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Daniel, I know you mean well, but your suggestion of "flag sparingly" is only useful some of the time, and there is code in place to handle those who flag exces

by jcr 15y ago

Daniel, I know you mean well, but your suggestion of "flag sparingly" is only useful some of the time, and there is code in place to handle those who flag excessively. As always, there's more to it than meets the eye. There is a great deal of "secret sauce" running on HN, and to prevent adversaries from abusing HN for their own gain, PG deliberately does not publicly divulge how a lot of things work. [1] You would need to have either a deep fascination with discussion forums, or far too much free time (probably both) to figure out some of the non-public details of how HN really works. If one really does their homework well and figures out some of the details, hopefully they have enough respect for PG, YC and all of the folks using HN to not abuse or divulge what they learn. Though the precise details are not public information, pg has publicly stated that he does have some form of (vote/flag) "ring detection" running here on HN to thwart group and/or multi-account manipulation. [2] Since the details are not public, there is really no way to know how effective the ring detection is, but suffice to say, if it wasn't an improvement, it wouldn't exist. When it comes to flagging and up-voting of submissions, the publicly described logic is both clever and fascinating. If you flag heavily up-voted submissions, your flags count less. Similarly, if you flag too many things (and most likely, too quickly), your flags count less. In other words, there are thresholds employed. [3,4] When it comes to flagging comments, I can't recall seeing any mention of how the comment flags are handled, and worse, there's nothing in my notes about it. Considering the potential for abuse, I doubt PG will ever give vague details about it. Spam comments are an interesting problem, and it's very difficult to solve. Allowing users to flag comments is one way to handle it, but divulging the details would most likely reduce the effectiveness of the counter-measures. There is still one place on HN where doing a lot of flagging and up-voting of submissions is both useful and beneficial to HN as a whole, namely, on the "new" page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest I'm sure many people appreciate the high signal to noise ratio here on HN, and would rather avoid the more noisy /newest page. None the less, people putting in some time to both flag spam and give up-votes to new submissions is what keeps the high signal to noise on the front page. Yes, even if you're just flagging spam on the /newest page, you can still trigger the "excessive flagger" threshold, and the result is (was?) the "flag" links disappear. I had it happen to me once a long time ago, but since then, I believe the system was changed to simply not count the flags once a user has passed the threshold value. I would bet a human being (pg or a moderator) looks at any account that flags too much to determine if the account should be banned, hell banned, deleted, or whatever. If they see that you're really just trying to flag the endless spam submissions, they probably just quietly appreciate your efforts. I've never received a gilded thank you note for flagging spam submissions, and I don't expect to get one, but I'm sure everyone who likes the high signal to noise ratio around here appreciates it. NOTE: Though the references below are from PG himself, it's entirely possible that he's changed his mind, and his code, since they were originally posted. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830838 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354900 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830485 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830531

acharm 15y ago
This is my third account here. My last started posting [dead] last week. I'd very much like to know how one goes from positive karma to censored. Was it too many posts on the SOPA thread? That was the last set of posts before I went [dead]. I made like 10 posts, not a single one was downvoted, and a couple were upvoted 10 or more times. This was an issue I felt strongly about. Fair enough: my opinion may not merit such prolific posting - but how about blocking me from posting on that one article? I'm attempting to view this positively: my goal is to learn how to communicate effectively here, and clearly I'm doing something wrong. It would genuinely help if I knew what that was. http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ldar15 http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ldar15
- cema 15y ago
  I think general advice would be not to put too much heart into it. Brain, yes. (But spare the sarcasm.)
- jcr 15y ago
  Though I have studied HN a lot, I am not a moderator and I do not have access to the actual code running on HN. The "basic" code behind HN (NEWS.YC) is publicly available in the ARC language distribution, but PG is running a modified version here. Without source code or moderator access, along with my well publicized lack of mind reading skills, I simply cannot tell you why your account was "hellbanned" (i.e. all posts from the account are immediately marked "[dead]"). Even if you're a long time user with substantial karma and "show dead" enabled in your profile, there are times when you're still unable to see posts from some "hellbanned" users. With this said, even if I knew which SOPA thread you're talking about, and what user-name you were using, I might not be able to see said problematic posts. You are essentially asking me for blind speculation. The best I can tell you from blind speculation is you probably let your emotions get the better of you in the discussion, others decided you were acting like an ass, and they flagged your comments. Since you admit to "feeling strongly" about the topic, you were most likely pushing your opinion, and hence, your agenda... --And others pushed back. The other thing to realize is, in highly political and divisive topics there are most likely groups/rings at work trying to suppress the most vocal (or acerbic) posters. As far as I know, there is no such thing as "perfect" ring detection since differentiating it from group-think would be very problematic. If you've read any of PG's code, or any of his coding books (OnLisp, ANSI Common Lisp), you'll agree he's pretty darn good at coding, but even for him, "perfect" ring detection is probably beyond feasible. So, with blind speculation, you've got three possibilities: 1.) You added a bit too much spice to your comments. 2.) You were on the wrong side of a voting/flagging ring. 3.) You were on the wrong side of consensus / group-think (i.e. you have an uncommon and contentious opinion). Just because you could see up-votes on your comments does not mean you can see the 'flags' they have received, so you're basing your evaluation on incomplete information. The last possibility is clearly stated in the HN Guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics Sure, SOPA intersects with tech and hacking, and even PG himself got in on the action by taking a stand on it, but none the less, it's still politics. You pushed heavily on comparisons to Nazi Germany (see "Godwin's Law") and voiced strong advocacy of Ron Paul. You might want to note that one rather prolific HN poster described Ron Paul as a "Mendacious Kook," so your opinion is not universally accepted and promoting your opinion is essentially pushing a political agenda. The result, of course, is the same "Ron Paul Spam" problems seen on Reddit. This is not Reddit. Here on HN, there is no way to compartmentalize topics (i.e. "sub-reddits") to prevent political pressure over-load. You may have been up-voted by those who share your political views, but you were also most likely flagged for voicing those views here. If you want to discuss general politics, HN is the wrong place to do it. My hunch is that you've been banned twice for going political in a place were it's clearly against the guidelines. And no, just because you see PG occasionally breaking his own guidelines does not give you, or anyone, license to turn this place into yet another political forum. Hacker (nee Startup) News is his party, and the rest of us are just guests here. On the bright side, if you study both the NEWS.YC source code and posts made by PG regarding his modifications to the HN version, you'll notice he has a rather consistent habit of using time as a factor in a lot of his calculations. If you got yourself banned for some reason, the ban may or may not be permanent. I suggest that you give your old account another try in a couple of weeks. Though I'm too tired to dig up a reference for you, I do remember reading something about bans being time limited in much the same way that there's a timer to prevent/slow-down replies for the sake of preventing flame wars. I could be mistaken, but none the less, I'm remembering something about this. Looking at your posts under the 'ldar15' account shows none of them currently marked as '[dead]' so it seems as if your ban timed-out. I don't have total recall, so until someone posts a link to a post by PG stating that not all bans are permanent, the only safe bet is to consider your un-banning as just a coincidence. ;) For notes, there has been one, and only one, time when I was actually concerned about a down-vote I received. I was interacting directly with PG, and quickly got down-voted. Since my reply to him would show up in his "Threads" page, and the down-vote occurred so quickly, I was unnecessarily concerned the down-vote came from PG --the guy nice enough to provide this site to me any everyone else. In that case, I just sent PG a polite email to make sure I hadn't stepped on any toes. It wasn't him, and it wasn't a big deal to him, but contacting him privately was the most polite way I could think of handling it. Lastly, there is a known degree of randomness in voting, and there are known problems with up/down link placement on some devices (particularly mobile devices with touch screens). Though I have had moments where I wondered, "Why (the expletive) am I being down-voted?" often, it's not as big of a deal as it seems. Sometimes I communicate poorly. Sometimes I fail to be perfectly clear. Sometimes I get things wrong. Sometimes I'm a bit too spicy in my replies. But sometimes, people just click the wrong button by mistake. It happens to everyone. Learning from mistakes is good, but being overly concerned about it is a waste of time.

by jcr 15y ago

acharm 15y ago

This is my third account here. My last started posting [dead] last week. I'd very much like to know how one goes from positive karma to censored. Was it too many posts on the SOPA thread? That was the last set of posts before I went [dead]. I made like 10 posts, not a single one was downvoted, and a couple were upvoted 10 or more times. This was an issue I felt strongly about. Fair enough: my opinion may not merit such prolific posting - but how about blocking me from posting on that one article? I'm attempting to view this positively: my goal is to learn how to communicate effectively here, and clearly I'm doing something wrong. It would genuinely help if I knew what that was. http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ldar15 http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ldar15

cema 15y ago
I think general advice would be not to put too much heart into it. Brain, yes. (But spare the sarcasm.)
jcr 15y ago
Though I have studied HN a lot, I am not a moderator and I do not have access to the actual code running on HN. The "basic" code behind HN (NEWS.YC) is publicly available in the ARC language distribution, but PG is running a modified version here. Without source code or moderator access, along with my well publicized lack of mind reading skills, I simply cannot tell you why your account was "hellbanned" (i.e. all posts from the account are immediately marked "[dead]"). Even if you're a long time user with substantial karma and "show dead" enabled in your profile, there are times when you're still unable to see posts from some "hellbanned" users. With this said, even if I knew which SOPA thread you're talking about, and what user-name you were using, I might not be able to see said problematic posts. You are essentially asking me for blind speculation. The best I can tell you from blind speculation is you probably let your emotions get the better of you in the discussion, others decided you were acting like an ass, and they flagged your comments. Since you admit to "feeling strongly" about the topic, you were most likely pushing your opinion, and hence, your agenda... --And others pushed back. The other thing to realize is, in highly political and divisive topics there are most likely groups/rings at work trying to suppress the most vocal (or acerbic) posters. As far as I know, there is no such thing as "perfect" ring detection since differentiating it from group-think would be very problematic. If you've read any of PG's code, or any of his coding books (OnLisp, ANSI Common Lisp), you'll agree he's pretty darn good at coding, but even for him, "perfect" ring detection is probably beyond feasible. So, with blind speculation, you've got three possibilities: 1.) You added a bit too much spice to your comments. 2.) You were on the wrong side of a voting/flagging ring. 3.) You were on the wrong side of consensus / group-think (i.e. you have an uncommon and contentious opinion). Just because you could see up-votes on your comments does not mean you can see the 'flags' they have received, so you're basing your evaluation on incomplete information. The last possibility is clearly stated in the HN Guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics Sure, SOPA intersects with tech and hacking, and even PG himself got in on the action by taking a stand on it, but none the less, it's still politics. You pushed heavily on comparisons to Nazi Germany (see "Godwin's Law") and voiced strong advocacy of Ron Paul. You might want to note that one rather prolific HN poster described Ron Paul as a "Mendacious Kook," so your opinion is not universally accepted and promoting your opinion is essentially pushing a political agenda. The result, of course, is the same "Ron Paul Spam" problems seen on Reddit. This is not Reddit. Here on HN, there is no way to compartmentalize topics (i.e. "sub-reddits") to prevent political pressure over-load. You may have been up-voted by those who share your political views, but you were also most likely flagged for voicing those views here. If you want to discuss general politics, HN is the wrong place to do it. My hunch is that you've been banned twice for going political in a place were it's clearly against the guidelines. And no, just because you see PG occasionally breaking his own guidelines does not give you, or anyone, license to turn this place into yet another political forum. Hacker (nee Startup) News is his party, and the rest of us are just guests here. On the bright side, if you study both the NEWS.YC source code and posts made by PG regarding his modifications to the HN version, you'll notice he has a rather consistent habit of using time as a factor in a lot of his calculations. If you got yourself banned for some reason, the ban may or may not be permanent. I suggest that you give your old account another try in a couple of weeks. Though I'm too tired to dig up a reference for you, I do remember reading something about bans being time limited in much the same way that there's a timer to prevent/slow-down replies for the sake of preventing flame wars. I could be mistaken, but none the less, I'm remembering something about this. Looking at your posts under the 'ldar15' account shows none of them currently marked as '[dead]' so it seems as if your ban timed-out. I don't have total recall, so until someone posts a link to a post by PG stating that not all bans are permanent, the only safe bet is to consider your un-banning as just a coincidence. ;) For notes, there has been one, and only one, time when I was actually concerned about a down-vote I received. I was interacting directly with PG, and quickly got down-voted. Since my reply to him would show up in his "Threads" page, and the down-vote occurred so quickly, I was unnecessarily concerned the down-vote came from PG --the guy nice enough to provide this site to me any everyone else. In that case, I just sent PG a polite email to make sure I hadn't stepped on any toes. It wasn't him, and it wasn't a big deal to him, but contacting him privately was the most polite way I could think of handling it. Lastly, there is a known degree of randomness in voting, and there are known problems with up/down link placement on some devices (particularly mobile devices with touch screens). Though I have had moments where I wondered, "Why (the expletive) am I being down-voted?" often, it's not as big of a deal as it seems. Sometimes I communicate poorly. Sometimes I fail to be perfectly clear. Sometimes I get things wrong. Sometimes I'm a bit too spicy in my replies. But sometimes, people just click the wrong button by mistake. It happens to everyone. Learning from mistakes is good, but being overly concerned about it is a waste of time.