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We're being watched closely by the same people responsible for the behavior talked about in the article. Hacker News is not an oasis of free thought. It can be

We're being watched closely by the same people responsible for the behavior talked about in the article. Hacker News is not an oasis of free thought. It can be managed in its own way: unlike Reddit and Twitter and Facebook you can't just directly use raw power to do it, but you can keep a sharp eye on discourse and be vigilant about stamping out discourse that you don't like. And this is the only way to do it: flag positive interest, and flag anybody saying anything you don't want said. And then accuse them of being a bot army or something. Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints. This very article from the BBC and its multiple, stifled attempts to show up at all on Hacker News is evidence of this tactic being employed. The conversation around it's lively enough to demonstrate enough seed interest in article discussion, but just try and engage in such discussion. Somebody is stifling this topic through attempts to use the rules of Hacker News against it. Or, 'it's Tuesday'. In other words this is completely normal and to be expected given the conditions the article itself reports on. We're stuck going 'meta' even to talk about the article at all, because the management of such talk is coordinated, effective, and extensive.

josephorjoe 5y ago
> Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints. I think it is this plus I believe hacker news penalizes 'controversial' discussions, so by ensuring that there are a large number of 'controversial' comments the trolls can kill off discussions they want suppressed.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  It's their hard luck that to a crowd of curious and intelligent hackers and nerds in the silicon valley and social media programming space, all this is FASCINATING :) I think in many places it'd be possible to get a whole righteous indignation going that could be exploited against itself, but this is Hacker News. We are nerds and super-interested in exactly this sort of thing, to the point that there are rules against obsessively hyper-focussing on it. And so when you try to judo-flip the system, nerds immediately notice the discrepancies, and fixate upon them. And nerds can't always be depended upon to fire up righteous outrage and paint themselves the aggressors: the peculiar detachment of the nerd mind comes into play and the reflexive (exploitable) responses can't always be exploited. Mask-slips like the handling of this article are FASCINATING. It reveals a system behind the story, and the idea that the system pops up in all sorts of places (and has predictable behaviors) is like a puzzle to be solved :)

josephorjoe 5y ago

> Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints. I think it is this plus I believe hacker news penalizes 'controversial' discussions, so by ensuring that there are a large number of 'controversial' comments the trolls can kill off discussions they want suppressed.

Applejinx 5y ago
It's their hard luck that to a crowd of curious and intelligent hackers and nerds in the silicon valley and social media programming space, all this is FASCINATING :) I think in many places it'd be possible to get a whole righteous indignation going that could be exploited against itself, but this is Hacker News. We are nerds and super-interested in exactly this sort of thing, to the point that there are rules against obsessively hyper-focussing on it. And so when you try to judo-flip the system, nerds immediately notice the discrepancies, and fixate upon them. And nerds can't always be depended upon to fire up righteous outrage and paint themselves the aggressors: the peculiar detachment of the nerd mind comes into play and the reflexive (exploitable) responses can't always be exploited. Mask-slips like the handling of this article are FASCINATING. It reveals a system behind the story, and the idea that the system pops up in all sorts of places (and has predictable behaviors) is like a puzzle to be solved :)