5 ms·

The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News

65 points by dxs 10mo ago

DivingForGold 10mo ago
. . . It became increasingly clear that some form of censorship, whether through subtle slowing or outright blocking, does seem to be a recurring issue on the Hacker News platform . . .
techbrovanguard 10mo ago
None of this is surprising, YC is as incestuous as the rest of the industry. Still, it’s worth calling out. This submission will likely be nuked, too.
BoredPositron 10mo ago
We’ve reached a point where people cannot tolerate differing ideologies or something trivial like tase in coffee anymore. This fosters a tribal mentality. By providing a moderation system that allows users to suppress disagreeable content, you’re essentially facilitating censorship. I’m unsure of the solution, and at this point, I’ve lost interest in finding one. With bot armies left and right there is just no place left for open communities.
- metadope 10mo ago
  > you’re essentially facilitating censorship. Yes, please. I want the facility to censor. I want and need to exercise it all the time. I start with the headline, taking one full second of my time and attention. Not interested? Skip it (censored). I'll never know what lied (lay) within. So be it. Content? I might load one or two of the first 30 pages pointed to by /active, but I'll rollover first, and my personal censor will often reject loading of certain sites, based solely on their URLs. Comments, finally... active pages get the most comments, and there's a lot to learn here, so it's often worth the effort and the time to segregate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. This requires the usual selective reading: the first sentence of the first paragraph determines whether the rest of the graph will be consumed, parsed into a gist, or skip the rest. Only slow down for recognized experts (or inherent/exhibited expertise). Build a quick TL;DR as you scan, backtrack if you find a nugget. Panning for gold! Not censorship based on 'a tribal mentality' but a pure self-interest in not wasting the limited time I have at my disposal. Wanting knowledge and insight and perspective, not willing to slog through regurgitated shittalking. > We’ve reached a point where people cannot tolerate Exactly.
  - BoredPositron 10mo ago
    Pretty unhinged and unrelated but you do you.
    - metadope 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - BoredPositron 10mo ago
        [flagged]
  - leephillips 10mo ago
    I’m bored with AI posts so I made a tool to automate some of the censorship for me: https://hn-ai.org/ https://hn-ai.org/
  - t-3 10mo ago
    Discrimination - what you practice in selectively reading and choosing articles - is not the same as censorship at all. Discrimination is personal. Censorship stops other people from seeing things.
korse 10mo ago
I think a whole lot of people forget that this is a discussion board run by a venture capital group. I agree with the post, but don't find it surprising. If you have problems with companies these guys are invested in, probably find a different platform that they don't run? Seriously, we could do this on IRC without hard gatekeeping...
- pavel_lishin 10mo ago
  You say gatekeeping like it's a bad thing; I wonder how much spam gets blocked by automated systems here.
  - korse 10mo ago
    This article doesn't relate to spam prevention as far as I can tell. The author is concerned that content which would be valuable to the 'tech-scene' by virtue of demonstrable ability to gain traction quickly is being suppressed due to site owners wanting to avoid damaging their investments.
- ssl-3 10mo ago
  > Seriously, we could do this on IRC without hard gatekeeping... I mean: We're all free to have a drink from the proverbial firehose any time we want. It's right over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
ssl-3 10mo ago
The linked blog post is a complaint about a different blog post[1] being briefly popular on HN and then dropping off into the weeds rapidly, becoming flagged, and mysteriously becoming unflagged. Obviously, this must the result of proactive, willful censorship or maybe some kind of deep-state conspiracy. By extension, it could never have been the result of HN's automated flamewar detector reacting to 29 of the 145 comments being from just one user who seemed to spend most of their efforts telling others that they were wrong. (That user may in fact be authoritative on the topic, but it looks like a flamewar from my own 10,000-foot overview of this discussion that I have zero personal interest in.) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309
- the-anarchist 10mo ago
  You are right with that you say about the "29 of the 145 comments being from just one user", in the post that you linked. However, the complaint the author made was not related to the post that you linked. The flagging and unflagging occurred on this post [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667615
  - ssl-3 10mo ago
    Within this blog post on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 is hyperlinked, verbatim, as "the post in question". Was there some other aspect to this blog post under this article under this very posting, here, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46312812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46312812, that is more in question -- perhaps one that I missed? Did I not read deep-enough into the rant? (If I did not, then I'm really not sure how much I care. But I do suspect that my care is approximately zero for the output of someone who very deliberately puts overtly-patronizing, browser-fucking shit like this on their blog: https://imgur.com/a/bOkSsd4 https://imgur.com/a/bOkSsd4 )
scoofy 10mo ago
The idea that there will ever be a platform with overhead costs that is completely free from censorship is a pipe dream. That platform is called literally just going outside and yelling.
thegrim000 10mo ago
I mean, the real steering force is the fact that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all stories on HN come from the same ~20 power users whose accounts post a dozen stories every single day of every single year to the site. Last time I ran AI sentiment analysis over the stories from those accounts, it classified over a third of them as either breaking HN's posted guidelines or as being "extremely" political in nature. And yet the mods are seemingly fine with the situation.
mixmastamyk 10mo ago
The author links to a previous post with graphs with the answer. Roughly, there’s a controversy flag that gets enabled when comments are greater than upvotes, with limits. Looks like that’s what happened to the author’s posts. I’ve seen this happen to many interesting posts and not a big fan, but this is connected to a business after all.

65 points by dxs 10mo ago

. . . It became increasingly clear that some form of censorship, whether through subtle slowing or outright blocking, does seem to be a recurring issue on the Hacker News platform . . .

techbrovanguard 10mo ago

None of this is surprising, YC is as incestuous as the rest of the industry. Still, it’s worth calling out. This submission will likely be nuked, too.

BoredPositron 10mo ago

We’ve reached a point where people cannot tolerate differing ideologies or something trivial like tase in coffee anymore. This fosters a tribal mentality. By providing a moderation system that allows users to suppress disagreeable content, you’re essentially facilitating censorship. I’m unsure of the solution, and at this point, I’ve lost interest in finding one. With bot armies left and right there is just no place left for open communities.

metadope 10mo ago
> you’re essentially facilitating censorship. Yes, please. I want the facility to censor. I want and need to exercise it all the time. I start with the headline, taking one full second of my time and attention. Not interested? Skip it (censored). I'll never know what lied (lay) within. So be it. Content? I might load one or two of the first 30 pages pointed to by /active, but I'll rollover first, and my personal censor will often reject loading of certain sites, based solely on their URLs. Comments, finally... active pages get the most comments, and there's a lot to learn here, so it's often worth the effort and the time to segregate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. This requires the usual selective reading: the first sentence of the first paragraph determines whether the rest of the graph will be consumed, parsed into a gist, or skip the rest. Only slow down for recognized experts (or inherent/exhibited expertise). Build a quick TL;DR as you scan, backtrack if you find a nugget. Panning for gold! Not censorship based on 'a tribal mentality' but a pure self-interest in not wasting the limited time I have at my disposal. Wanting knowledge and insight and perspective, not willing to slog through regurgitated shittalking. > We’ve reached a point where people cannot tolerate Exactly.
- BoredPositron 10mo ago
  Pretty unhinged and unrelated but you do you.
  - metadope 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - BoredPositron 10mo ago
      [flagged]
- leephillips 10mo ago
  I’m bored with AI posts so I made a tool to automate some of the censorship for me: https://hn-ai.org/ https://hn-ai.org/
- t-3 10mo ago
  Discrimination - what you practice in selectively reading and choosing articles - is not the same as censorship at all. Discrimination is personal. Censorship stops other people from seeing things.

korse 10mo ago

I think a whole lot of people forget that this is a discussion board run by a venture capital group. I agree with the post, but don't find it surprising. If you have problems with companies these guys are invested in, probably find a different platform that they don't run? Seriously, we could do this on IRC without hard gatekeeping...

pavel_lishin 10mo ago
You say gatekeeping like it's a bad thing; I wonder how much spam gets blocked by automated systems here.
- korse 10mo ago
  This article doesn't relate to spam prevention as far as I can tell. The author is concerned that content which would be valuable to the 'tech-scene' by virtue of demonstrable ability to gain traction quickly is being suppressed due to site owners wanting to avoid damaging their investments.
ssl-3 10mo ago
> Seriously, we could do this on IRC without hard gatekeeping... I mean: We're all free to have a drink from the proverbial firehose any time we want. It's right over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

ssl-3 10mo ago

The linked blog post is a complaint about a different blog post[1] being briefly popular on HN and then dropping off into the weeds rapidly, becoming flagged, and mysteriously becoming unflagged. Obviously, this must the result of proactive, willful censorship or maybe some kind of deep-state conspiracy. By extension, it could never have been the result of HN's automated flamewar detector reacting to 29 of the 145 comments being from just one user who seemed to spend most of their efforts telling others that they were wrong. (That user may in fact be authoritative on the topic, but it looks like a flamewar from my own 10,000-foot overview of this discussion that I have zero personal interest in.) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309

the-anarchist 10mo ago
You are right with that you say about the "29 of the 145 comments being from just one user", in the post that you linked. However, the complaint the author made was not related to the post that you linked. The flagging and unflagging occurred on this post [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45667615
- ssl-3 10mo ago
  Within this blog post on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309 is hyperlinked, verbatim, as "the post in question". Was there some other aspect to this blog post under this article under this very posting, here, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46312812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46312812, that is more in question -- perhaps one that I missed? Did I not read deep-enough into the rant? (If I did not, then I'm really not sure how much I care. But I do suspect that my care is approximately zero for the output of someone who very deliberately puts overtly-patronizing, browser-fucking shit like this on their blog: https://imgur.com/a/bOkSsd4 https://imgur.com/a/bOkSsd4 )

scoofy 10mo ago

The idea that there will ever be a platform with overhead costs that is completely free from censorship is a pipe dream. That platform is called literally just going outside and yelling.

thegrim000 10mo ago

I mean, the real steering force is the fact that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all stories on HN come from the same ~20 power users whose accounts post a dozen stories every single day of every single year to the site. Last time I ran AI sentiment analysis over the stories from those accounts, it classified over a third of them as either breaking HN's posted guidelines or as being "extremely" political in nature. And yet the mods are seemingly fine with the situation.

mixmastamyk 10mo ago

The author links to a previous post with graphs with the answer. Roughly, there’s a controversy flag that gets enabled when comments are greater than upvotes, with limits. Looks like that’s what happened to the author’s posts. I’ve seen this happen to many interesting posts and not a big fan, but this is connected to a business after all.