7 ms·

It 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 g

by slg 4y ago

It 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 ago
It 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 ago
  It’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 ago
  Well, that is a misfortune for the rest of us who find it relevant.
  - imron 4y ago
    The 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.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > The 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. Nope, it doesn't. > Substantive things will get through (this one did). Are you only flagging the non-substantive things? Because that's not what you imply above ("flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts").
      - imron 4y ago
        I flag almost everything I see, but I am just one vote. If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter. And it’s not like I have an army of bot accounts continually refreshing and flagging. I’m just using my one vote to signify I’m not interested in hearing about Twitter drama.
        mrguyorama 4y ago
        HN downranks posts that get both a lot of flags AND a lot of votes so >If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter. Is just flat out wrong.
        imron 4y ago
        Thanks for the correction. It still achieves my objective of less Twitter drama on the front page.
        dang 4y ago
- dmonitor 4y ago
  Speculation and gossip are annoying, but the actual things that are happening (and there are a lot of them) are worth keeping.
  - imron 4y ago
    Agree. And substantive things (like this piece of news) make it through.
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    In principle, sure, but this submission and all the others I've seen is clearly in the "speculation and gossip" bucket. The only non-speculative information here, that Twitter offices are closed tomorrow, is moderately interesting at best and we can see upthread that nobody's really interested in talking about it except to feed tangential speculation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sbuttgereit 4y ago
  I'm with you. I've seen some fairly low quality discussions on HN, many of which fixate on Musk. The Twitter situation is magnifying it to stupefying dimensions. Are the goings on at Twitter relevant to "the industry"? Sure. But, the inability to have serious discussion about it speaks poorly of the those that populate that industry. Somewhere between the 10,000th iteration of "see how billionaires are evil?", "see how Musk is a genius?", "see how Musk behaves badly?", and "Look at what's Musk accomplished?" nothing new is said. Anything novel or serious that does manage to pop-up gets drowned out in the sea of noise. I join you in downvoting all of these. There are good discussions on HN, but these discussions are them.
- dang 4y ago
  You're right, and the people complaining are also right because the story does deserve oxygen—just not all the oxygen. It's our job to balance this so it gets some oxygen but not all the oxygen. The system tends not to be able to do this without human intervention—either the flags win (in which case the story gets smothered) or the upvotes win (in which case HN becomes Twittermusk News with a side dish of SBFTX). Human intervention is needed to keep the teeter-totter from teetering one way or tottering the other*. We're super open to feedback. If you (or anyone) want to influence the balance, you should make your case to hn@ycombinator.com. That's the only reliable message queue. More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667761 (* Unfortunately. It would be so much nicer to just write code to deal with this.)
  - imron 4y ago
    Thanks for all the work you (and other mods) do to keep things balanced. I think for the most part it's been working well.
Ferrotin 4y ago
The comment threads in them are a train wreck.
- kibwen 4y ago
  Which would be apropos for the train wreck under discussion.
  - nomel 4y ago
    Hard disagree. I think the best discussions can be had with chaotic circumstances, because they provide a new surface for thought. A very small percentage of the comments in these threads are appropriate for HN [1]. These comment sections look like they're straight from reddit. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
shard972 4y ago
@dang
rchaud 4y ago
they are heavily moderating it. I only saw a couple of front page stories last week, and these events have been headline news internationally. i hope the reason is because of the risk of flamewars, rather than YC leadership's desire to protect the reputation of someone who is hagified in SV circles and currently crashing and burning very publicly.
- dang 4y ago
  I agree with you all that some of these Twitter/Musk deserve HN threads (though many don't). That said, it's a feature-not-a-bug that stories making "headline news internationally" don't automatically show up on HN.
threeseed 4y ago
Paul Graham and some of the YC partners have been surprisingly defensive of Musk's actions. It's been massively disappointing to watch since Musk's behaviour has been abhorrent and has resulted in a lot of unnecessary hurt and despair for innocent employees. The same employees who may end up running future startups.
- dbmkn 4y ago
  Lol one of his tweets aged well, https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961?s=20&t=M3uW2cmtw-GavJgKEC5E6g https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961?s=20&t=...
  - zone411 4y ago
    Huh? You have no evidence either way yet.
    - enumjorge 4y ago
      Well we know that after an ultimatum, enough employees quit that Musk is now asking some of them to come back. The number of employees leaving is also so high, that they're shutting down access to offices. There's also been reports of features like 2FA not working anymore after the first round of layoffs. Not exactly the results I'd expect from someone who really knows how to run a company. If one of Musk's middle managers had messed up this badly, Musk would have fired them already. But Elon deserves the continued benefit of the doubt for some reason.
      - zone411 4y ago
        All that you've mentioned may or may not matter eventually but it's not any sort of evidence of how Twitter did. The only things that matter are revenue, expenses, and growth. This tweet was made two days ago and nothing has happened since to provide any sort of evidence of how these actually important factors will unfold. To say that this tweet has "aged badly" is just nonsense.
dang 4y ago
A lot are getting caught in the flamewar algorithm and/or being flagged by users. Moderation basically goes by these principles: 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... 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...

by slg 4y ago

regpertom 4y ago

It 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 ago
It’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 ago
Well, that is a misfortune for the rest of us who find it relevant.
- imron 4y ago
  The 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.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > The 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. Nope, it doesn't. > Substantive things will get through (this one did). Are you only flagging the non-substantive things? Because that's not what you imply above ("flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts").
    - imron 4y ago
      I flag almost everything I see, but I am just one vote. If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter. And it’s not like I have an army of bot accounts continually refreshing and flagging. I’m just using my one vote to signify I’m not interested in hearing about Twitter drama.
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        HN downranks posts that get both a lot of flags AND a lot of votes so >If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter. Is just flat out wrong.
        imron 4y ago
        Thanks for the correction. It still achieves my objective of less Twitter drama on the front page.
        dang 4y ago
dmonitor 4y ago
Speculation and gossip are annoying, but the actual things that are happening (and there are a lot of them) are worth keeping.
- imron 4y ago
  Agree. And substantive things (like this piece of news) make it through.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  In principle, sure, but this submission and all the others I've seen is clearly in the "speculation and gossip" bucket. The only non-speculative information here, that Twitter offices are closed tomorrow, is moderately interesting at best and we can see upthread that nobody's really interested in talking about it except to feed tangential speculation.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sbuttgereit 4y ago
I'm with you. I've seen some fairly low quality discussions on HN, many of which fixate on Musk. The Twitter situation is magnifying it to stupefying dimensions. Are the goings on at Twitter relevant to "the industry"? Sure. But, the inability to have serious discussion about it speaks poorly of the those that populate that industry. Somewhere between the 10,000th iteration of "see how billionaires are evil?", "see how Musk is a genius?", "see how Musk behaves badly?", and "Look at what's Musk accomplished?" nothing new is said. Anything novel or serious that does manage to pop-up gets drowned out in the sea of noise. I join you in downvoting all of these. There are good discussions on HN, but these discussions are them.
dang 4y ago
You're right, and the people complaining are also right because the story does deserve oxygen—just not all the oxygen. It's our job to balance this so it gets some oxygen but not all the oxygen. The system tends not to be able to do this without human intervention—either the flags win (in which case the story gets smothered) or the upvotes win (in which case HN becomes Twittermusk News with a side dish of SBFTX). Human intervention is needed to keep the teeter-totter from teetering one way or tottering the other*. We're super open to feedback. If you (or anyone) want to influence the balance, you should make your case to hn@ycombinator.com. That's the only reliable message queue. More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667761 (* Unfortunately. It would be so much nicer to just write code to deal with this.)
- imron 4y ago
  Thanks for all the work you (and other mods) do to keep things balanced. I think for the most part it's been working well.

Ferrotin 4y ago

The comment threads in them are a train wreck.

kibwen 4y ago
Which would be apropos for the train wreck under discussion.
- nomel 4y ago
  Hard disagree. I think the best discussions can be had with chaotic circumstances, because they provide a new surface for thought. A very small percentage of the comments in these threads are appropriate for HN [1]. These comment sections look like they're straight from reddit. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

shard972 4y ago

@dang

rchaud 4y ago

they are heavily moderating it. I only saw a couple of front page stories last week, and these events have been headline news internationally. i hope the reason is because of the risk of flamewars, rather than YC leadership's desire to protect the reputation of someone who is hagified in SV circles and currently crashing and burning very publicly.

dang 4y ago
I agree with you all that some of these Twitter/Musk deserve HN threads (though many don't). That said, it's a feature-not-a-bug that stories making "headline news internationally" don't automatically show up on HN.

threeseed 4y ago

Paul Graham and some of the YC partners have been surprisingly defensive of Musk's actions. It's been massively disappointing to watch since Musk's behaviour has been abhorrent and has resulted in a lot of unnecessary hurt and despair for innocent employees. The same employees who may end up running future startups.

dbmkn 4y ago
Lol one of his tweets aged well, https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961?s=20&t=M3uW2cmtw-GavJgKEC5E6g https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961?s=20&t=...
- zone411 4y ago
  Huh? You have no evidence either way yet.
  - enumjorge 4y ago
    Well we know that after an ultimatum, enough employees quit that Musk is now asking some of them to come back. The number of employees leaving is also so high, that they're shutting down access to offices. There's also been reports of features like 2FA not working anymore after the first round of layoffs. Not exactly the results I'd expect from someone who really knows how to run a company. If one of Musk's middle managers had messed up this badly, Musk would have fired them already. But Elon deserves the continued benefit of the doubt for some reason.
    - zone411 4y ago
      All that you've mentioned may or may not matter eventually but it's not any sort of evidence of how Twitter did. The only things that matter are revenue, expenses, and growth. This tweet was made two days ago and nothing has happened since to provide any sort of evidence of how these actually important factors will unfold. To say that this tweet has "aged badly" is just nonsense.

dang 4y ago

A lot are getting caught in the flamewar algorithm and/or being flagged by users. Moderation basically goes by these principles: 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... 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...