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I am going to call out this lie every time you post it: spam is not a synonym for misinformation. This was a disingenuous lie seven months ago when you copy pas

I am going to call out this lie every time you post it: spam is not a synonym for misinformation. This was a disingenuous lie seven months ago when you copy pasted this response and it is no less different today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33250463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33250463 Relevance and truth are two different things. It is not your job to be making calls on the second one, and I find your willful conflation of these concepts, and continuing attempts to deflect from the fact that you have done so to be a bit gross.

yegg 3y ago
I never said they are synonyms. What I am saying is we are acting on spam and not misinformation. We do not have a misinformation/disinformation/truth/lie detector or whatever you want to call it. We do not evaluate individual stories or narratives for truth and never have. We are not an "arbiter of truth" in any way. We did not go looking for anything Russian or for any other country in particular. We did not go looking for any narrative at all. And highest level as I quoted from the News Rankings page, "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
- Karunamon 3y ago
  We do not have a misinformation/disinformation/truth/lie detector or whatever you want to call it. We do not evaluate individual stories or narratives for truth and never have. No, going by your own website, you outsource that judgment call to an unnamed and unaccountable list of third parties that apply unnamed and unauditable "objective" "journalistic standards" (which are not things that exist), which will then result in entire sites showing lower in the rankings an unspecified amount with no notification to the user that you have done this. If this was actually about spam, there would be no need to bring "journalistic standards" into the equation. Spam is spam regardless of who it comes from. There would be no need to be so coy about all of this.
  - yegg 3y ago
    It is about spam. There are actually many flavors of spam and they each need their own spam detector. For example parked domain spam vs. adult content spam vs. copycat site spam vs. content-farm spam vs. news spam. This is about news spam. The referenced organizations are evaluating a supposed news site's process on how they go about making news ("journalistic standards") and in particular what we care about is whether there really is any process/standard at all. That is, we're only looking for the very few sites that everyone agrees has no news process and is just a site purporting to be a news site but isn't in reality. From the page: "a well-documented history of a site’s extremely low journalistic standards, correlated with: routinely using spam or clickbait to artificially inflate traffic, consistently publishing stories without citing sources, censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site." Spamming search engines to game rankings is the primary criteria here. However, we note that "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases." We're talking tiny amounts of domains here because "we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards." That means if the site has any pulse of a real news site then it doesn't get counted as spam. And it also says for these spam sites: "We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed."
    - Karunamon 3y ago
      If this is truly a site by site blacklist, and it is truly this small, and truly limited to only the most extreme cases, you realize that even the slightest crumb of transparency would invalidate most of the complaints, right? This is why you are getting dragged repeatedly, all of the possible reasons for being this cagey about this reflect terribly on DDG. Your FAQ page is loaded with what Wikipedia would call "weasel words". - Why can you not publish who these organizations are and what the "objective" standards they all use are? - Why can you not notify users when they have entered a query that has results subjected to this rank modification? (And/or give them the ability to reverse it?) - Why can you not just publish the naughty list? - Why can you not publish anything objectively verifiable about this entire process?

yegg 3y ago

I never said they are synonyms. What I am saying is we are acting on spam and not misinformation. We do not have a misinformation/disinformation/truth/lie detector or whatever you want to call it. We do not evaluate individual stories or narratives for truth and never have. We are not an "arbiter of truth" in any way. We did not go looking for anything Russian or for any other country in particular. We did not go looking for any narrative at all. And highest level as I quoted from the News Rankings page, "we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."

Karunamon 3y ago
We do not have a misinformation/disinformation/truth/lie detector or whatever you want to call it. We do not evaluate individual stories or narratives for truth and never have. No, going by your own website, you outsource that judgment call to an unnamed and unaccountable list of third parties that apply unnamed and unauditable "objective" "journalistic standards" (which are not things that exist), which will then result in entire sites showing lower in the rankings an unspecified amount with no notification to the user that you have done this. If this was actually about spam, there would be no need to bring "journalistic standards" into the equation. Spam is spam regardless of who it comes from. There would be no need to be so coy about all of this.
- yegg 3y ago
  It is about spam. There are actually many flavors of spam and they each need their own spam detector. For example parked domain spam vs. adult content spam vs. copycat site spam vs. content-farm spam vs. news spam. This is about news spam. The referenced organizations are evaluating a supposed news site's process on how they go about making news ("journalistic standards") and in particular what we care about is whether there really is any process/standard at all. That is, we're only looking for the very few sites that everyone agrees has no news process and is just a site purporting to be a news site but isn't in reality. From the page: "a well-documented history of a site’s extremely low journalistic standards, correlated with: routinely using spam or clickbait to artificially inflate traffic, consistently publishing stories without citing sources, censoring stories due to operating with very limited press freedom, and misleading readers about who owns, funds, and authors stories for the site." Spamming search engines to game rankings is the primary criteria here. However, we note that "Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases." We're talking tiny amounts of domains here because "we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards." That means if the site has any pulse of a real news site then it doesn't get counted as spam. And it also says for these spam sites: "We trust that users can find the right information for themselves, so even in these rare cases we do not remove these sites from our search results page. Additionally, impacted sites are not moved so far down in the results that they are effectively removed."
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    If this is truly a site by site blacklist, and it is truly this small, and truly limited to only the most extreme cases, you realize that even the slightest crumb of transparency would invalidate most of the complaints, right? This is why you are getting dragged repeatedly, all of the possible reasons for being this cagey about this reflect terribly on DDG. Your FAQ page is loaded with what Wikipedia would call "weasel words". - Why can you not publish who these organizations are and what the "objective" standards they all use are? - Why can you not notify users when they have entered a query that has results subjected to this rank modification? (And/or give them the ability to reverse it?) - Why can you not just publish the naughty list? - Why can you not publish anything objectively verifiable about this entire process?