17 ms·

@dang, I think we need an explanation for why Tank Man-related content on Hacker News has been disappearing all day. I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free

by kian 5y ago

@dang, I think we need an explanation for why Tank Man-related content on Hacker News has been disappearing all day. I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech, and if there isn't some kind of proportionate response here, I don't believe myself or many others here will be able to see it that way going forward. EDIT: Thank you for your response, dang. Hacker News is a special place, which is why we have responded so strongly to today's events - I apologize if the tone above came off as less-than-civil. I (and it seems, many others) look forward to hearing more about the 'dupe' article others have linked to below. It was only upon seeing the article marked as a dupe after seeing the previous flagged out of existence that it began to feel like more than just a user-initiated action, so I am sure further information on the mod-initiated actions will put these fears to rest.

dTal 5y ago
"Political" or "controversial" content is always^H^H^H^H sometimes punished by HN (sorry, dang). While I think this is a highly questionable policy which is itself political in nature (reinforcing as it does the status quo), it need not be specific to China. A statement would certainly be nice, however.
- kian 5y ago
  This explains the flagging. It does not explain the 'duplicate content' article from CNN on the origins of the Tank Man photo, which I believe requires HN moderator activity.
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  I did notice it the past that HN articles critical of China behaved in a strange way. In the past all the comments in the comment section were downvoted, sometimes you could see dozens of comments greyed out, every single one of them. (Probably because it's not possible to downvote an article). Now the articles are flagged, probably whoever was organising this realised that flagging an article is effectively downvoting it.
  - dang 5y ago
    No one is organizing anything. It is all just normal community + software + moderator interaction. People read sinister "organization" into it purely because of their pre-existing conceptions. It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more. I say that based on looking into literally thousands of such cases, and spending god knows how many hours poring over data. My comments are based exclusively on what I know about HN—I know nothing at all about other sites because I don't have their data. But I know a lot about HN, and I can tell you that the users making breathless insinuations about this stuff have literally no idea what they're talking about. The truth is just painfully boring. (Edit: here's a detailed explanation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230.) As for why the comments in such threads get downvoted, that is easily explained by the fact that flamewar topics attract shitty comments, and shitty comments get shittier as people get politically and nationalistically riled.
    - Judgmentality 5y ago
      > It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more. This is a really insightful way of describing this phenomenon.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    I've downvoted everyone in an entire thread before. Not because I'm a member of a shadowy organization (otherwise I'd be blowing my cover posting this) but because all of them were really bad. HN being HN, usually someone will take the time to write a good comment, but especially on emotionally charged topics, the earliest comments will be both short and just a reflection of the posters views before they read the article (if they read it at all) which makes it likely I'll consider them downvote-worthy. I think there are probably quite a few users who behave similarly. But there's no need for us to form an organization, because each of us can just use the user-moderation tools as intended, without having to coordinate our actions with each other.
- dang 5y ago
  That is false. If you changed "always" to "sometimes" you'd be on the green. I've written about this extensively: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN. If you (or anyone) takes a look at that material and still has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is. Please just make sure that you've actually familiarized yourself with the past explanations, though, because the odds are good that they do answer the question.
  - nolok 5y ago
    Not american here. My reponse is not directly to this subthread, but to likening this subject to politics. I think there is a massive difference between political discourse (which are mostly about opinions) and fact vs lies discourse (which I would qualify as one where something that is definitely provable or in this case definitely happened is denied as untruth or never happening by one side, with said side pushing for increased conflict in the discourse so as to get the entire thing stopped). I understand the wish and sometime need to push the first away, but the second is entirely different and when you agree to push it away you are by default siding with the lies faction, even if you have a very good and valid and pure reason for it. The question then remaining being, what obligation has a platform that's massively use for discourse to remain partial to those things ? Legally none, at least in the US. Morally, to each their own. I understand the issue is way more complex than that, and that you have a third type of discourse which uses the same rules to push something false (eg bill gates vaccine nanobots get activated by 5g !!!), and I have no idea what the correct solution is or isn't. Just wanted to maybe clear out why "we're not taking side" is taken by some as taking sides.
    - dang 5y ago
      I appreciate your comment but I think you make a mistake in treating "facts" as if fact-discourse is somehow different than political discourse. Bear with me because I'm not saying 'there are no facts' or 'truth is what you make of it' or anything remotely like that. Rather, the problem is one of selection. There are infinitely many facts. Selecting the ones that serve your purpose and omitting the ones that don't is not only a political choice, it's the quintessence of political discourse. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20infinitely%20many%20facts&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... While I certainly agree (if I hear you correctly) that truth matters and there is such a thing as loving the truth for its own sake, I don't agree that public discourse can be divided in the way you posit. Quite the opposite.
kokanator 5y ago
HN, time for an explanation. This is not trivial.
- dang 5y ago
  Having spent the time digging into it, I'd say it turned out to be pretty trivial.
dang 5y ago
This post is on the front page right now (edit: and now also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783) - that's the opposite of "disappearing". I'd have to see links to the other ones. Here's one tip for you guys, from years-long, world-weary experience: if you're coming up with sensational explanations in breathless excitement, it's almost certainly untrue. Edit: ok, here's what happened. Users flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925. When you see [flagged] on a submission, you should assume users flagged it because with rare exceptions, that's always why. A moderator saw that, but didn't look very closely and thought "yeah that's probably garden-variety controversy/drama" and left the flags on. No moderator saw any of the other posts until I woke up, turned on HN, and—surprise!—saw the latest $outrage. Software marked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 a dupe for the rather esoteric reasons explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397622. After that, the current post got upvoted to the front page, where it remains. In other words, nothing was co-ordinated and the dots weren't connected. This was just the usual stochastic churn that generates HN. Most days it generates the HN you're used to and some days (quite a few days actually) it generates the next outlier, but that's how stochastics work, yes? If you're a boat on a choppy sea, sometimes some waves slosh into the boat. If you're a wiggly graph, sometimes the graph goes above a line. If I put myself in suspicious shoes, I can come up with objections to the above, but I can also answer them pretty simply: this entire thing was a combo of two data points, one borderline human error [1] and one software false positive. We don't know how to make software that doesn't do false positives and we don't know how to make humans that don't do errors. And we don't know how to make those things not happen at the same time sometimes. This is what imperfect systems do, so it's not clear to me what needs changing. If you think something needs changing, I'm happy to hear it, but please make it obvious how you're not asking for a perfect system, because I'm afraid that's not an option. [1] I will stick up for my teammate and say that this point is arguable; I might well have made the same call and it's far from obvious that it was the wrong call at the time. But we don't need that for this particular answer, so I'll let that bit go.
- asxd 5y ago
  I always really appreciate and learn from the measured perspectives you share here. It really is a bastion in a world that has recently been pretty crazy. Thanks a lot for your hard work, dang.
xibalba 5y ago
Does not much of the "content moderation" on HN get done via HN users flagging posts?
- whymauri 5y ago
  Yeah, and it can take a surprisingly small amount of flags to take down a post. So it could literally just be a dozen people flagging them, not even in a coordinated matter. Something similar happened on Jan 6 this year with a lot of individual users being like 'No, this isn't related to tech, so we'll flag it." until a couple posts got enough traction to actually stay at the top. BTW, you can 'anti-flag' by vouching a submission. I've done this a few times when HN insta-flags posts about inclusion in tech.
GuB-42 5y ago
HN is not a bastion of free speech and it is not meant to be. Controversial topics are routinely flagged because they incite flame wars and downvoting because you disagree is considered acceptable. However, in this particular case, I don't think it should be flagged unless the comment sections becomes unmanageable. It may be a political topic but it is seen from a technical angle, and indeed, a lot of the comments are technical in nature: the effect of different options, different engines, alternative wording, etc... What I think is interesting is how artificial the censorship looks. If I see no results for such a simple phrase, I know something fishy is going on and that would encourage me to carry on.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  From someone with several years of moderate volume online community moderation, the issue with post-hoc censorship is radicalization. If something disappears, no one has bad feelings about it. If something two people are arguing over disappears, then two people carry simmering resentment about it (ironically, likely more than if their verbal spat had reached a cathartic conclusion), that eventually manifests in their next comments, and which ultimately leads to an erosion of common decency and civility. It's a fine line, but it's definitely a line rather than right vs wrong.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    Is that really an issue? If the user makes more uncivil comments then you flag them again until they get the picture. There are plenty of other places on the internet that seem to welcome and encourage flame wars -- they can go there to work out their resentment and then come back when they're ready.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      These were more topic-specific forums (people who did the thing hung on the forum), so it might be a bit different with HN. As you note, why would they stay where they don't feel welcome?
- sdenton4 5y ago
xenocyon 5y ago
> I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech You must have a remarkably selective definition of free speech then. Stuff gets flagged all the time, and users are suppressed via opaque and obfuscated methods. To be clear, I'm not saying that moderation is a bad thing. But increasingly I notice that people use the term "free speech" to simply mean "speech I agree with".
- kian 5y ago
  I believe the principle of charity is enshrined in the HN guidelines. There's no need to assume ill intent here, either on my part or on the part of many others who believe in the bedrock, foundational principle of free speech. I don't see how you could make the connection that being outraged that China has managed to censor search results nearly globally on one of the top-three search engines on the day of the anniversary of the event being censored could be interpreted as arguing for only 'speech I agree with'.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    The parent comment was made specifically about HN being a bastion of free speech. Bringing up China/Tank Man/Bing is spurious in that context.
twirlock 5y ago
>I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech Whoops
ddlatham 5y ago
It looks like the main reason why the first Ask HN story ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 ) disappeared was because it was flagged. But that's just the surface reason. The deeper reason is because of HN's design which seems to weight flags much more heavily than up votes. This means that a non-trivial minority can successfully drag a story off the homepage, even if a majority believes it is important and worthy of discussion, and even if the comments are actually constructive. Unfortunately we are not able to see what the count of flags are, and I don't know the scoring algorithm to see what portion of minority is needed to make a story disappear, or if it is even greater than a fixed portion (i.e. whether flag count may have a greater than linear effect, compared to linear support from up votes). I have heard the rationale of attempting to avoid flame wars and heated discussion of controversial topics, but I'm not sure that it's the only way or worth the price of making things important to most of the community disappear. So far, follow up submissions seem to still be on the home page, but as I write this comment, I can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 already drop from the top position down to #6 and I wonder if it will disappear also. I hope that HN may reconsider what options are available to keep discussion constructive and useful while still allowing important topics to be seen and discussed without being buried by a minority. Edit - 2 additional notes a few minutes later: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 has now dropped more than halfway off the front page. - Whoever downvoted this comment, please consider responding as well.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
root_axis 5y ago
HN is not a "bastion of free speech", one of its most distinguishing features is the extensive moderation implemented to suppress spam, trolls, and rancor. A platform like reddit or even Twitter is far more welcoming to diverse discussion than HN, but this is an intentional decision by the site operators to maintain a certain threshold of discussion quality.
Igelau 5y ago
> Hacker News is a special place This is not a place.

by kian 5y ago

dTal 5y ago

"Political" or "controversial" content is always^H^H^H^H sometimes punished by HN (sorry, dang). While I think this is a highly questionable policy which is itself political in nature (reinforcing as it does the status quo), it need not be specific to China. A statement would certainly be nice, however.

kian 5y ago
This explains the flagging. It does not explain the 'duplicate content' article from CNN on the origins of the Tank Man photo, which I believe requires HN moderator activity.
0-_-0 5y ago
I did notice it the past that HN articles critical of China behaved in a strange way. In the past all the comments in the comment section were downvoted, sometimes you could see dozens of comments greyed out, every single one of them. (Probably because it's not possible to downvote an article). Now the articles are flagged, probably whoever was organising this realised that flagging an article is effectively downvoting it.
- dang 5y ago
  No one is organizing anything. It is all just normal community + software + moderator interaction. People read sinister "organization" into it purely because of their pre-existing conceptions. It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more. I say that based on looking into literally thousands of such cases, and spending god knows how many hours poring over data. My comments are based exclusively on what I know about HN—I know nothing at all about other sites because I don't have their data. But I know a lot about HN, and I can tell you that the users making breathless insinuations about this stuff have literally no idea what they're talking about. The truth is just painfully boring. (Edit: here's a detailed explanation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230.) As for why the comments in such threads get downvoted, that is easily explained by the fact that flamewar topics attract shitty comments, and shitty comments get shittier as people get politically and nationalistically riled.
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    > It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more. This is a really insightful way of describing this phenomenon.
- yorwba 5y ago
  I've downvoted everyone in an entire thread before. Not because I'm a member of a shadowy organization (otherwise I'd be blowing my cover posting this) but because all of them were really bad. HN being HN, usually someone will take the time to write a good comment, but especially on emotionally charged topics, the earliest comments will be both short and just a reflection of the posters views before they read the article (if they read it at all) which makes it likely I'll consider them downvote-worthy. I think there are probably quite a few users who behave similarly. But there's no need for us to form an organization, because each of us can just use the user-moderation tools as intended, without having to coordinate our actions with each other.
dang 5y ago
That is false. If you changed "always" to "sometimes" you'd be on the green. I've written about this extensively: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN. If you (or anyone) takes a look at that material and still has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is. Please just make sure that you've actually familiarized yourself with the past explanations, though, because the odds are good that they do answer the question.
- nolok 5y ago
  Not american here. My reponse is not directly to this subthread, but to likening this subject to politics. I think there is a massive difference between political discourse (which are mostly about opinions) and fact vs lies discourse (which I would qualify as one where something that is definitely provable or in this case definitely happened is denied as untruth or never happening by one side, with said side pushing for increased conflict in the discourse so as to get the entire thing stopped). I understand the wish and sometime need to push the first away, but the second is entirely different and when you agree to push it away you are by default siding with the lies faction, even if you have a very good and valid and pure reason for it. The question then remaining being, what obligation has a platform that's massively use for discourse to remain partial to those things ? Legally none, at least in the US. Morally, to each their own. I understand the issue is way more complex than that, and that you have a third type of discourse which uses the same rules to push something false (eg bill gates vaccine nanobots get activated by 5g !!!), and I have no idea what the correct solution is or isn't. Just wanted to maybe clear out why "we're not taking side" is taken by some as taking sides.
  - dang 5y ago
    I appreciate your comment but I think you make a mistake in treating "facts" as if fact-discourse is somehow different than political discourse. Bear with me because I'm not saying 'there are no facts' or 'truth is what you make of it' or anything remotely like that. Rather, the problem is one of selection. There are infinitely many facts. Selecting the ones that serve your purpose and omitting the ones that don't is not only a political choice, it's the quintessence of political discourse. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20infinitely%20many%20facts&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... While I certainly agree (if I hear you correctly) that truth matters and there is such a thing as loving the truth for its own sake, I don't agree that public discourse can be divided in the way you posit. Quite the opposite.

kokanator 5y ago

HN, time for an explanation. This is not trivial.

dang 5y ago
Having spent the time digging into it, I'd say it turned out to be pretty trivial.

dang 5y ago

This post is on the front page right now (edit: and now also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783) - that's the opposite of "disappearing". I'd have to see links to the other ones. Here's one tip for you guys, from years-long, world-weary experience: if you're coming up with sensational explanations in breathless excitement, it's almost certainly untrue. Edit: ok, here's what happened. Users flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925. When you see [flagged] on a submission, you should assume users flagged it because with rare exceptions, that's always why. A moderator saw that, but didn't look very closely and thought "yeah that's probably garden-variety controversy/drama" and left the flags on. No moderator saw any of the other posts until I woke up, turned on HN, and—surprise!—saw the latest $outrage. Software marked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 a dupe for the rather esoteric reasons explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397622. After that, the current post got upvoted to the front page, where it remains. In other words, nothing was co-ordinated and the dots weren't connected. This was just the usual stochastic churn that generates HN. Most days it generates the HN you're used to and some days (quite a few days actually) it generates the next outlier, but that's how stochastics work, yes? If you're a boat on a choppy sea, sometimes some waves slosh into the boat. If you're a wiggly graph, sometimes the graph goes above a line. If I put myself in suspicious shoes, I can come up with objections to the above, but I can also answer them pretty simply: this entire thing was a combo of two data points, one borderline human error [1] and one software false positive. We don't know how to make software that doesn't do false positives and we don't know how to make humans that don't do errors. And we don't know how to make those things not happen at the same time sometimes. This is what imperfect systems do, so it's not clear to me what needs changing. If you think something needs changing, I'm happy to hear it, but please make it obvious how you're not asking for a perfect system, because I'm afraid that's not an option. [1] I will stick up for my teammate and say that this point is arguable; I might well have made the same call and it's far from obvious that it was the wrong call at the time. But we don't need that for this particular answer, so I'll let that bit go.

asxd 5y ago
I always really appreciate and learn from the measured perspectives you share here. It really is a bastion in a world that has recently been pretty crazy. Thanks a lot for your hard work, dang.

xibalba 5y ago

Does not much of the "content moderation" on HN get done via HN users flagging posts?

whymauri 5y ago
Yeah, and it can take a surprisingly small amount of flags to take down a post. So it could literally just be a dozen people flagging them, not even in a coordinated matter. Something similar happened on Jan 6 this year with a lot of individual users being like 'No, this isn't related to tech, so we'll flag it." until a couple posts got enough traction to actually stay at the top. BTW, you can 'anti-flag' by vouching a submission. I've done this a few times when HN insta-flags posts about inclusion in tech.

GuB-42 5y ago

HN is not a bastion of free speech and it is not meant to be. Controversial topics are routinely flagged because they incite flame wars and downvoting because you disagree is considered acceptable. However, in this particular case, I don't think it should be flagged unless the comment sections becomes unmanageable. It may be a political topic but it is seen from a technical angle, and indeed, a lot of the comments are technical in nature: the effect of different options, different engines, alternative wording, etc... What I think is interesting is how artificial the censorship looks. If I see no results for such a simple phrase, I know something fishy is going on and that would encourage me to carry on.

ethbr0 5y ago
From someone with several years of moderate volume online community moderation, the issue with post-hoc censorship is radicalization. If something disappears, no one has bad feelings about it. If something two people are arguing over disappears, then two people carry simmering resentment about it (ironically, likely more than if their verbal spat had reached a cathartic conclusion), that eventually manifests in their next comments, and which ultimately leads to an erosion of common decency and civility. It's a fine line, but it's definitely a line rather than right vs wrong.
- zxzax 5y ago
  Is that really an issue? If the user makes more uncivil comments then you flag them again until they get the picture. There are plenty of other places on the internet that seem to welcome and encourage flame wars -- they can go there to work out their resentment and then come back when they're ready.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    These were more topic-specific forums (people who did the thing hung on the forum), so it might be a bit different with HN. As you note, why would they stay where they don't feel welcome?
sdenton4 5y ago

xenocyon 5y ago

> I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech You must have a remarkably selective definition of free speech then. Stuff gets flagged all the time, and users are suppressed via opaque and obfuscated methods. To be clear, I'm not saying that moderation is a bad thing. But increasingly I notice that people use the term "free speech" to simply mean "speech I agree with".

kian 5y ago
I believe the principle of charity is enshrined in the HN guidelines. There's no need to assume ill intent here, either on my part or on the part of many others who believe in the bedrock, foundational principle of free speech. I don't see how you could make the connection that being outraged that China has managed to censor search results nearly globally on one of the top-three search engines on the day of the anniversary of the event being censored could be interpreted as arguing for only 'speech I agree with'.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  The parent comment was made specifically about HN being a bastion of free speech. Bringing up China/Tank Man/Bing is spurious in that context.

twirlock 5y ago

>I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech Whoops

ddlatham 5y ago

It looks like the main reason why the first Ask HN story ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 ) disappeared was because it was flagged. But that's just the surface reason. The deeper reason is because of HN's design which seems to weight flags much more heavily than up votes. This means that a non-trivial minority can successfully drag a story off the homepage, even if a majority believes it is important and worthy of discussion, and even if the comments are actually constructive. Unfortunately we are not able to see what the count of flags are, and I don't know the scoring algorithm to see what portion of minority is needed to make a story disappear, or if it is even greater than a fixed portion (i.e. whether flag count may have a greater than linear effect, compared to linear support from up votes). I have heard the rationale of attempting to avoid flame wars and heated discussion of controversial topics, but I'm not sure that it's the only way or worth the price of making things important to most of the community disappear. So far, follow up submissions seem to still be on the home page, but as I write this comment, I can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 already drop from the top position down to #6 and I wonder if it will disappear also. I hope that HN may reconsider what options are available to keep discussion constructive and useful while still allowing important topics to be seen and discussed without being buried by a minority. Edit - 2 additional notes a few minutes later: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 has now dropped more than halfway off the front page. - Whoever downvoted this comment, please consider responding as well.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

root_axis 5y ago

HN is not a "bastion of free speech", one of its most distinguishing features is the extensive moderation implemented to suppress spam, trolls, and rancor. A platform like reddit or even Twitter is far more welcoming to diverse discussion than HN, but this is an intentional decision by the site operators to maintain a certain threshold of discussion quality.

Igelau 5y ago

> Hacker News is a special place This is not a place.