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Hilarious that the original article was flagged off the front page, but this one isn't... I find it very disheartening that the negative voices are being given
by swombat 13y ago
Hilarious that the original article was flagged off the front page, but this one isn't...
I find it very disheartening that the negative voices are being given so much weight. Everything that's worth doing will have detractors, and when it's something really worth doing it will have vocal detractors. Back when I had comments on my blog, every article I wrote that was any good had at least one person commenting that I was a moron or some equivalent statement.
Great things arouse passion - on both sides.
Giving 10x the power to the people on the negative side just creates an environment where new ideas are discouraged, where important but difficult discourse is pushed aside, where things of true import are penalised out of the group's attention by a few detractors.
There does need to be a system for flagging and removing spam articles, but if this system can (as it plainly regularly is) be co-opted to remove articles from sight just based on not liking them much, then it is broken. The people who have flagging powers are not responsible enough to use them wisely, perhaps.
I see at least one simple solution: lift the flagging privileges so it only becomes available to a much smaller segment of the population. Perhaps making the limit 10'000 instead of 500 would do that. That would still include hundreds of people, based on a quick extrapolation from https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders ). An even better model would be to make it dynamic - perhaps the top 200 commenters...
- baking 13y agoWait until 9am or 40 comments, whichever comes first.
- 001sky 13y agoHN commenters have shown enough restraint !
- jamesbritt 13y agoWhich 9am?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ximeng 13y agoOr open up the system more and allow people to add their own algorithms to weight how they want not how pg wants.
- obsession 13y agoYeah. I really would like to see a version of HN where there are no arbitrary penalties applied.
- eksith 13y agoBut we all already have that. Browse here : https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest with show dead and viola! You have a raw feed with no penalties.
- krapp 13y agoThe problem is there are opaque, global filters which appear abritrary, not that they can be ignored to a degree.
- pbreit 13y agoThat's not helpful. What night be nice is a URL with the voting and time factors but not the penalties.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- napoleond 13y agoI just built this: http://news-yc.appspot.com/ http://news-yc.appspot.com/ It pulls https://www.hnsearch.com/bigrss https://www.hnsearch.com/bigrss and re-sorts it with the basic formula (but without penalties). If people like it/return to it I'll clean up the UI for better readability/mobile use (and display comments there instead of linking back to HN). EDIT: Interestingly, without penalties it looks like this thread would no longer be on the front page.
- pg 13y agoWe don't let users abuse flagging. We have software that identifies users who flag excessive numbers of stories, and we take away their ability to flag.
- pearjuice 13y agoI sometimes downvote or flag stuff to take account of correctional inflation.
- jamesbritt 13y agoI believe, though, that flagging something that ends up popular can count against you.
- ars_technician 13y agoThat sounds like an impressive way to create an echo chamber of opinions. "Looks like what you said isn't what other people believe so you shall be punished!"
- jamesbritt 13y agoYes, it seems so. If you get caught on the wrong side of some upvote mob you lose. Whatever; this is what the oweners want and it's a silly thing in the grand scheme of things.
- larrys 13y agoCurious if the software would also weigh a person who never flags higher or just what you are describing.
- nkurz 13y agoIs the option visibly removed, or are the 'flags' silently ignored? When I post something I try go through a few pages of 'newest' and flag spam, but this makes me worry I'm wasting my time.
- kogir 13y agoJust for the record, it was neither flagging nor manual moderation that caused it to drop off.
- nh 13y agoso just like comedy, timing is everything?
- gress 13y agoWhat was it then?
- pg 13y agoIt set off the voting ring detector.
- gress 13y agoWas it a false alarm?
- ssclafani 13y agoVotes made from an article's direct link (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854) don't count towards its rank and too many of them will set of the voting ring detector (this is why it's a bad idea to link directly to a HN submission from your blog or from Twitter/Facebook). This is probably what happened here.
- Zaephyr 13y agoWait...what? I am not suppose to upvote from the article page but the main pages? I know I'm new here, but I find that counter-intuitive and disappointing that I've been doing wrong. Wouldn't it make sense to remove the upvote option on the article page, surely I'm not the only one who got this wrong (I hope).
- larrys 13y ago"every article I wrote that was any good had at least one person commenting that I was a moron or some equivalent statement." Presenting a polarizing opinion (non circumspect) is a great way to get people involved and commenting. For example, which would get more activity: "No programmer should use perl!" "Why I personally don't use perl" "Perl and CGI routines"
- socillion 13y agoOn the topic of flamewars causing removal of articles, the difficulty, IMO, is that an entry on HN is composed of both an article and comments. Flamewars have terrible comment quality, so even if the article is upvote-worthy, it can mean the spot on HN is better occupied by something with a less interesting story but better comments. As to flagging, I think a bigger problem is activism-upvoting, in other words upvoting so others see a story and not because it's interesting. If you don't trust the average user with flagging powers because of how they affect the front page, why do you trust them to upvote good articles onto the front page? Clearly only select users should be able to upvote articles.
- snowwrestler 13y agoI tend to flag any article that is about analyzing, optimizing, or gaming Hacker News. It's just a website for people to talk to each other and share links. Trying to out-think the algorithms is, to me, a smell for cynical PR or at best misplaced priorities.
- marshray 13y agoYeah whatever you do, don't let us read anything about anyone out-thinking our algorithms. The algorithms will save us. Over optimization is the root of all evil. Smart people are dangerous.
- kbenson 13y agoI've often wondered about the possibility of gaming HN through it's participants. For example, pre-emptively down-voting yourself from a second account early on in a busy article, possibly with a reply using that second account noting you don't know why anyone would feel the need to down-vote that...
- booyaa00 13y agoI think it's also funny that some people are under the delusion that sites like this and reddit, are actually controlled by the 'voters', and that everyone has the same power. They're not. They're controlled by editors who will place items where they want to. For me, the worst part of hacker news is the silent banning if you are critical of any YC funded startup. Censorship is ugly, but it happens routinely.