5 ms·

Why is it removed from the frontpage? It got almost 20 points in less than 30 minutes, and then suddenly got removed from the front page?

by usaphp 5y ago

JohnTHaller 5y ago
Because people flagged it. Quite a few people likely think that someone violating YouTube's terms of service (circumventing a suspension by posting on a second channel) and being banned for said violation isn't something that fits Hacker News.
nonethewiser 5y ago
Same thing happened with this thread earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087769
knaik94 5y ago
It may have initially been an attempt to avoid political topics. It may also have been because a moderator and users may have expected there will be a lot of non productive comments because people from both sides tend to be passionate. Either way I see it now. Edit Now I don't.
floatingatoll 5y ago
User flags can do that. There’s also a flamewar response algorithm that reacts poorly to, for example, ideological wars between differing groups. You could email the mods using the page footer’s contact link and let them know that you’re seeing unusual behavior in the site; they can look into further, but might otherwise miss your comment here without the email.
dan-robertson 5y ago
Postings are penalised if the comments/votes ratio is high
sm4rk0 5y ago
Silent censorship? I tried posting this article today and it was [dead] immediately: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/i-live-in-ukraine-we-have-been-living-under-the-looming-shadow-of-russian-invasion-for-eight-years-no-one-here-is-freaking-out-as-much-as-my-relatives-in-the-us-are-youre-getting-heavy-pro/ https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/i-live-in-ukraine-we-hav...
fuckcensorship 5y ago
Hacker News has many undocumented features [1] which should give you some insight into how/why this happened. [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
knaik94 5y ago
In case you haven't seen the guidelines in a bit. I assume it is people mass flagging because people believe it's off topic for being political. And maybe that the comments won't be an on topic and productive discussion even if the article does fit from a perspective. This article is gone again. It's not censorship. People just don't want to discuss it. I imagine it's the same for some other topics mentioned in this comment thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did." "What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"
ahthat 5y ago
Interesting. I like Hacker News because its community is so great compared to nearly every other platform I know. Too bad that we can't talk about stuff like this.
- dang 5y ago
  Certainly we can and do talk about stuff like this. The issue is the other way around: there have been tons of threads about topics just like this already. That leads to having the same discussion over and over again. Since the core principle of HN is intellectual curiosity, it's important to avoid too much repetition (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). That's particularly important when it's repetition of a high-indignation topic, since indignation shuts down curiosity even faster than repetition does. BigTech bannage in the eras of Trump and Covid is a classic Major Ongoing Topic (MOT). Such topics have a way of appearing over and over again and getting upvoted a lot, because people feel strongly about them. The problem is that there's little curiosity value to be gained from having them repeat so much—they tend to be generic and to metastasize into flamewars. Yet sometimes the MOT mutates in an interesting way. What's best for HN is if the interesting milestones in a MOT saga get front page threads, but not all the garden-variety instances. Over the years, we worked out a heuristic for this which turns out to work well: it's called SNI (Significant New Information). Each time there's SNI, it makes sense to have a fresh discussion because there's something fresh to discuss. Each time there isn't SNI, it makes sense not to have a frontpage discussion, because that discussion has already taken place, usually many times. We came up with this approach after the Snowden MOT of 2013, in which users were rightly complaining when one article after another would show up on the front page repeating things that had already been reported and discussed. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Moderators haven't touched this post, btw—users flagged it. We sometimes turn off flags when the article is interesting, contains SNI, and is able to support a substantive HN thread. But I don't think this story really clears that bar. It's a yet-another case in a long sequence. People already know how they feel about it and even already know what they have to say about it. That makes for HN badness.

Why is it removed from the frontpage? It got almost 20 points in less than 30 minutes, and then suddenly got removed from the front page?

by usaphp 5y ago

Why is it removed from the frontpage? It got almost 20 points in less than 30 minutes, and then suddenly got removed from the front page?

JohnTHaller 5y ago

Because people flagged it. Quite a few people likely think that someone violating YouTube's terms of service (circumventing a suspension by posting on a second channel) and being banned for said violation isn't something that fits Hacker News.

nonethewiser 5y ago

Same thing happened with this thread earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30087769

knaik94 5y ago

It may have initially been an attempt to avoid political topics. It may also have been because a moderator and users may have expected there will be a lot of non productive comments because people from both sides tend to be passionate. Either way I see it now. Edit Now I don't.

floatingatoll 5y ago

User flags can do that. There’s also a flamewar response algorithm that reacts poorly to, for example, ideological wars between differing groups. You could email the mods using the page footer’s contact link and let them know that you’re seeing unusual behavior in the site; they can look into further, but might otherwise miss your comment here without the email.

dan-robertson 5y ago

Postings are penalised if the comments/votes ratio is high

sm4rk0 5y ago

Silent censorship? I tried posting this article today and it was [dead] immediately: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/i-live-in-ukraine-we-have-been-living-under-the-looming-shadow-of-russian-invasion-for-eight-years-no-one-here-is-freaking-out-as-much-as-my-relatives-in-the-us-are-youre-getting-heavy-pro/ https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/i-live-in-ukraine-we-hav...

fuckcensorship 5y ago

Hacker News has many undocumented features [1] which should give you some insight into how/why this happened. [1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

knaik94 5y ago

In case you haven't seen the guidelines in a bit. I assume it is people mass flagging because people believe it's off topic for being political. And maybe that the comments won't be an on topic and productive discussion even if the article does fit from a perspective. This article is gone again. It's not censorship. People just don't want to discuss it. I imagine it's the same for some other topics mentioned in this comment thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did." "What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic"

ahthat 5y ago

Interesting. I like Hacker News because its community is so great compared to nearly every other platform I know. Too bad that we can't talk about stuff like this.

dang 5y ago
Certainly we can and do talk about stuff like this. The issue is the other way around: there have been tons of threads about topics just like this already. That leads to having the same discussion over and over again. Since the core principle of HN is intellectual curiosity, it's important to avoid too much repetition (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). That's particularly important when it's repetition of a high-indignation topic, since indignation shuts down curiosity even faster than repetition does. BigTech bannage in the eras of Trump and Covid is a classic Major Ongoing Topic (MOT). Such topics have a way of appearing over and over again and getting upvoted a lot, because people feel strongly about them. The problem is that there's little curiosity value to be gained from having them repeat so much—they tend to be generic and to metastasize into flamewars. Yet sometimes the MOT mutates in an interesting way. What's best for HN is if the interesting milestones in a MOT saga get front page threads, but not all the garden-variety instances. Over the years, we worked out a heuristic for this which turns out to work well: it's called SNI (Significant New Information). Each time there's SNI, it makes sense to have a fresh discussion because there's something fresh to discuss. Each time there isn't SNI, it makes sense not to have a frontpage discussion, because that discussion has already taken place, usually many times. We came up with this approach after the Snowden MOT of 2013, in which users were rightly complaining when one article after another would show up on the front page repeating things that had already been reported and discussed. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Moderators haven't touched this post, btw—users flagged it. We sometimes turn off flags when the article is interesting, contains SNI, and is able to support a substantive HN thread. But I don't think this story really clears that bar. It's a yet-another case in a long sequence. People already know how they feel about it and even already know what they have to say about it. That makes for HN badness.