4 ms·

I think this is the first time I've posted an article that has been flagged, especially given that the source is the journal Science. As a professor working in

• yodsanklai 1y ago
  > if I cannot get funding it will be challenging to stay in academia I assume this is the goal
• dzdt 1y ago
  It is a shame also that this topic is deemed too hotly political for HN and hence the flagging. We are lacking in good forums for measured discussion of what is happening in this country right now.
  • janice1999 1y ago
    Calling something "controversial" or "political" is a useful tool for those who support the status quo to suppress conversation and dissent.
    • jauntywundrkind 1y ago
      The site's moderation system needs to change. There's near infinite power to suppress & deny. That's unhackerly in extreme. There should be some skin in the game for suppressing. If you want to participate in moderating things away, at the very least you should be willing & able to put your name on that act of denying the public.
      • nineplay 1y ago
        The site's moderation isn't going to change because it's in no one's best interest except a bunch of us posters who don't bring in any money.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • insane_dreamer 1y ago
        just drop the flagging by users -- moderators can flag, but not users
        • haunter 1y ago
          Welcome to reddit
  • watwut 1y ago
    It is not about being too political. Only factual anti Trump articles get flagged. Political articles are accepted, ignored or there is a redirect to duplicate discussion
    • dang 1y ago
      > Only factual anti Trump articles get flagged. I don't know what data you're looking at, such that you'd only see such a distinct subset of the total, but this is not true. Non-factual and pro-Trump articles also get flagged—probably more heavily, in fact.
      • watwut 1y ago
        I specified factual, because anti-Trump blog post with opinions and theories without much facts do not get flagged. It is not that any anti Trump article is flagged, but the factual dry ones are more likely to be flagged. I have seen maybe 1 pro Trump article being flagged. From what I have seen, they tend to be ignored rather then flagged.
        • dang 1y ago
          If you don't have 'showdead' turned on in your profile, what could be happening is that those articles are so heavily flagged that they're almost all [dead], in which case only users with that setting turned on would see them. Articles that show [flagged] but are not [dead] have actually been flagged less (relative to upvotes) than articles which get flagkilled, i.e. flagged all the way to the [dead] state, where they cease to be visible to most users. (Here are a bunch of past explanations about 'showdead' in case anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20showdead&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
          • computerthings 1y ago
            [dead]
      • 1y ago
  • dang 1y ago
    That's not the issue; the issue is repetition. Avoiding too much repetition is a core principle here, especially when it's a repetition/indignation combo: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=curiosity%20repetition%20indignation%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... HN has had a huge number of political threads in recent months, including quite a few about funding cuts along the lines of the present story. These submissions don't end up with specific discussions about the specifics of a given story; they end up with generic discussions repeating how people feel about the larger topics. Those topics, and those feelings, are certainly important—but it makes the threads largely interchangeable, and therefore even more repetitive. Since frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20front%20scarce&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), we can't have too many of these, or HN would turn into a current affairs site, which is definitely not what it's supposed to be (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20current%20affairs%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Btw I took a look at the users who flagged the current submission and I didn't see any evidence of political motivation.
    • UncleMeat 1y ago
      This feels unreasonable to me. It isn't like these are all the same political story. A lot of politics is legitimately happening very fast and "we can't talk about the next thing because we just talked about the last thing" is a structural weakness, not a benefit. Are there other topics besides politics that regularly get flagged for being repetitive?
      • dang 1y ago
        I agree—they're not all the same story. On the other hand: stories in an ongoing sequence usually lead to repetitive discussion, which is bad for HN—especially because people get angrier as they repeat things [1]. So the question is: how do we decide which stories should be treated as new discussions, worthy of major new threads, vs. repetitive follow-ups, which should be downweighted [2]? HN has had a well-defined and stable set of principles for answering that for many years now. It goes back to the Snowden avalanche of 2013 [3], when the front page got overrun by follow-up stories and duplicate discussions, and there was a user backlash to that. (I call these principles well defined and stable because they've held up well over the years, and because once we figured them out we haven't had to change them.) It goes like this: when there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) [4], we try to reserve frontpage time for articles that contain Significant New Information (SNI) [5], and which seem like they have a chance to support a substantive, and substantively different, discussion. Articles which don't contain SNI, we tend to downweight as follow-ups [2]. This applies to flags too. When an article meets the above criteria but has been flagged by users, we're open to turning off the flags [6]. When an article has been flagged but doesn't meet those criteria, we tend to leave the flags on. Sometimes, an article contains SNI but also is written in a way that seems to have no chance of supporting a substantive discussion, for example it's so inflammatory or one-sided that it seems doomed to instant flamewar. In cases like that, we wait for a more neutral article about the SNI. If the information really is significant, one should come along soon enough. That is the answer to your objection here: "we can't talk about the next thing because we just talked about the last thing". We can and do talk about the next thing, but it's a question of what the "next thing" is: how do you define what counts as a next thing (a new story) rather than a repetitive variation on the last thing [7]? We do that according to the principles I just described. Of course, this shifts the question to "which articles contain SNI", and users frequently disagree about that. But I'm not talking here about specific calls on particular articles, but rather the principles by which we make those calls. The specific calls we make are inevitably inconsistent and sometimes mistaken. That's ok; we can't be consistent at the level of individual cases (though we're consistent at the level of principles [8]), and we can't not make mistakes, but we're open to reversing a call when users make a good case for why an article meets the principles and we made a bad call about it. To make such a case, you have to know what the principles are and make your argument based on them. Most users don't do that—rather they post blanket complaints about how "all $FOO stories are suppressed on HN", the mods are imposing their pro-$FOO or anti-$FOO agenda, and so on. This is understandable as a reflexive response to seeing things one dislikes [9] (e.g. an important $FOO story being [flagged]). But it doesn't help us do a better job as moderators. To help us do a better job, you (I don't mean you personally, but anyone) need to address what HN moderation is trying to achieve: what kind of site HN is supposed to be (optimized for intellectual curiosity [10], not current affairs [11]), what the fundamentals are (e.g. frontpage space is the scarcest resource [12] and we can't simply turn off flags on all political stories or even all important ones), and what the principles are, as I've described them above. --- [1] The mind resorts to indignation to amuse itself in the absence of new information - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=mind%20amuse%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] We tend to downweight follow-ups - 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... [3] The Snowden deluge of 2013 taught us how (not) to moderate a Major Ongoing Topic - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20snowden%202013&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [4] For a Major Ongoing Topic, some but not all submissions should have major threads - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20major%20ongoing%20topic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [5] The primary criterion for a new major thread is Significant New Information - 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... [6] How we think about turning off flags on a story - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20turn%20off%20flags&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306 [8] Moderation is inconsistent at the level of individual posts, but consistent at the level of principles - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20moderation%20principles%20consisten&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [9] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [10] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [11] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20current%20affairs%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [12] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20front%20scarce&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
• nineplay 1y ago
  The flagging has become de facto censorship for HN and I really thought this is the last place I'd see it. Why is this OK except that some people with influence don't want topics hitting the front page? Should we forgot that PG is yet another tech billionaire who probably is pretty happy with the way things are going right now. Everyday my paranoia increases, every day I become more of a conspiracy theorist. It's us vs. the people who can outspend us a million times over and we can't fight back. Why should any news organization tell the truth if lying gets them a fat paycheck. Why should anyone in charge of any public forum allow controversial topics to get posted when they can make a fat paycheck by blocking them?