8 ms·

That article was not flagged off the frontpage. It set off the flamewar detector. As for recoiledsnake, that is one of many accounts created by a group or ind

by pg 13y ago

That article was not flagged off the frontpage. It set off the flamewar detector. As for recoiledsnake, that is one of many accounts created by a group or individual who is either an astroturfer or indistinguishable from one. Part of his/her/their m.o. is to talk constantly about there being an anti-Microsoft conspiracy on HN. Sometimes he/she/they would use multiple, separate accounts in the same thread.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Thanks for the clarification. I admit that I still don't know how Hackernews works, and that opacity leads to confusion. This is the first time I took something like this personal on HN, and I have been here for awhile. It might be nice to mark why article have been killed so we don't go off and make the wrong assumptions about what happened.
iamshs 13y ago
Thank you for the clarification, appreciated. Yes, that thread was a flamewar in one way or another, and unfortunately it was a product that took the brunt. About, recoiledsnake I would not know much except his posts.
lessnonymous 13y ago
So the article might be useful to people building businesses in the tech space, but because some users decided to air their petty grievances in the _comments_ to that story, the story itself got buried? Seems like the flamewar detector would be better aimed at closing comments rather than burying stories.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  I like the flamewar detector removing the whole story. As PG has said in the past, flamewars aren't interesting and they do nothing but divide the community. Keeping the story on just causes more drama because the users with comments deleted end up replying asking where their comments went and then start crying about anti-Americanism and the right to comment on a private website ad infinitum. It's pointless.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    On the other hand, if you are large-ish and organized, it provides an easy avenue to take down stories you don't like without the paper-trail of flagging...
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      Considering these flamewars typically involve at least one person who admits to being a Microsoft employee, I don't think that "false-flags flamewars" is something that we are seeing in practice.
      - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        Actually, the flamewar involved no one claiming to be an MS employee. I only commented after the submission was killed. But feel free to believe anything that reinforces your existing beliefs.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Well you are certainly participating in this one.....
  - lessnonymous 13y ago
    Sorry .. I did not intend to imply the flamewar detector was going to delete anyone's comment. It was going to do one of two things: 1. Turn off comments 2. Turn off comments and hide all comments to date. You can't have it electing to remove one comment or another. At most it could delete a top level comment that was the spawn of the flamewar. But still, I say hide all comments and turn off further comments. That way we still get the benefit of the story.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      > 1. Turn off comments A few days ago, on the topic of turning off comments when there is a flamewar, instead of knocking the entire post down/off the front page, I said this: "[killing the discussion entirely] is a good thing, if something is on the front page then comments should be enabled, if only in case something in the article desperately needs to be corrected. If we get a post on here about a new study suggesting that vaccines may cause autism, that would almost certainly generate a flamewar but the absolute last thing we would want is for the post to remain on the front page and not permit anyone to post comments that may refute claims made by the study. In situations like those, it is better to kill the discussion and to take the post off the frontpage than to leave it there but disable commenting."
sillysaurus2 13y ago
Sometimes he/she/they would use multiple, separate accounts in the same thread. Is it possible they post from work, and hence share the same IP address with other HN posters? Microsoft is a big place.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  I often get locked out of Google and Stackoverflow for "botting" from work when its obvious I'm just a casual user. I think this has something to do with the way the proxy is setup.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  This is PG. If he doesn't think it is just a bunch of well-meaning commenters coincidentally behind the same NAT, then I am inclined to believe him. Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? I stay the fuck out of it. I think that is good policy, unless participating in those discussions is part of your job description. Best case scenario here: a bunch of well-meaning Microsoft employees got into an internet fight, got mistaken for a sockpuppet ring, and got a discussion about their company pushed off of HN? If that's in their job description, I don't know why they're still getting paid; if it isn't, maybe they should consider spectating next time.
  - Anderkent 13y ago
    > Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? I stay the fuck out of it. That's a shame, since as an employee you have an unique and very valuable perspective on the company. Why not participate, perhaps add a disclaimer?
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      I understand that perspective, but what I know is either public knowledge, or behind a few NDAs. Furthermore, my employer politely asks that I don't, and I'd rather not anyway. Online PR, no matter how unofficial, isn't something that I am comfortable with.
rpenm 13y ago
There is a perverse incentive here. If commenters can push an article off the front page by flaming, the flamewar detector would actually encourage flaming.
- mistercow 13y ago
  I think that maintaining a community like this is really a dynamic process, so while it's important to make note of bad incentive situations for the future, it's not necessarily the best choice to correct them prematurely. In theory, your reasoning sounds right. In practice, that's probably not happening right now, so the mechanism still serves its purpose with only the (presumably considered acceptable) expected collateral damage. The important thing with a situation like that is to be ready to kill the feature as soon as people learn how to exploit it. It's one thing to see that it's theoretically exploitable. It's another to actually figure out how to selectively engineer flame wars to make a significant dent in the front page.
- pg 13y ago
  It would be a risky strategy because those commenters could get banned.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    But unlike flagging, there is no minimum karma requirement to get involved in a flame war, right?
  - lmkg 13y ago
    Risky for real commenters who care about their presence on HN. Effectively consequence-free for astroturfers.
    - belorn 13y ago
      New accounts can be handled differently by the flame war flamewar detector than established accounts. That is, if this is a actually problem and not only a theoretical one.
napoleond 13y ago
It would be neat if the flamewar detector buried threads instead of entire submissions. It could work the same way as hellbanning, where the users involved would have no idea that no one else could see their posts, except it would be local to the thread in question. (Ideally, it wouldn't even hide the entire thread, it would just stop showing new posts from the users involved after a certain "flamewar" threshold--that way there wouldn't be the possibility of burying someone's legitimate commentary by starting a flamewar with them.)
cwoods 13y ago
Looks like recoiledsnake's reply is here. http://pastebin.com/gRHH0LFG http://pastebin.com/gRHH0LFG
marze 13y ago
Would you say you are catching 20%, 80%, or an unknown number of PR/shill type accounts on HN? Given the size of the PR industry and the relatively low cost of posting on forums where influential people hang out I would think HN would be a tempting target, although it would have to be a sophisticated effort to go undetected.
redthrowaway 13y ago
Speaking of the flamewar detector, I'm curious: what's the balance to be struck between discouraging flamewars (or encouraging civility) and discouraging groupthink? If certain topics are in effect verboten due to the types of discussions they tend to breed, does that not induce a sort of hivemind effect that reinforces prevailing views? For example, if articles on Microsoft tend to get driven off the front page, while articles on Apple dominate it, that presents the appearance of the HN community being pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft, which affects the types of submissions and comments that are made, which affects the types of views people feel comfortable expressing, and eventually the types of people who choose to participate. The end result is that the community actually is more pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft, and the cycle intensifies until something close to homogeneity is reached. As desirable as it is to discourage low-signal discussion threads, is there any thought given to the side effects of doing so?
- bad_user 13y ago
  People that think this community is pro-Apple should stick around some more. This is the only place were I'm constantly seeing Apple (and Google) badmouthed with good arguments. Personally I hate Apple's products and most of my anti-Apple rhetoric received up-votes. I've seen plenty of Microsoft related stories, but if Microsoft tends to be driven off the front page, maybe it's because Microsoft is totally uninteresting and some Microsoft proponents behave like shills, especially because they bitch and moan about the lack of interest in Microsoft, as if it's some kind of conspiracy or as if it's our duty to have an interest in Microsoft.
  - xgarland 13y ago
    Agreed. The cry for attention from the Microsoft community is becoming a bit annoying, especially on HN.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      Says the new account just created :)
throwawaykf 13y ago
Huh, maybe cooldeals and recoiledsnake were the same entity; looks like both stopped commenting at exactly the same time. But the more salient point is, were he/she/they completely wrong in their accusations? Were all the examples he/she/they presented of articles dropping off the frontpage just instances of flamewar detection, or natural HN ranking at work, or something else?
credo 13y ago
Ironically, this submission is at #8 even though it has 290 points and was submitted just 4 hours ago Meanwhile the #2 item was submitted 5 hours and it only has 90 points. IMO anyone who observes HN reaction to any Microsoft topic (that isn't a virulently anti-Microsoft submission) knows that these topics will get pushed down to the back pages. In some cases, the reason may be flagging, in other cases, it may be the flamewar reason (that pg cites above) Regardless of the reasoning, it is unfortunate that pg is unwilling to admit that this is a problem (and unfortunately, he does also reflect the thinking of most HNers). Fwiw in terms of disclosure, I was an SDE, then dev-lead at Microsoft in the 90s/00s and dev-manager for a few years later on, but I left the company in 2007 and since then, I've been running the company I founded.
- dlss 13y ago
  > it is unfortunate that pg is unwilling to admit that this is a problem I think pg thinks there is a problem, and is almost surely willing to admit it. I think he just doesn't see a way of solving it that doesn't involve the discussions here on HN becoming flamewars... Which is also a serious problem... This looks to me very much like a doctor prescribing a drug with unfortunate side effects. You still do it, but you're also keeping an eye out for new drugs that don't cause as many headaches.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - blueblob 13y ago
    Good point. It's an error tradeoff between detecting too many false flamewars and not detecting enough flamewars. It might be kind of interesting to study the effects in terms of bias on the actual reported articles vs the submitted articles.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  Ironically, this submission is at #8 even though it has 290 points and was submitted just 4 hours ago This is a selfpost, and selfposts are automatically penalized. I.e. it's an invalid comparison, because the #2 item is a link to a URL, whereas this post isn't. Selfposts require many more votes to keep pace with URL submissions.
a1a 13y ago
Flamewar detector sounds like a bad solution IMO. Why not warning/banning system to handle comments? As long as the argument is factual, without fallacies (and not subject to Poe's law), I would be glad if we could keep the discussions open even if people have radically different views. If you indeed insist on closing the comments on flamewar detection - good courtesy suggests keeping the comments open for public review. As for the conspiracy folk, why not make a multiple account detector and ban such folk?
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Not all factual discussions free of fallacy are productive. An Emacs user and I could easily talk past each other for hours.
mercurial 13y ago
> It set off the flamewar detector. This seems to be a recurring issue on HN, and a reliable generator of conspiracy theories. Would it be possible to have a small label signaling when a given article was flagged by the detector?

by pg 13y ago

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

Thanks for the clarification. I admit that I still don't know how Hackernews works, and that opacity leads to confusion. This is the first time I took something like this personal on HN, and I have been here for awhile. It might be nice to mark why article have been killed so we don't go off and make the wrong assumptions about what happened.

iamshs 13y ago

Thank you for the clarification, appreciated. Yes, that thread was a flamewar in one way or another, and unfortunately it was a product that took the brunt. About, recoiledsnake I would not know much except his posts.

lessnonymous 13y ago

So the article might be useful to people building businesses in the tech space, but because some users decided to air their petty grievances in the _comments_ to that story, the story itself got buried? Seems like the flamewar detector would be better aimed at closing comments rather than burying stories.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago
I like the flamewar detector removing the whole story. As PG has said in the past, flamewars aren't interesting and they do nothing but divide the community. Keeping the story on just causes more drama because the users with comments deleted end up replying asking where their comments went and then start crying about anti-Americanism and the right to comment on a private website ad infinitum. It's pointless.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  On the other hand, if you are large-ish and organized, it provides an easy avenue to take down stories you don't like without the paper-trail of flagging...
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Considering these flamewars typically involve at least one person who admits to being a Microsoft employee, I don't think that "false-flags flamewars" is something that we are seeing in practice.
    - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
      Actually, the flamewar involved no one claiming to be an MS employee. I only commented after the submission was killed. But feel free to believe anything that reinforces your existing beliefs.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        Well you are certainly participating in this one.....
- lessnonymous 13y ago
  Sorry .. I did not intend to imply the flamewar detector was going to delete anyone's comment. It was going to do one of two things: 1. Turn off comments 2. Turn off comments and hide all comments to date. You can't have it electing to remove one comment or another. At most it could delete a top level comment that was the spawn of the flamewar. But still, I say hide all comments and turn off further comments. That way we still get the benefit of the story.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    > 1. Turn off comments A few days ago, on the topic of turning off comments when there is a flamewar, instead of knocking the entire post down/off the front page, I said this: "[killing the discussion entirely] is a good thing, if something is on the front page then comments should be enabled, if only in case something in the article desperately needs to be corrected. If we get a post on here about a new study suggesting that vaccines may cause autism, that would almost certainly generate a flamewar but the absolute last thing we would want is for the post to remain on the front page and not permit anyone to post comments that may refute claims made by the study. In situations like those, it is better to kill the discussion and to take the post off the frontpage than to leave it there but disable commenting."

sillysaurus2 13y ago

Sometimes he/she/they would use multiple, separate accounts in the same thread. Is it possible they post from work, and hence share the same IP address with other HN posters? Microsoft is a big place.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
I often get locked out of Google and Stackoverflow for "botting" from work when its obvious I'm just a casual user. I think this has something to do with the way the proxy is setup.
jlgreco 13y ago
This is PG. If he doesn't think it is just a bunch of well-meaning commenters coincidentally behind the same NAT, then I am inclined to believe him. Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? I stay the fuck out of it. I think that is good policy, unless participating in those discussions is part of your job description. Best case scenario here: a bunch of well-meaning Microsoft employees got into an internet fight, got mistaken for a sockpuppet ring, and got a discussion about their company pushed off of HN? If that's in their job description, I don't know why they're still getting paid; if it isn't, maybe they should consider spectating next time.
- Anderkent 13y ago
  > Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? I stay the fuck out of it. That's a shame, since as an employee you have an unique and very valuable perspective on the company. Why not participate, perhaps add a disclaimer?
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    I understand that perspective, but what I know is either public knowledge, or behind a few NDAs. Furthermore, my employer politely asks that I don't, and I'd rather not anyway. Online PR, no matter how unofficial, isn't something that I am comfortable with.

rpenm 13y ago

There is a perverse incentive here. If commenters can push an article off the front page by flaming, the flamewar detector would actually encourage flaming.

mistercow 13y ago
I think that maintaining a community like this is really a dynamic process, so while it's important to make note of bad incentive situations for the future, it's not necessarily the best choice to correct them prematurely. In theory, your reasoning sounds right. In practice, that's probably not happening right now, so the mechanism still serves its purpose with only the (presumably considered acceptable) expected collateral damage. The important thing with a situation like that is to be ready to kill the feature as soon as people learn how to exploit it. It's one thing to see that it's theoretically exploitable. It's another to actually figure out how to selectively engineer flame wars to make a significant dent in the front page.
pg 13y ago
It would be a risky strategy because those commenters could get banned.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  But unlike flagging, there is no minimum karma requirement to get involved in a flame war, right?
- lmkg 13y ago
  Risky for real commenters who care about their presence on HN. Effectively consequence-free for astroturfers.
  - belorn 13y ago
    New accounts can be handled differently by the flame war flamewar detector than established accounts. That is, if this is a actually problem and not only a theoretical one.

napoleond 13y ago

It would be neat if the flamewar detector buried threads instead of entire submissions. It could work the same way as hellbanning, where the users involved would have no idea that no one else could see their posts, except it would be local to the thread in question. (Ideally, it wouldn't even hide the entire thread, it would just stop showing new posts from the users involved after a certain "flamewar" threshold--that way there wouldn't be the possibility of burying someone's legitimate commentary by starting a flamewar with them.)

cwoods 13y ago

Looks like recoiledsnake's reply is here. http://pastebin.com/gRHH0LFG http://pastebin.com/gRHH0LFG

marze 13y ago

Would you say you are catching 20%, 80%, or an unknown number of PR/shill type accounts on HN? Given the size of the PR industry and the relatively low cost of posting on forums where influential people hang out I would think HN would be a tempting target, although it would have to be a sophisticated effort to go undetected.

redthrowaway 13y ago

Speaking of the flamewar detector, I'm curious: what's the balance to be struck between discouraging flamewars (or encouraging civility) and discouraging groupthink? If certain topics are in effect verboten due to the types of discussions they tend to breed, does that not induce a sort of hivemind effect that reinforces prevailing views? For example, if articles on Microsoft tend to get driven off the front page, while articles on Apple dominate it, that presents the appearance of the HN community being pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft, which affects the types of submissions and comments that are made, which affects the types of views people feel comfortable expressing, and eventually the types of people who choose to participate. The end result is that the community actually is more pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft, and the cycle intensifies until something close to homogeneity is reached. As desirable as it is to discourage low-signal discussion threads, is there any thought given to the side effects of doing so?

bad_user 13y ago
People that think this community is pro-Apple should stick around some more. This is the only place were I'm constantly seeing Apple (and Google) badmouthed with good arguments. Personally I hate Apple's products and most of my anti-Apple rhetoric received up-votes. I've seen plenty of Microsoft related stories, but if Microsoft tends to be driven off the front page, maybe it's because Microsoft is totally uninteresting and some Microsoft proponents behave like shills, especially because they bitch and moan about the lack of interest in Microsoft, as if it's some kind of conspiracy or as if it's our duty to have an interest in Microsoft.
- xgarland 13y ago
  Agreed. The cry for attention from the Microsoft community is becoming a bit annoying, especially on HN.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Says the new account just created :)

throwawaykf 13y ago

Huh, maybe cooldeals and recoiledsnake were the same entity; looks like both stopped commenting at exactly the same time. But the more salient point is, were he/she/they completely wrong in their accusations? Were all the examples he/she/they presented of articles dropping off the frontpage just instances of flamewar detection, or natural HN ranking at work, or something else?

credo 13y ago

Ironically, this submission is at #8 even though it has 290 points and was submitted just 4 hours ago Meanwhile the #2 item was submitted 5 hours and it only has 90 points. IMO anyone who observes HN reaction to any Microsoft topic (that isn't a virulently anti-Microsoft submission) knows that these topics will get pushed down to the back pages. In some cases, the reason may be flagging, in other cases, it may be the flamewar reason (that pg cites above) Regardless of the reasoning, it is unfortunate that pg is unwilling to admit that this is a problem (and unfortunately, he does also reflect the thinking of most HNers). Fwiw in terms of disclosure, I was an SDE, then dev-lead at Microsoft in the 90s/00s and dev-manager for a few years later on, but I left the company in 2007 and since then, I've been running the company I founded.

dlss 13y ago
> it is unfortunate that pg is unwilling to admit that this is a problem I think pg thinks there is a problem, and is almost surely willing to admit it. I think he just doesn't see a way of solving it that doesn't involve the discussions here on HN becoming flamewars... Which is also a serious problem... This looks to me very much like a doctor prescribing a drug with unfortunate side effects. You still do it, but you're also keeping an eye out for new drugs that don't cause as many headaches.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- blueblob 13y ago
  Good point. It's an error tradeoff between detecting too many false flamewars and not detecting enough flamewars. It might be kind of interesting to study the effects in terms of bias on the actual reported articles vs the submitted articles.
sillysaurus2 13y ago
Ironically, this submission is at #8 even though it has 290 points and was submitted just 4 hours ago This is a selfpost, and selfposts are automatically penalized. I.e. it's an invalid comparison, because the #2 item is a link to a URL, whereas this post isn't. Selfposts require many more votes to keep pace with URL submissions.

a1a 13y ago

Flamewar detector sounds like a bad solution IMO. Why not warning/banning system to handle comments? As long as the argument is factual, without fallacies (and not subject to Poe's law), I would be glad if we could keep the discussions open even if people have radically different views. If you indeed insist on closing the comments on flamewar detection - good courtesy suggests keeping the comments open for public review. As for the conspiracy folk, why not make a multiple account detector and ban such folk?

jlgreco 13y ago
Not all factual discussions free of fallacy are productive. An Emacs user and I could easily talk past each other for hours.

mercurial 13y ago

> It set off the flamewar detector. This seems to be a recurring issue on HN, and a reliable generator of conspiracy theories. Would it be possible to have a small label signaling when a given article was flagged by the detector?