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The moderating strategy that normally makes HN on-topic is both fundamentally biased against and easily to exploit by bad actors to downplay this kind of breaki
by Tadpole9181 2y ago
The moderating strategy that normally makes HN on-topic is both fundamentally biased against and easily to exploit by bad actors to downplay this kind of breaking news.
Dang has unflagged several posts and has explained "the algorithm" clearly throughout the week, so this seems a little unfair. Though I personally remain disappointed that there seems to be no concern that "the algorithm" is clearly being abused here to suppress coverage of, at best, one of the largest security breeches in American history or, at worst, a potential coup of the world's largest superpower. And that I've not seen arecognition that unflagging a post is like splinting a broken leg - still a broken leg. It robs a thread of several hours of natural growth and still biases the ranking, so the abusive flagger gets their way. I would guess their opinion is in the ballpark of "that's the way the cookie crumbles".
I don't think I've seen Dang say if they're revoking flagging privileges - I doubt it? And they seem pretty adamant on not making exceptions to the moderation system, so that's that... Though it seems reasonable to me there should be a temporary whitelist system they could use to make flagging require manual review if a post meets a condition, I'm also not an HN moderator with analytics and years of practice.
WRT many of the flags, there are admittedly a lot of duplicates. Heck, this thread is a duplicate, but I can hardly blame that when the flagging is as ridiculous as it is right now.
Also, @dang doesn't really work IIRC. Moderators tend to not want to be spammed easily.
- Tomte 2y ago> clearly being abused here to suppress coverage of, at best, one of the largest security breeches in American history Worst suppression ever with several front-page threads about it that were not flagged. Something you also need to understand: there are dozens of "new" developments to a story like this every day. But they don‘t warrant another whole thread.
- Tadpole9181 2y agoYes, because Dang unflagged them manually. Those threads still sit dead for hours, as I explain in the very comment you replied to. This biases against those posts and prevents many people who check once daily from ever seeing them. Just because we have a competent moderator doesn't mean they aren't abusing forum mechanics to suppress those threads? Nobody claimed they were entirely silenced. And it is entirely disingenuous for you to sit here and say this didn't happen to the very first posts on the topic.
- pvg 2y agoYes, because Dang unflagged them manually. There's lots of manual moderation and tweakage on HN, every single day, big news or no big news. That's its completely vanilla, normal mode of operation. You might have just noticed this because of this particular outlier set of stories but it's not some sign of 'biases' or even abuse (although surely those things happen as well quite often, you can just email them in if you think you've come across something like that - that's also 'manual' moderation).
- Tadpole9181 2y agoApologies, I'm not sure what's you mean with this reply to that quote. To be clear, I don't think the moderators are biased here, just that HN naturally works against controversial topics and that there are a lot of people who are abusing the flag feature for anything that goes against their ideology / role model.
- pvg 2y agoI'm saying this isn't 'abuse', much of the time and that manual intervention alone is not evidence of abuse or even of something going wrong. The assumption the flagging must be ideological itself tends to be strongly coloured by the views of the assumer.
- Tadpole9181 2y agoI'm not saying the manual intervention is evidence of abuse, I'm saying HN moderation is working as intended and abuse being mitigated does not mean abuse was not attempted, or even partially successful. As a response to them saying that just because a bad actor was thwarted, they aren't a bad actor. A caught thief is a thief all the same. I personally believe the flagging of these posts is abuse, though. I don't have analytics or a need to meet a criteria of proof, but I do have common sense and an awareness of how this cult following works. The guy [Musk] did a Nazi salute on stage for God's sake, I'm not a fool as to what kind of crowd that attracts... I'm a fool in other ways, naturally!