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Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time (2024)
- gerikson 9mo ago(2024) Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513
- ramb2 9mo agoReading that, I feel bad for dang. It sounds like HN relies on automated flamewar detection and not-immediately-moderated flagging and voting that doesn’t work that well for hot threads or poor user behavior. I’ve been visiting since the late 2000s and have felt for some time that HN was really ADHD in its topics in the frontpage and that things frequently are unfairly flagged or voted down. PG used to say something to the effect of “use humans to scale until you automate properly”; obviously the moderation needs human help.
- adornKey 9mo agoThe question is if humans are any better. Usually mentioning anything about doing proper epidemiology (e.g. analysing COVID numbers), or anything modern about atmosphere physics and climate-modelling gets taken down everywhere within 24 hours - by humans. Mathematics and physics is something a lot of people don't like and really love to take down. Idiots censoring experts is a real problem. This place here has less idiots, but outnumbering experts with stupidity is something that works everywhere.
- pixl97 9mo agoA random sampling of humans might be better. The problem with people that want to take things down and cause problems is they are not random. Brigaders, marketing agencies with an agenda, nation state propaganda teams, groups with religious motivations, idiots that have been propagandized to and think they are fighting the good war, all of these tip the scales away from user voting being useful on forums.
- adornKey 9mo agoCurrent systems are indeed very vulnerable to professional manipulation - there is no real defence yet - and there are powerful players. But democratic sampling won't help much. Only the wrong guys are interested in voting - and once mass hysteria has set in any democratic majority will vote to censor anything that brings them out of their panic loop. Witch hunting lasted for hundreds of years. I think just tagging things accordingly would be a lot better than raw censorship. In good old places of Usenet just tagging things as Spam worked quite well. Just filtering out some tags and putting some guys in a kill-file was good enough. But it required manual labour - and eventually that was too much. But with AI now I think tagging could be done efficiently. If people like to filter out all the tags (sarcasm, math, physics, ...) they can have it - but the way how things work now is that a lot of important information just gets censored by stupid people everywhere. Just hiding information from everybody is quite harmful - being seriously uninformed already killed a lot of people...
- pixl97 9mo agoOne problem with tagging is how much false tagging bullshit happens. You can't trust the posters to put correct tags, but you cannot also expect malicious users not to put false tags to hide stories from others. I've also always hated binary up/down voting systems. Slashdot had it better with meta moderation where you had a few options to choose from. I suppose now with AI I could mock up a UI concept I call orange slice voting. Instead of a singular up/down vote, you get what looks like a orange sliced across its equator where each segment has a series of positive and negative vote options and the user gets one selection per post. "I like this content", "I believe this is true", "Fits this thread", "Good post", and "Misinformation", "I don't like this content", "doesn't fit this thread", "etc" These can be adjusted for a site as needed and gives more dimensions for people to search and filter by.
- adornKey 9mo agoI wouldn't trust users for tagging. Let the AI tag things and let the users select what flavour of AI they want to use. The biggest problem are the people. Especially people interested in tagging are really bad. Sane people have a life and don't have time for things like that. Web forums with a reputation system have proven that power users with a lot of reputation usually are the worst. After Usenet died it was like the trolls went to web forums, and as power users they were granted admin rights.
- leosanchez 9mo ago> it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news. Not hard to believe at all. While I don't flag any posts. I have no interest in LLM related content. I also actively use AI tools btw. It's just tiring seeing everything with AI suffix including monitors.
- kotaKat 9mo agoLooks like a majority of it’s all politics and LLMs. I think we’re all as a collective tired of both and want something ‘interesting’ for once to post.
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoI get that. And if an LLM story disappears from the front page—oh well. I'll defend the political stories though. For me, all the other places out there that vend politics are truly awful. While a political post lingers briefly on the HN front page, I find I actually learn something from the comments. If there are shit-posts in the discussion, they are quickly "dead". More often though there are (seemingly) reasoned debates about the issues in the comments. I appreciate (what I am embarrassed to call) a more intellectual discussion on politics than I have been able to find anywhere else. (Embarrassed because I'm walking a fine line trying not to appear to cast the discussions as "elitist". Or maybe I am an elitist, who knows.)
- homeonthemtn 9mo agoNah, politics is a cancer that's infected everything. Let the addicts get their fix someplace else
- b40d-48b2-979e 9mo agoHand-waving everything as "politics" is not healthy. It's necessary for us to be able to make collective decisions on societal questions which is what "politics" are.
- matsemann 9mo agoIn the january archive [0] I can't find this flagged story [1]. Was it already fallen off when flag-killed? Or doesn't it catch these? So many important tech related debates lately being silenced by mass flagging. Luckily they remain in https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active (I feel like "everything" is now "political" and thus not wanted here. Since Musk for instance now is a political figure, one cannot discuss X even when not a partisan topic about X. Or when some guy does big swoops that affect tech world wide, it's also not possible to discuss here. And I miss it, because I think HN is full of great people and I would like your take on these events.) [0]: https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals/blob/main/OLD/ARCHIVE-2026-01.md https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals/blob/ma... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503199
- pixl97 9mo ago>everything" is now "political" Old tech nerds area surprised that technology took over the world and drives politics and want to hide their head in the sand. Now, every article being political does suck, and we should probably drip feed it on the site, so the technology itself it what is primarily talked about, but ignoring it all together is dangerous.
- orthecreedence 9mo agoYeah, a bunch of Randian anarcho-capitalists-turned-fascist gain immense amount of power through tech, but any mention of "Hmm, maybe this is a bad idea??" gets "SSSHHHH!! No politics, please!!"
- dfxm12 9mo agoIn a sense, "everything" is "political", and always has been. It's practically a given, since politics is literally about governing our lives, technical standards, industry regulations, etc. A ton of news, especially that worth discussing, happens within this lens. Now, if, for example, HN allows stories about twitter to be killed opaquely and selectively, this is a political act in and of itself & the selection is telling.
- cj 9mo agoThank you Dang and team for your moderation efforts. You’ve done a remarkably good job maintaining the quality of the community - we appreciate you.
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago+1, I would pay for HN because of Dan, Tom, et al.
- bookofjoe 9mo agoConcur
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoThank you for your service!
- bookofjoe 9mo agoWhere do I send my $?
- PlatoIsADisease 9mo agoSomehow it got better over the years as typically moderation gets worse. Maybe Dang got sick of Apple too, because there was a heavy hand on anything anti-Apple at one point.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- frm88 9mo ago+1 This. Consigned.
- beardyw 9mo ago"An Unfolding Scientific Revolution in Cosmology" seems to be uncontentious in itself but that it is on economicsfromthetopdown.com raises a question about why it is there at all. Also there seems to be little that is newsworthy in it.
- AreShoesFeet000 9mo agoAnd yet it’s an excellent article and shatters scientific dogmatism some what like Nietzsche took a big dump on c10y.
- mmooss 9mo ago> there seems to be little that is newsworthy in it. Newsworthiness is not a criteria, officially; it's intellectual curiosity. A FPP could talk about Newton's Laws, which would not be newsworthy.
- smusamashah 9mo agoSomewhat related, I use this script to see which posts are new on frontpage. Also shows rank change but I don't look at that anymore. https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/e7c9ed3936ba69e522f8cb38671f1da7 https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/e7c9ed3936ba69e522f8cb38...
- oriettaxx 9mo agouh, found several mines :) sometime I have the feeling having a username that ends with "xx" does not help much :)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- xnorswap 9mo agoI browse HN too much, I recognised most the removals as simply recent duplicates.
- afavour 9mo agoI’m glad the flagging system exists on HN but I think it could do with improvements. I think it would be interesting to be able to see how many flags an item has gotten and who has flagged it. There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc) despite those topics generating a lot of discussion. It would be interesting to have clearer visibility into whether this kind of thing is spontaneous or whether there is a core group of power users censoring topics they dislike.
- mooxie 9mo agoAgreed. While I really value HN's commitment to not becoming Reddit, the intersection of politics and tech (and their effects on our lives) is indisputable. If we can't talk about the government's use of technology as a tool of the state without it being considered a 'hot button' topic - especially considering the relevance that politics have always had to 'hackers' - then this is really just a site for discussions about technology fluff.
- giraffe_lady 9mo agoThe biggest example of this is on military stuff. You can literally post northrup grumman placed articles from military trade journals fawning over some new weapon system and that's fine, that's technology. But any comment about the applications of that technology, who it will be used on, by whom, for whose benefit, with what consequences, all of that is off limits. That's political. I fully understand that this is a legitimate preference of a lot of people. But it is revolting.
- tastyface 9mo agoDifferent caliber, but same thing happens with Grok. New Grok release? Fun, exciting, let’s all talk about it. Well-researched articles describing Grok’s alignment with far-right/white supremacist politics and clear evidence of Musk’s thumb on the scale? Nothing to see here, flag flag flag. Oh look, it’s Grokipedia! Surely this will be a font of well-sourced information! Sigh.
- glimshe 9mo agoHacker News has a silent majority that works tirelessly to keep this site relatively free of ads disguised as articles and political news. I hope it stays that way. I'm just completely tired of those political echo chamber articles, even when I happen to agree with them.
- jackyinger 9mo agoWhat if there was a way for the “silent majority” (or something like it) to discuss political issues free of the impetus to polarization? Surely that would be a lot better than echo chambers. Hackernews style apoliticism strikes me as wanting to chameleon to whatever side is perceived as winning the political game. I think it’s a nihilistic stance. We need to be able to be political without the zealotry. Politics, of all things, is not a zero sum game.
- ACCount37 9mo agoPolitics is the mind killer. A near-total ban on the whole thing is easier to implement and enforce than trying to make online discussions of politics not suck, when their natural state seems to be to suck big time. Is it impossible to maintain a civilized discussion of hot topic political issues? No. But it's not a solved problem, or anywhere near. I respect the "keep the incendiary stuff off the front page" policy.
- jackyinger 9mo agoIt seems to me you think of politics as being the politics of the sensationalist 24 hour news cycle. Sure, that is a mind killer. But I encourage you to take a look at politics as a broader thing. Read some academic, foundational political philosophy works. Politics in its broad sense is inescapable. Better to know it and be an active participant than to leave it up to others.
- ACCount37 9mo agoYou start by allowing "politics as a broader thing", flash forward a year, then you notice that at any given time, at least 20% of the frontpage is occupied by people screeching their throats raw with some incendiary hyper-partisan rhetoric. The failure mode is rather obvious, and also extremely hard to avoid in practice.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo agoI wish HN would add something in the page that indicates that flags were turned off for a post.
- giraffe_lady 9mo agoYes, the moderators are in effect editors of a news media site with heavy social elements. Editorial decisions about articles should be handled differently from content moderation of user comments. There is a lot of editorial involvement (tweaking titles, hand placing articles on the front page, flag removal) but almost no transparency or communication. Sometimes a pinned comment from dang but that's it. These actions aren't nefarious or anything but like, is there a policy? Or is it just if a mod happens to see something and they happen to feel like tweaking it, they do. There are actual (varying, but something) standards professionals follow on this stuff, or at least convincingly pretended they did until pretty recently. HN's editors don't take the site as seriously at it deserves or needs for its stature, influence, and subject matter.
- keepamovin 9mo agoI feel like if you are not making this page at least once or twice a year you are not trying hard enough to think outside "da box".
- ks2048 9mo agoI never understood the "flag" option on HN. Usually "flag" means to flag as inappropriate - porn, obvious spam, etc. But, is it meant to be used as "downvote"? i.e. "I don't want to see this topic" or "I disagree with this opinion?". I guess the equivalent here is just lack of an upvote? There seems to be a variety feedback that mean different things... e.g. sometimes I would like to say "I strongly disagree with this opinion", but I don't want to say "This shouldn't be on HN".
- ryandrake 9mo agoThat's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page. HN has a little "| hide |" button under each article that you can click if you don't want to see the article. I wish people just used that and moved on. The only reason you'd flag is if you don't want other people to see the article.
- __turbobrew__ 9mo agoI don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago> I don’t think I have ever downvoted or flagged anything. I actually enjoy reading stuff which is controversial or against the grain, even if I don’t agree. Unfortunately voting here seems to be like reddit where you are really voting if you agree with the opinion, and then power users can just nuke your post/comments if they don’t like what you say. I so much agree with this being one of the biggest issues in Hackernews in my opinion. (I love hackernews but this has genuine impact where genuine posts can get flagged just because it might be negative but that just feels like very much so censorship in some part) and whenever people mention why flagged? people say the moderation's bad and everything (I admit I must have said this once or twice too when getting angry why posts are getting flagged left and right) & then people mention how moderation's not the fault and its always been this way or similar & we just get really tangential. The real reason probably seems to be this instead. We probably need some net negative in case someone intentionally flags something like if they flagged a post (>4 hours) and moderators find that they flagged incorrectly, just have it be visible that they flagged such post. If there was a genuine mistake, I am sure that moderators will be able to do so but we won't really go around then with people flagging anything or everything that they don't like (some of which might be political news)
- xcvxvdf 9mo ago[dead]
- charles_f 9mo agoPublishing to GitHub using git is a very interesting mechanism, crafty and hacky, love it!
- xve 9mo agoOk, so let's think about this. If we were to make a "hacker news for politics", how would we do that? It would have to be moderated, what would be the rules? Who wants to do it?
- carlosjobim 9mo agoLook no further than to your parliament / congress / senate debate. They probably have a +5 hour session from today for you to listen to. Enjoy!
- xve 9mo agoyeah, but where can the fine minds of hn comment on these debates other than the void?
- carlosjobim 9mo agoYou just have to get yourself elected first in order to post or comment in parliament.
- k310 9mo agoTech and politics are now entangled. Techies make choices, often not smart ones. Most would jump at the chance to make "a few dollars more" on people-exploiting projects than beneficial enabling ones. I tried, and never crossed that line. I advocated open source but never contributed. That was probably good for open source. I'm trying to be objective here, while the thread does go fiesta politico at times. I participate at two sites, both heavily moderated, in order to learn and to do good when possible. It's additive. Bullshit and rage are subtractive.