7 ms·

> The downvotes and flagged comments in this post are clearly not "organic" FWIW the downvotes and flags in threads like this, including this thread, do seem l

by dang 1y ago

> The downvotes and flagged comments in this post are clearly not "organic" FWIW the downvotes and flags in threads like this, including this thread, do seem largely organic to me, and well within the range of what one expects from a divisive and emotional topic. People often use words like "clearly" in making such descriptions (I don't mean to pick on you personally! countless users do this, from all sides of all issues), but actually there's nothing so clear. Mostly what happens is that people have perceptions based on their strong feelings and then call those perceptions "clear" because their feelings are strong. We do occasionally turn off flags in order to allow a discussion to happen because allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong. I've posted lots of explanations of how we approach this in the past (e.g. 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...)

iw7tdb2kqo9 1y ago
you detached/flagged my comment from thread, shadow banned my account and disabled signup in my IP because I said something against them. That was "clearly" enough.
- dang 1y ago
  I'd need a specific link to say anything specific, but the general answer that we moderate HN based on the site guidelines, and those don't vary based on who you've "said something against". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
rendall 1y ago
It's unfortunate and notable that whenever Israel hits the front page of HN and avoids getting flagged, the perspective is reliably anti-Israel. It's worth recalling that confirmation bias, which we’re all prone to, kicks in hard on this topic. We are all subject to the tendency to notice and remember things that back up what we already believe, while tuning out anything that contradicts it. With Israel, that often means people stick to sources and angles that reinforce their stance, whether pro- or anti-Israel, and dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their narrative. It’d be a welcome change to see top comments or stories that challenge anti-Israel assumptions, not just confirm them.
- mjamil 1y ago
  Have you considered that your framing exposes implicit bias? It breaks posts down in a binary (pro- or anti-Israel) formation. It’s not that simple. One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians. It’s also reasonable at this point to believe that Israel - for the last year, at least - is pursuing military action without a strategic goal or a long-term plan other than “encouraging voluntary transfer” of the civilian population. To you, does the above paragraph immediately strike you as pro- or anti-Israel?
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians And then extend that to believing Hamas are monsters, that whenever Palestine has--in modern times--had any power or leverage, it has used it to be a pest to its neighbors, and yet still believe that those people don't deserve to face starvation, bombing, economic ruin and forced displacement.
    - mjamil 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > are you saying that there is a scenario where it is legitimate for a person or group of people to believe that another group of people should be deserving of starvation, economic ruin, and forced displacement? No, I'm saying the opposite. That you can be judgemental of Hamas and even suspicious of the motives of those claiming to speak for the Palestinian people while still condemning Netanyahu's tactics in this war.
        1y ago
submeta 1y ago
Dang, how can you say for sure they are organic? Just because the downvoters appear to be human and seem not to be bots? Even if the dovnvotes came from human beings: Israel apologists are very organised. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett publicly emphasized the importance of Wikipedia as an information source and stated that Israelis should learn how to edit Wikipedia. Israeli Hasbara, also known as public diplomacy or pro-Israel advocacy, uses various strategies to promote Israel’s perspective on campuses and online. On university campuses, examples include Hasbara Fellowships (training students to advocate for Israel), pro-Israel student clubs (organizing events and campaigns), social media trainings, resource support from Jewish organizations, and counter-actions against pro-Palestinian movements. Online, Israeli ministries and affiliated organizations operate official social media teams, develop advocacy platforms and tools (like the Act.IL app), and use influencer campaigns, bots, and coordinated digital actions to shape public opinion. After October 7, 2023, civilian Hasbara initiatives on social media expanded rapidly, ranging from individual efforts to coordinated campaigns with governmental support. So how can you say that this is a controversial topic and the dovnvotes are organic? How is it controversial when 2mil. peope are being starved? When thousands of children have been killed by a country whose prime minister is a wanted war criminal? Edit: Corrected "not organic" => organic
- dang 1y ago
  I can't say for sure. What I said is that they seem that way to me, and are within the range of what one expects from divisive and emotional topics. That isn't proof (which is elusive if not impossible in any case), but is at least based on many years and god knows how many lost hours poring over this sort of data. Incidentally, I was talking about downvotes and flags from every side of the conflict, not just the side you're talking about. I don't see a lot of difference there either.
  - submeta 1y ago
    Are you familiar with Tal Hanan, an Israeli businessman and former special forces operative alleged to have run disinformation campaigns to manipulate elections in several countries? That activity was pre‑LLM. What concrete safeguards, audits, and transparency measures does this platform use to detect and prevent similarly professional manipulation?
crystal_revenge 1y ago
> a divisive and emotional topic. I strongly suspect that this "divisive" nature of the topic is precisely the illusion being created. That's exactly what I am challenging here. In my non-online life I've known many vaccine skeptics, climate skeptics, crypto enthusiasts, extreme right/left-wingers, people with complex view of trans issues, divisions on BLM topics, gun fanatics, gun abolitionists etc, etc. But the opinion around what's happening in Gaza right now doesn't fit into this category. Regardless of political opinion, outside of Zionists, I have not met anyone who will not, in private of course (for the reasons mentioned previously), agree that what's happening in Gaza is genocide and is not in the interests of the United States. The strength of the opinion can vary, but the general direction of opinion is consistent. Another reason I added "clearly" is because, compared to say climate change posts that are often filled with climate denial comments, there are typically very few commenters engaging in any controversial discussions. Nearly all the top level comments are in agreement, the majority of the replies are as well. Compared to genuinely controversial topics which often do quickly devolve into impossible arguments. There's also the broader issue that silence is not always a neutral position. When one side benefits much, much more from silence than the other, you can't simply shrug your shoulders and say "well it's controversial so let's not talk about it". In this case, silencing conversations about the genocide in Gaza is very beneficial to the state perpetuating this genocide and likewise very harmful to the people suffering from it. The strategy is simple: make the topic appear to be more divisive than it is, which makes it easy to silence as "divisive and emotional", which is essentially the most desirable outcome.
- unclad5968 1y ago
  It's just your social circle. Where I live (still USA) it's the opposite. I don't know a single person who doesn't think the Palestinian support isn't propaganda. It is for sure a controversial topic.
  - thoroughburro 1y ago
    Also my social circle.
  - tbrownaw 1y ago
Scramblejams 1y ago
allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong Could it actually be right? It's hard for me to feel like these political flagfests make the rest of the site any better, while the rest of the site is what I find value in. If I want to witness mobs possessing massive standard deviations in knowledge and experience with the subject matter flamewarring each other, there are already a whole lot of places on the Internet I can go for that. It's the tech-and-genuine-curiosity-not-yelling part of HN that's the value prop for me here, and FWIW, for a sample size of one, threads like this do little to improve on that. Of course I can hide this story and move on. But it's hard for me to believe that all the stress hormones flowing in the people reading and participating don't have some kind of negative knock-on effects on other, more peaceful threads.
- arp242 1y ago
  The problem with this line of reasoning is that a few bad faith actors can kill any topic on the site simply by showing up and being unpleasant.
  - Scramblejams 1y ago
    Seems like the existing mechanisms and moderation are designed to already handle this case to me. No?
  - dang 1y ago
    We turn off flags in some (though not all) of those cases.
tastyface 1y ago
Over the past few months, I’ve been dejected to see a large number of articles that were politics-adjacent, but otherwise thoughtful and topical, get flagged and remain that way. The mods told us that HN is not supposed to be a news aggregator. Begrudgingly, I accepted the justification, since fostering intelligent discussion in a diverse community can be incredibly challenging. So… why were the flags on the article covering Hulk Hogan’s (tech-irrelevant) death turned off? The article was flagged, then inexplicably came back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672329 And it's not the first time I've seen this happen with various news fluff. I’ll be frank: I’ve had faith in the mod team in the past, but the lack of consistency is becoming offensive to me. Celebrity gossip is OK, but not most things ICE or Musk related for example, even when there's direct involvement from SV elites? I'm finding it hard to see the throughline here. What am I missing?
- tomhow 1y ago
  That story spent 9 minutes on the front page. Turning off the flags on a story doesn't mean we want to give it front page exposure (and in that case, we didn't give it front page exposure). It allows people who want to discuss that topic to do so whilst not taking up front page space and also not drawing complaints from people who feel strongly that they want to discuss it. We do the same thing with some of the politics-related topics you're talking about too. The primary consideration is always whether the story contains "significant new information", and another significant consideration is whether the discussion thread is of a reasonably high standard.
hughlomas 1y ago
With respect, allowing political posts that clearly violate the HN guidelines will normalize such posts, incentivize them in the future due to karma, and attract the type of people that want to soapbox to the community.
- dang 1y ago
  This post doesn't violate the site guidelines, nor does having it on HN's frontpage. There's long precedent here, going back at least to 2008 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869). Here's a memorable (to me at least) case from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426. If you want to understand how we think about and approach moderation of political stories on HN, probably the best set of explanations is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) familiarize yourself with those explanations and then still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. But do please read some of that stuff first because the questions (and therefore the answers) are nearly always the same. p.s. All that said, I appreciate your watching out for the quality of HN and I understand the concern.
  - Scramblejams 1y ago
    I guess with polarizing topics it comes down to the ratio of "intellectually interesting" (quote from your first link) comments, and those that engage with them in good faith, versus all the yelling and condemnation, right? And there's some fuzzy line that you want the thread to stay on one side of. I will freely admit my view may be too dismissive and that I should change my ways, but these kinds of threads almost never feel to me like the juice is worth the squeeze. In other words, that ratio I mentioned seems out of whack. Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead, not enough people vouch for 'em (I'm sometimes guilty of that), and the amount of invective and judgment they're met with just seems to depend on how fast they got downvoted or flagged to oblivion. I realize I'm shouting into the wind, and you have no obligation to change any of this for me. But I really do not see how this sort of thing is good for the site long-term. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a certain set that needs to scream about something every month or they start vandalizing less controversial threads and it's net positive to let them have their moment. Maybe I'll go write something that auto-hides threads for me when there's been a certain proportion of flagging and downvoting. Anyway, you've got a tough job and do it with grace. No reply necessary, but thanks for all you do.
jiggawatts 1y ago
I concur: Sometimes I get downvoted when making what I thought were nuanced comments, but then after a few replies I realised that I had left a few things open to misinterpretation. A few corrections later... upvotes. That feels organic.
trabant00 1y ago
Might not be worth much but I just want to thank you for being willing to put in the work to make such discussions possible even though clearly (wink) the vast majority of comments don't want to have a discussion. I would have shut it down writing it off as too much work for almost no result. I don't even want to comment on-topic because I already know nobody will seriously consider my point of view, but just downvote and attack me.

by dang 1y ago

iw7tdb2kqo9 1y ago

you detached/flagged my comment from thread, shadow banned my account and disabled signup in my IP because I said something against them. That was "clearly" enough.

dang 1y ago
I'd need a specific link to say anything specific, but the general answer that we moderate HN based on the site guidelines, and those don't vary based on who you've "said something against". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rendall 1y ago

It's unfortunate and notable that whenever Israel hits the front page of HN and avoids getting flagged, the perspective is reliably anti-Israel. It's worth recalling that confirmation bias, which we’re all prone to, kicks in hard on this topic. We are all subject to the tendency to notice and remember things that back up what we already believe, while tuning out anything that contradicts it. With Israel, that often means people stick to sources and angles that reinforce their stance, whether pro- or anti-Israel, and dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their narrative. It’d be a welcome change to see top comments or stories that challenge anti-Israel assumptions, not just confirm them.

mjamil 1y ago
Have you considered that your framing exposes implicit bias? It breaks posts down in a binary (pro- or anti-Israel) formation. It’s not that simple. One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians. It’s also reasonable at this point to believe that Israel - for the last year, at least - is pursuing military action without a strategic goal or a long-term plan other than “encouraging voluntary transfer” of the civilian population. To you, does the above paragraph immediately strike you as pro- or anti-Israel?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians And then extend that to believing Hamas are monsters, that whenever Palestine has--in modern times--had any power or leverage, it has used it to be a pest to its neighbors, and yet still believe that those people don't deserve to face starvation, bombing, economic ruin and forced displacement.
  - mjamil 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > are you saying that there is a scenario where it is legitimate for a person or group of people to believe that another group of people should be deserving of starvation, economic ruin, and forced displacement? No, I'm saying the opposite. That you can be judgemental of Hamas and even suspicious of the motives of those claiming to speak for the Palestinian people while still condemning Netanyahu's tactics in this war.
      - 1y ago

submeta 1y ago

Dang, how can you say for sure they are organic? Just because the downvoters appear to be human and seem not to be bots? Even if the dovnvotes came from human beings: Israel apologists are very organised. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett publicly emphasized the importance of Wikipedia as an information source and stated that Israelis should learn how to edit Wikipedia. Israeli Hasbara, also known as public diplomacy or pro-Israel advocacy, uses various strategies to promote Israel’s perspective on campuses and online. On university campuses, examples include Hasbara Fellowships (training students to advocate for Israel), pro-Israel student clubs (organizing events and campaigns), social media trainings, resource support from Jewish organizations, and counter-actions against pro-Palestinian movements. Online, Israeli ministries and affiliated organizations operate official social media teams, develop advocacy platforms and tools (like the Act.IL app), and use influencer campaigns, bots, and coordinated digital actions to shape public opinion. After October 7, 2023, civilian Hasbara initiatives on social media expanded rapidly, ranging from individual efforts to coordinated campaigns with governmental support. So how can you say that this is a controversial topic and the dovnvotes are organic? How is it controversial when 2mil. peope are being starved? When thousands of children have been killed by a country whose prime minister is a wanted war criminal? Edit: Corrected "not organic" => organic

dang 1y ago
I can't say for sure. What I said is that they seem that way to me, and are within the range of what one expects from divisive and emotional topics. That isn't proof (which is elusive if not impossible in any case), but is at least based on many years and god knows how many lost hours poring over this sort of data. Incidentally, I was talking about downvotes and flags from every side of the conflict, not just the side you're talking about. I don't see a lot of difference there either.
- submeta 1y ago
  Are you familiar with Tal Hanan, an Israeli businessman and former special forces operative alleged to have run disinformation campaigns to manipulate elections in several countries? That activity was pre‑LLM. What concrete safeguards, audits, and transparency measures does this platform use to detect and prevent similarly professional manipulation?

crystal_revenge 1y ago

> a divisive and emotional topic. I strongly suspect that this "divisive" nature of the topic is precisely the illusion being created. That's exactly what I am challenging here. In my non-online life I've known many vaccine skeptics, climate skeptics, crypto enthusiasts, extreme right/left-wingers, people with complex view of trans issues, divisions on BLM topics, gun fanatics, gun abolitionists etc, etc. But the opinion around what's happening in Gaza right now doesn't fit into this category. Regardless of political opinion, outside of Zionists, I have not met anyone who will not, in private of course (for the reasons mentioned previously), agree that what's happening in Gaza is genocide and is not in the interests of the United States. The strength of the opinion can vary, but the general direction of opinion is consistent. Another reason I added "clearly" is because, compared to say climate change posts that are often filled with climate denial comments, there are typically very few commenters engaging in any controversial discussions. Nearly all the top level comments are in agreement, the majority of the replies are as well. Compared to genuinely controversial topics which often do quickly devolve into impossible arguments. There's also the broader issue that silence is not always a neutral position. When one side benefits much, much more from silence than the other, you can't simply shrug your shoulders and say "well it's controversial so let's not talk about it". In this case, silencing conversations about the genocide in Gaza is very beneficial to the state perpetuating this genocide and likewise very harmful to the people suffering from it. The strategy is simple: make the topic appear to be more divisive than it is, which makes it easy to silence as "divisive and emotional", which is essentially the most desirable outcome.

unclad5968 1y ago
It's just your social circle. Where I live (still USA) it's the opposite. I don't know a single person who doesn't think the Palestinian support isn't propaganda. It is for sure a controversial topic.
- thoroughburro 1y ago
  Also my social circle.
- tbrownaw 1y ago

Scramblejams 1y ago

allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong Could it actually be right? It's hard for me to feel like these political flagfests make the rest of the site any better, while the rest of the site is what I find value in. If I want to witness mobs possessing massive standard deviations in knowledge and experience with the subject matter flamewarring each other, there are already a whole lot of places on the Internet I can go for that. It's the tech-and-genuine-curiosity-not-yelling part of HN that's the value prop for me here, and FWIW, for a sample size of one, threads like this do little to improve on that. Of course I can hide this story and move on. But it's hard for me to believe that all the stress hormones flowing in the people reading and participating don't have some kind of negative knock-on effects on other, more peaceful threads.

arp242 1y ago
The problem with this line of reasoning is that a few bad faith actors can kill any topic on the site simply by showing up and being unpleasant.
- Scramblejams 1y ago
  Seems like the existing mechanisms and moderation are designed to already handle this case to me. No?
- dang 1y ago
  We turn off flags in some (though not all) of those cases.

tastyface 1y ago

Over the past few months, I’ve been dejected to see a large number of articles that were politics-adjacent, but otherwise thoughtful and topical, get flagged and remain that way. The mods told us that HN is not supposed to be a news aggregator. Begrudgingly, I accepted the justification, since fostering intelligent discussion in a diverse community can be incredibly challenging. So… why were the flags on the article covering Hulk Hogan’s (tech-irrelevant) death turned off? The article was flagged, then inexplicably came back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672329 And it's not the first time I've seen this happen with various news fluff. I’ll be frank: I’ve had faith in the mod team in the past, but the lack of consistency is becoming offensive to me. Celebrity gossip is OK, but not most things ICE or Musk related for example, even when there's direct involvement from SV elites? I'm finding it hard to see the throughline here. What am I missing?

tomhow 1y ago
That story spent 9 minutes on the front page. Turning off the flags on a story doesn't mean we want to give it front page exposure (and in that case, we didn't give it front page exposure). It allows people who want to discuss that topic to do so whilst not taking up front page space and also not drawing complaints from people who feel strongly that they want to discuss it. We do the same thing with some of the politics-related topics you're talking about too. The primary consideration is always whether the story contains "significant new information", and another significant consideration is whether the discussion thread is of a reasonably high standard.

hughlomas 1y ago

With respect, allowing political posts that clearly violate the HN guidelines will normalize such posts, incentivize them in the future due to karma, and attract the type of people that want to soapbox to the community.

dang 1y ago
This post doesn't violate the site guidelines, nor does having it on HN's frontpage. There's long precedent here, going back at least to 2008 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869). Here's a memorable (to me at least) case from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426. If you want to understand how we think about and approach moderation of political stories on HN, probably the best set of explanations is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) familiarize yourself with those explanations and then still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. But do please read some of that stuff first because the questions (and therefore the answers) are nearly always the same. p.s. All that said, I appreciate your watching out for the quality of HN and I understand the concern.
- Scramblejams 1y ago
  I guess with polarizing topics it comes down to the ratio of "intellectually interesting" (quote from your first link) comments, and those that engage with them in good faith, versus all the yelling and condemnation, right? And there's some fuzzy line that you want the thread to stay on one side of. I will freely admit my view may be too dismissive and that I should change my ways, but these kinds of threads almost never feel to me like the juice is worth the squeeze. In other words, that ratio I mentioned seems out of whack. Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead, not enough people vouch for 'em (I'm sometimes guilty of that), and the amount of invective and judgment they're met with just seems to depend on how fast they got downvoted or flagged to oblivion. I realize I'm shouting into the wind, and you have no obligation to change any of this for me. But I really do not see how this sort of thing is good for the site long-term. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a certain set that needs to scream about something every month or they start vandalizing less controversial threads and it's net positive to let them have their moment. Maybe I'll go write something that auto-hides threads for me when there's been a certain proportion of flagging and downvoting. Anyway, you've got a tough job and do it with grace. No reply necessary, but thanks for all you do.

jiggawatts 1y ago

I concur: Sometimes I get downvoted when making what I thought were nuanced comments, but then after a few replies I realised that I had left a few things open to misinterpretation. A few corrections later... upvotes. That feels organic.

trabant00 1y ago

Might not be worth much but I just want to thank you for being willing to put in the work to make such discussions possible even though clearly (wink) the vast majority of comments don't want to have a discussion. I would have shut it down writing it off as too much work for almost no result. I don't even want to comment on-topic because I already know nobody will seriously consider my point of view, but just downvote and attack me.