5 ms·

Hey dang, what's happening here?

by swombat 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
buro9 13y ago
This has happened a few times recently. It seems to be a new thing, that the front page is being editorialised. An example of dang whitelisting something to get what he feels should be on the front page on there (and past the various things that would block it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634603 And the criticism of Sam Altman's Barack Obama fundraiser at YC was silently removed the moment it became apparent that nearly all comments were negative. What we've seen in the last month is: 1) Things can be whitelisted and their place on the front page assured (skip filters and checks) 2) Things can be killed in a way that excludes them from the front page without leaving the item as [dead] (penalise in the placement algorithm) 3) Things can be silently removed (soft delete) And all of those things are happening. As a community we used to be able to rely on the fact that pg basically didn't get involved. And so we could trust that the front page reflected the community intent. That trust is being broken.
- JohnDeleted 13y ago
  Yep, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655595
- tptacek 13y ago
  The front page is better than it's been in years. If the trust is being broken, please, keep hitting it with whatever hammer it's being hit with. Your comment, on the other hand, is not so great. For instance, you've decided to put an inaccurate spin on Daniel's actions. What you call "whitelisting", Daniel calls "overriding the voting ring detector that you had no control over in the first place, and that you only know about because he told you it was there". This is all metadrama, of course, but this story is also worthless so a bit of meta here isn't going to kill us.
  - buro9 13y ago
    I'm not against anything that continues to change how and why things are placed on the front page in an effort to increase quality. But without transparency how are people going to learn from it and adapt (in what they upvote, submit, etc). If it happens silently, then those who comment on things as well as those who submit things are going to be left wondering why. You may consider this a positive on the line that "They're creating the wrong type of content", but not all of the content should be removed, sometimes the discussions are insightful and valuable even when the story itself wasn't.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Moderation on HN is more transparent now than it has ever been.
      - selmnoo 13y ago
        Not really. Rankbanning is still happening (from what I hear and observe from several high-profile HN users), slowbanning is still happening, hellbanning is still happening. That would all be fine, but this is increasingly happening with people who are not trolls. For example, jacquesm can't submit articles... we both know he's not a troll, and has no bad intentions, yet he's always getting dinged by HN.
        tptacek 13y ago
        No part of your comment responds to mine. Moderation under Paul Graham was entirely, completely, absolutely opaque. Nobody ever said hellbanning would go away, or that users wouldn't lose privileges. If people believe themselves to be "rankbanned" or "slowbanned", they can mail hn@ycombinator.com and be virtually assured that they'll get a personal, candid answer from the mod squad about what's going on. That's not as gratifying as snarking about it in public, though.
        selmnoo 13y ago
        > Moderation under Paul Graham was entirely, completely, absolutely opaque. That is not correct. Fairly often pg responded to questions about whether a post was getting flagged. Anyway, you're right that my comment wasn't really related to your original comment. I guess just the defensive tone of your comment set me off, because I keep seeing rampant censorship on HN, perhaps even more than before, and that irks me. > they can mail hn@ycombinator.com and be virtually assured that they'll get a personal, candid answer from the mod squad about what's going on. That's not as gratifying as snarking about it in public, though. So, the problem with jacquesm -- who has been publicly complaining about his inability to submit articles for a long time now, is that he just never emailed hn@ycombinator? That is a _necessary_ step to regain the ability to make submissions? I think in a healthy community it would not have been. I've known jacquesm for a long time now, he's a genuinely nice guy who's always willing to spare time to give tips on everything from programming to startups, he should not have had his submitting privileges revoked in the first place.
- kens 13y ago
  The front page has never been the raw "community intent". It's not just upvotes and time that control ranking. Other factors are sites that get automatically penalized, title words that get penalized, flagged articles, controversy penalty (which is likely to hit this article soon), articles that get marked as "fluff", and probably other factors. From my measurements (in 2013 before the latest changes), at least 20% of front-page articles and 38% of second-page articles were penalized, so there have always been a lot of invisible ranking changes. I wrote up details at http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
- dang 13y ago
  This statement couldn't be more false: > As a community we used to be able to rely on the fact that pg basically didn't get involved. PG was heavily involved, right from the beginning. The HN front page has always been a blend of user voting and curation. At no time, ever, was it determined by voting alone. Had it been, HN's quality would have been lower—because quality is only one of the reasons why people upvote stories—and HN would never have been HN. Other moderators, including me, worked with PG on this. I started in September 2012. One reason he took so long to hand over primary responsibility for HN, despite unsustainable demands on his time, is that he wanted to be sure that the moderators really grasped what he'd been doing all along. I'm thus in a position to assure you that we're not doing anything now that hasn't been done since basically forever—except that we're being a lot more transparent. Even that isn't a policy change (pg answered questions when he could) so much as a consequence of there being a dedicated team for the first time. It never occurred to me when I started posting these transparency comments that we'd get accused of making insidious changes to (paraphrasing) "how HN has always been", "breaking trust", and so on. But I understand how it could seem that way. There's an upside to being unobtrusive. When stuff just works, people can rely on it and focus on the topics at hand. That goes a long, long way (though it doesn't do so well when stuff doesn't just work). Edit: For some reason I didn't notice this earlier: > the criticism of Sam Altman's Barack Obama fundraiser at YC was silently removed the moment it became apparent that nearly all comments were negative That's not only completely false, it's a shameless misrepresentation that eats half the hope out of my soul. Nothing was "silent" [1] and nothing was "removed"—users flagged the posts and I personally rolled the penalty back at least four times. I said above that I could understand how one misconception might have arisen, but I can't understand this one; it seems devoid of even a grain of good faith. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612226 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623254
  - swombat 13y ago
    > That's not only completely false, it's a shameless misrepresentation that eats half the hope out of my soul. Nothing was "silent" [1] and nothing was "removed"—users flagged the posts and I personally rolled the penalty back at least four times. I said above that I could understand how one misconception might have arisen, but I can't understand this one; it seems devoid of even a grain of good faith. I have no opinion on that thread, as I didn't see it, but let me just say that this is a result of lack of transparency... what I referred to in my post a while back when your involvement was announced. When you care about a topic emotionally and it gets buried, and you don't know why, you tend to assume not the reasonable explanation, but the worst explanation. I've seen that reaction in myself, so it's not surprising to see it in others. If there had been some sign that the post was heavily flagged (hey, how about a flag counter?) and perhaps even a sign that you were rolling back the flag counter manually, buro would not have felt this way. I think one simple, obvious start to a solution might be to make the flag counter visible. Worth a try?
dang 13y ago
The story is being flagged by users as well as a relatively mild moderation penalty. The penalty makes it go slightly further down the front page; most of the action is by the user flags (edit: which have now buried the story altogether). This story is a good example—almost a litmus test—of what pg called "shallowly interesting" [1] and what davidw called "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions" [2]. I'm as shocked by the story as anyone, but it's essentially celebrity gossip (for some sort of "celebrity"), and that is off topic for Hacker News. This person is of little importance to this community (how many of us had heard of him before? surely very few), nor do the threads reveal insight into underlying phenomena. They're mostly about what a horrible person he is. So in terms of HN moderation practices, this doesn't seem like a borderline call. This is not to deny the obvious importance of the story to the people—most importantly the victim—affected by it. 1. http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495446
- swombat 13y ago
  Fair enough. Thank you very, very much for your effort at transparency. The above makes sense.
- danso 13y ago
  I think the underlying phenomena is pretty interesting and evident here. Part of the reason why this has blown up, besides the alleged abuse and his eventual guilty plea of course, is an entrepreneur who is drunk on his own Kool-Aid. How else could you explain his ill-informed decision to rant about this, in public, without even a proofreader, even though he's retained the services of high profile PR firms? This is an entrepreneur whose prominence and success was accelerated by the current dynamic in the tech industry, and his rise would be quite admired by most HNers here, especially at his young age, and he's apparently thought that makes him immune to the laws of public outreach and image. Besides this being a good lesson of how being an asshole is not the ideal way to success...it's also a good example of the machinations of our justice system. Wonder why the rich seem to have better outcomes than the poor? This guy's legal team did great wonders for him. If only his PR team was a bit better, he may be still CEO (deservedly or not).

Hey dang, what's happening here?

by swombat 13y ago

Hey dang, what's happening here?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

buro9 13y ago

This has happened a few times recently. It seems to be a new thing, that the front page is being editorialised. An example of dang whitelisting something to get what he feels should be on the front page on there (and past the various things that would block it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634603 And the criticism of Sam Altman's Barack Obama fundraiser at YC was silently removed the moment it became apparent that nearly all comments were negative. What we've seen in the last month is: 1) Things can be whitelisted and their place on the front page assured (skip filters and checks) 2) Things can be killed in a way that excludes them from the front page without leaving the item as [dead] (penalise in the placement algorithm) 3) Things can be silently removed (soft delete) And all of those things are happening. As a community we used to be able to rely on the fact that pg basically didn't get involved. And so we could trust that the front page reflected the community intent. That trust is being broken.

JohnDeleted 13y ago
Yep, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655595
tptacek 13y ago
The front page is better than it's been in years. If the trust is being broken, please, keep hitting it with whatever hammer it's being hit with. Your comment, on the other hand, is not so great. For instance, you've decided to put an inaccurate spin on Daniel's actions. What you call "whitelisting", Daniel calls "overriding the voting ring detector that you had no control over in the first place, and that you only know about because he told you it was there". This is all metadrama, of course, but this story is also worthless so a bit of meta here isn't going to kill us.
- buro9 13y ago
  I'm not against anything that continues to change how and why things are placed on the front page in an effort to increase quality. But without transparency how are people going to learn from it and adapt (in what they upvote, submit, etc). If it happens silently, then those who comment on things as well as those who submit things are going to be left wondering why. You may consider this a positive on the line that "They're creating the wrong type of content", but not all of the content should be removed, sometimes the discussions are insightful and valuable even when the story itself wasn't.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Moderation on HN is more transparent now than it has ever been.
    - selmnoo 13y ago
      Not really. Rankbanning is still happening (from what I hear and observe from several high-profile HN users), slowbanning is still happening, hellbanning is still happening. That would all be fine, but this is increasingly happening with people who are not trolls. For example, jacquesm can't submit articles... we both know he's not a troll, and has no bad intentions, yet he's always getting dinged by HN.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        No part of your comment responds to mine. Moderation under Paul Graham was entirely, completely, absolutely opaque. Nobody ever said hellbanning would go away, or that users wouldn't lose privileges. If people believe themselves to be "rankbanned" or "slowbanned", they can mail hn@ycombinator.com and be virtually assured that they'll get a personal, candid answer from the mod squad about what's going on. That's not as gratifying as snarking about it in public, though.
        selmnoo 13y ago
        > Moderation under Paul Graham was entirely, completely, absolutely opaque. That is not correct. Fairly often pg responded to questions about whether a post was getting flagged. Anyway, you're right that my comment wasn't really related to your original comment. I guess just the defensive tone of your comment set me off, because I keep seeing rampant censorship on HN, perhaps even more than before, and that irks me. > they can mail hn@ycombinator.com and be virtually assured that they'll get a personal, candid answer from the mod squad about what's going on. That's not as gratifying as snarking about it in public, though. So, the problem with jacquesm -- who has been publicly complaining about his inability to submit articles for a long time now, is that he just never emailed hn@ycombinator? That is a _necessary_ step to regain the ability to make submissions? I think in a healthy community it would not have been. I've known jacquesm for a long time now, he's a genuinely nice guy who's always willing to spare time to give tips on everything from programming to startups, he should not have had his submitting privileges revoked in the first place.
kens 13y ago
The front page has never been the raw "community intent". It's not just upvotes and time that control ranking. Other factors are sites that get automatically penalized, title words that get penalized, flagged articles, controversy penalty (which is likely to hit this article soon), articles that get marked as "fluff", and probably other factors. From my measurements (in 2013 before the latest changes), at least 20% of front-page articles and 38% of second-page articles were penalized, so there have always been a lot of invisible ranking changes. I wrote up details at http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
dang 13y ago
This statement couldn't be more false: > As a community we used to be able to rely on the fact that pg basically didn't get involved. PG was heavily involved, right from the beginning. The HN front page has always been a blend of user voting and curation. At no time, ever, was it determined by voting alone. Had it been, HN's quality would have been lower—because quality is only one of the reasons why people upvote stories—and HN would never have been HN. Other moderators, including me, worked with PG on this. I started in September 2012. One reason he took so long to hand over primary responsibility for HN, despite unsustainable demands on his time, is that he wanted to be sure that the moderators really grasped what he'd been doing all along. I'm thus in a position to assure you that we're not doing anything now that hasn't been done since basically forever—except that we're being a lot more transparent. Even that isn't a policy change (pg answered questions when he could) so much as a consequence of there being a dedicated team for the first time. It never occurred to me when I started posting these transparency comments that we'd get accused of making insidious changes to (paraphrasing) "how HN has always been", "breaking trust", and so on. But I understand how it could seem that way. There's an upside to being unobtrusive. When stuff just works, people can rely on it and focus on the topics at hand. That goes a long, long way (though it doesn't do so well when stuff doesn't just work). Edit: For some reason I didn't notice this earlier: > the criticism of Sam Altman's Barack Obama fundraiser at YC was silently removed the moment it became apparent that nearly all comments were negative That's not only completely false, it's a shameless misrepresentation that eats half the hope out of my soul. Nothing was "silent" [1] and nothing was "removed"—users flagged the posts and I personally rolled the penalty back at least four times. I said above that I could understand how one misconception might have arisen, but I can't understand this one; it seems devoid of even a grain of good faith. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612226 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623254
- swombat 13y ago
  > That's not only completely false, it's a shameless misrepresentation that eats half the hope out of my soul. Nothing was "silent" [1] and nothing was "removed"—users flagged the posts and I personally rolled the penalty back at least four times. I said above that I could understand how one misconception might have arisen, but I can't understand this one; it seems devoid of even a grain of good faith. I have no opinion on that thread, as I didn't see it, but let me just say that this is a result of lack of transparency... what I referred to in my post a while back when your involvement was announced. When you care about a topic emotionally and it gets buried, and you don't know why, you tend to assume not the reasonable explanation, but the worst explanation. I've seen that reaction in myself, so it's not surprising to see it in others. If there had been some sign that the post was heavily flagged (hey, how about a flag counter?) and perhaps even a sign that you were rolling back the flag counter manually, buro would not have felt this way. I think one simple, obvious start to a solution might be to make the flag counter visible. Worth a try?

dang 13y ago

The story is being flagged by users as well as a relatively mild moderation penalty. The penalty makes it go slightly further down the front page; most of the action is by the user flags (edit: which have now buried the story altogether). This story is a good example—almost a litmus test—of what pg called "shallowly interesting" [1] and what davidw called "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions" [2]. I'm as shocked by the story as anyone, but it's essentially celebrity gossip (for some sort of "celebrity"), and that is off topic for Hacker News. This person is of little importance to this community (how many of us had heard of him before? surely very few), nor do the threads reveal insight into underlying phenomena. They're mostly about what a horrible person he is. So in terms of HN moderation practices, this doesn't seem like a borderline call. This is not to deny the obvious importance of the story to the people—most importantly the victim—affected by it. 1. http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495446

swombat 13y ago
Fair enough. Thank you very, very much for your effort at transparency. The above makes sense.
danso 13y ago
I think the underlying phenomena is pretty interesting and evident here. Part of the reason why this has blown up, besides the alleged abuse and his eventual guilty plea of course, is an entrepreneur who is drunk on his own Kool-Aid. How else could you explain his ill-informed decision to rant about this, in public, without even a proofreader, even though he's retained the services of high profile PR firms? This is an entrepreneur whose prominence and success was accelerated by the current dynamic in the tech industry, and his rise would be quite admired by most HNers here, especially at his young age, and he's apparently thought that makes him immune to the laws of public outreach and image. Besides this being a good lesson of how being an asshole is not the ideal way to success...it's also a good example of the machinations of our justice system. Wonder why the rich seem to have better outcomes than the poor? This guy's legal team did great wonders for him. If only his PR team was a bit better, he may be still CEO (deservedly or not).