their bad behavior in the past. (mod correctly if I'm wrong)

jb775 6y ago

They probably auto-flag duplicates and known spam. Whenever I look at the "new" page, it seems like a firehose of posts. I'd imagine there's luck involved with how many people happen to visit the "New" page before a post is pushed into the abyss. I'd also imagine there's a certain time-frame where a post is more likely to catch traction.