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What confuses me is why many submissions are killed off and hidden. For example, right now, if you click new is show dead on you will see this grayed out: 15.[
by alan_cx 13y ago
What confuses me is why many submissions are killed off and hidden. For example, right now, if you click new is show dead on you will see this grayed out:
15.[dead] Oracle's Larry Ellison enthusiastically applauds NSA spying (techeye.net)
1 point by Mitt 17 minutes ago | flag | discuss
I copy and paste it in to google, and find what looks to me like a reasonable article. It even has a CBS video source(1). It is a legit article and fits in HN guide lines. The submitter has a decent karma level too.
Why was it banned? Could one suggest that HN is protecting Larry Ellison from the likely criticism? Should I hold on to that, or will we get "openness", "transparency", and all the other things HN members seem to want from every one else?
Looking at these dead submissions makes HN look like one of the most oddly censored sites on the net. Many of them seem perfectly legitimate. Of course, I have no real idea how censored other sites are. Maybe we cant trust any one at all.
I'll tell members this: It would come as a real blow to find that a site and community one comes to trust, may not be trust-able after all. Title manipulation is bad enough, true, but what we have here is what we accuse others of, opaque censorship. With out frank explanation, I have to conclude that Hacker News is hypocritical.
Lastly, I do hope this isn't censored. Wouldn't that be ironic?
(1) http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57598390/tech-tycoon-larry-ellison-on-nsa-surveillance/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57598390/tech-tycoon-l...
"ROSE: Let me just hear you clearly. You were saying whatever the NSA's doing is okay with me?
ELLISON: It's great. I wish, you know, it's great. It's essential. By the way, President Obama thinks it's essential.
It's essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It's absolutely essential."
And, even if we disagree, its a reasonable position to take.
- jerf 13y agoSome sites are auto-banned. I wouldn't be surprised techeye.net is among them, based on a quick look at the home page. While this has the occasional false positive, there are reasons for most of them.
- vonmoltke 13y agoIt would be nice to know which sites those are, so we don't try to submit links to them. I submitted an article last week from i-programmer.info that went dead immediately. I assume this is the reason, but I was very confused as to what happened.
- teawithcarl 13y agoStrange that DemocracyNow.org is auto-banned. Just yesterday, they had a video interview with Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit. Excellent interviewed, yet banned at HN.
- alan_cx 13y agoOK, if it is some sort of aggressive automated system, I can at least understand it. At least its not necessarily a human political or ideological thing, to a point. If that is the case, then my request would be that its toned down, because to my eyes, it at least looks suspicious.
- kmfrk 13y agoLess "extreme" examples than an overtly political site are BuzzFeed and the Gawker network that - although they may suck at times - have some good contributions every now and then.
- Helianthus 13y agoHN has a moderation policy that is heavy-handed, overbearing, inconsistent, and pathetically ineffective at preventing the lowbrow discourse that such a policy is theoretically designed to eliminate. This is consistent with the site's elitist tendencies.
- awakeasleep 13y agoThere is an old latin saying like "the pot finds it's own herbs" which you can interpret like leaders gather those they want around them.
- swanson 13y agoYou are waaaay overthinking it. Probably was just flagged to death because people are getting overloaded with NSA stories, especially when there is no new additions. I would probably have flagged it if I saw it, doesn't really advance the discussion and frankly, I don't come to HN for politics.
- gbaygon 13y agoBe careful when flagging articles you are tired of seeing, apparently if your tastes are different to that of the watchmen the ability to flag gets removed from you.
- ynniv 13y agoWell that sounds down right democratic.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bhauer 13y agoalan_cx is not describing a scenario that fits with the explanation of being "flagged to death." Alan is speaking about the "new" page, where you will routinely see dead articles if you have showdead enabled. In fact, if you reload the new page frequently you can see many articles that become dead the moment (effectively) they are posted. This isn't flagging; it's an automatic mechanism. It may be an automatic mechanism informed by previous heavy flagging of other articles from the same domain or any number of other heuristics, but it happens too quickly for it to be the result of user action on the specific article. As far as I can tell, flagging affects the sorting algorithm for the home page (use of the user script "HN Slapdown" allows you to visualize each article's score versus its rank order, providing color coding to indicate heavily-flagged articles) but I have not in my admittedly short HN experience ever seen an article become dead as a direct result of flagging. I have my own misgivings about the rigid title-normalization policy so I appreciate him and the op taking the time to ask some questions.
- 13y ago
- antitrust 13y agoThe weird thing about online communities is that at some point they transition from being promotional opportunities owned by the promoter to online communities owned by the users and promoters alike.