9 ms·
@dang - maybe let one twitter story through to the home page?
by davidw 4y ago
@dang - maybe let one twitter story through to the home page?
- tomlockwood 4y agoYeah given paulg's tweets I'm wondering if our free speech absolutist view as a website, actually holds here.
- davidw 4y agodang has done a phenomenal job at moderating this site, and I trust his judgement. It is heavily moderated, and that's a good thing to keep it focused. Too much twitter drama would be lame. But this feels like an important moment.
- orangepurple 4y agoI am deeply concerned that only one person is holding this ship on course, and that person's time is running out.
- tomlockwood 4y agoI generally agree, but I also think that a certain subset of political beliefs get upvoted here that creates a real echo chamber, and that there's this idea of a "middle path" rationality that is assumed, but doesn't actually exist. It's a class of problem I think could be classified as a "I don't have an accent" problem. I wrote to dang directly about this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817 I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.
- int_19h 4y agoIn my experience, you can post stuff that's politically as far left as it gets, so long as you phrase it politely.
- TylerE 4y agoI always found HN much more VCist than free speech. any comment criticizing plutocrats tends to get downvoted
- tomcam 4y agoWell HN is run by plutocrats. Who pay a lot of money to run the site. I’d rather have HN with this obvious bias than no HN at all.
- hotpotamus 4y agoThis doesn't feel like an expensive site to host/develop, but the moderation costs might be up there.
- TylerE 4y agoIt probably IS expensive to host because it’s written in a language no one uses without an optimizing compiler, and apprently most of the “db” is flatfiles on disk, some of which get read on every request.
- jrockway 4y agoComputers are fast. This isn't a particularly demanding workload; pages for users that aren't logged in are cached, and there probably aren't a ton of people logged in. Last time I looked, Let's Encrypt had one big beefy Postgres database to issue pretty much every single TLS certificate on the Internet. Computers are fast.
- detaro 4y agoits hosted on a single random server, so no, in absolute terms it very unlikely is expensive. (or two actually, since there is a backup server afaik)
- orangepurple 4y agoYou vastly underestimate how much impact ONE server can make if you don't use modern cloud garbage tech
- TylerE 4y agoTurn showdead in and tell me this website is a “free speech absolutist zone”. I mean, subjectively most of those accounts deserve to be dead, but don’t pretend this is something it isn’t.
- tomlockwood 4y agoUnfortunately, hypocrisy is possible. One interesting thing I heard recently was this idea that even in communities of the most rusted on free speech absolutists, there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why? It's totally possible to believe that unrestricted free speech is the best policy and to also not implement that policy.
- nyokodo 4y ago> there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why? Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. Generally free speech maximalism is about allowing all controversial speech for various reasons which tend to include the importance of dissenting voices.
- puffoflogic 4y agoIt's not that simple. A lot of censorship happens under the guise of "removing spam". For example, dang regularly censors HN comments promoting viewpoints he doesn't like by claiming that they are "flamebait" or similar, which is to say, if enough people dislike something then it is spam. Doing it right requires the intellectual honesty to draw a line between these two comments: "lol hitler did nothing wrong gas the **s! 1488 woo!" and "Hitler did nothing but implement some social control policies which would be widely accepted in today's society, if presented differently." I obviously don't agree with either sentence. But the second one should be permitted and vouched against downvotes while the first can be deleted without a second thought. Honesty required.
- tomlockwood 4y ago> Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. I'm pretty sure, looking at twitch chat, that this isn't universally true. Then the next question is, if this supposed truism isn't universally true, what other moderation decisions and flagging, aren't?
- ProAm 4y agoHN is definitely not a free speech zone. It doesn't need to be, and I think they let a lot of legitimate discussions take place, but in no way shape or form is this a free speech discussion forum, it's a business (a I personally think a decently run one, as for moderation is very difficult).
- d23 4y agoThis is a fast moving situation and is directly related to the industry. I’d like to see as many of them as is distinct and relevant.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sprite 4y agoI didn't know HN was biased like this, found out about this tweet on Reddit and was wondering why it wasn't front page here.
- davidw 4y agoThat 'bias' is part of the reason it has worked so well over the years.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y agoI don't think anyone would consider hiding information about one of the largest and most well known tech platforms in the world to be an example of beneficial bias.
- minimaxir 4y agoNormally the penality on Twitter links is such that a good number of upvotes can still rescue it; now, it seems that penality has changed and there's a very strong penalty, which I strongly disagree with given the industry impact of what's been happening at Twitter. It's on the front page now, after 100 upvotes.
- rurp 4y agoI agree that it's wrong to penalize these topics. I don't normally get caught up in the drama of the day, but this trainwreck has really gotten my attention. Whatever the outcome, these events are going to have a major effect on our industry and the broader economy. The reckless absurdity of it all makes it even more newsworthy; major developments have been happening almost daily. It doesn't hurt that this episode has brought some friends around to agreeing with my dismal view of Elon :)
- slg 4y agoIt is a little strange that I have seen almost no Twitter stories on the front page in the last week. Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be? Is it getting caught in the flamewar algorithm? Are they treating this as one big story so any individual article gets removed as a repost?
- regpertom 4y agoIt would surely be the flame war algorithm. Throwing some numbers out there, would this be too exaggerated? There have been 30 stories this past fortnight here with over 700 comments, mostly repeating the same love/hate musk battleground playing out across every other website. I think it’s a very interesting topic that’s unfolding but if dang wants to limit the frenzy from consuming here as well I certainly understand.
- colechristensen 4y agoIt’s interesting, but if the discussion isn’t interesting it doesn’t work here and is better culled.
- imron 4y ago> Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be? I’ve personally been visiting new and flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts I see (i started doing this after getting sick of all the Twitter/mastodon posts hitting the front page). I don’t want the front page to be all Twitter all the time, and most of the posts boil down to speculation and gossip and the ones that don’t, usually don’t offer anything meaningfully new and interesting. I suspect there are plenty of others like me.
- bagels 4y agoWell, that is a misfortune for the rest of us who find it relevant.
- imron 4y agoThe front page doesn’t need 5 posts from random people talking about how they’re moving to mastodon and boy isn’t toot such a weird name for tweets. Likewise it doesn’t need continued speculation about what Elon really meant when he posted ‘blah blah blah’. Substantive things will get through (this one did). Yay Elon/Boo Elon drama won’t. If you really need it, feel free to browse new yourself and vouch.
- lost_tourist 4y agoor skip them if you see twitter in the title?
- armchairhacker 4y agoIt's on the front page for me (as of 9:19PM EST, #19)
- loginatnine 4y agoNumber 29th as of November 18th, 8:08AM EST
- nr2x 4y agoThis is an actual historical event in regards to the web. This story will live on.
- tstrimple 4y ago
- dang 4y agoOuch. I don't mind so much when people call me 'SJW cunt' and 'literal fascist' but 'centrist' gets my goat. Now you know my terrible secret. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxYl5EzNG3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxYl5EzNG3Q
- hanafudafan 4y agoIt’s all ass pained kvetching.
- dang 4y agoThe current thread ended up spending 10 hours on HN's front page. IIRC it was flagged by users and we restored it. I didn't see your comment till just now. (@dang doesn't do anything—if you or anyone want to tell me something, the reliable message queue is hn@ycombinator.com.) I agree that this is a major ongoing topic (MOT) and needs to be discussed. At the same time, so many of the submissions are repeats of things already posted. This is a classic situation that comes up a few times a year (the FTX saga is another going on right now). Obviously some of the gazillion Twittermusk stories contain SNI [1], and some (most) are just follow-ups [2] or repetitive angerwars, and we have to make a distinction between the two or HN's frontpage will consist of nothing but. With user flags and the flamewar detector also downranking stories, it's possible for this strategy to get overapplied, in which case a MOT ends up getting insufficient oxygen. That's not good for HN either! It isn't because of sinister plutocracy or anything like that—it's a failure mode of the strategy I just described. User pushback is helpful! More on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667968 [1] 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... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... p.s. HN has worked this way for a long time - coming up on a decade now: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=snowden%202013%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...