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On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn
by Phlarp 13y ago
On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all and now you've come to find out that key words like "NSA" and "Snowden" have an automatic downvote penalty applied to them on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments from moderators on Hacker News, it seems the main problem is mods either ignore criticism of this policy or spew boilerplate non-denials about automated rank penalties for submissions with more comments than votes or a high number of comments in a small period of time indicating flame wars.
- danford 13y agoI agree. Any form of moderation that uses a blanket term to apply a penalty is horrible imo (except when it comes to blatant derogatory and inciteful terms). Perhaps a better way to do it would be to check if certain terms are already on the front page and only apply penalties to new posts with that term while a post with that term is on the front page. There are a ton of better ways than auto penalizing based on a blanket censorship system.
- pvnick 13y agoI agree with your (and the parent's) sentiment wholeheartedly, and I'm really upset that this has become the case here and on Reddit. The surveillance is a critical issue that should be talked about ad infinitum until adequately addressed. Instead we stick our head in the sand and self-censor to appease the people that don't care about it.
- Crito 13y agoPG has straight up admitted that there is classification of articles (automated or manual) and that penalties are applied to certain classifications, such as "political". There is no real denial. > "So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty applied. Or more precisly, they've been autotagged as being political, which entails a penalty." > "When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list that admins see. They decide either to kill it, mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934950
- Phlarp 13y agoJust because the mechanism for censorship is well meaning, excellently engineered and transparently implemented does not change the end effect.
- Crito 13y agoI'm not saying it's a good thing (for that matter, I'm not saying that it's bad either). I'm just pointing out that HN has been open that this is going on; it's not something that is denied or excused.