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Ask HN: Do you think HN's censoring bring anything to the table?

4 points by Istof 12y ago

ColinWright 12y ago
Would you care to be explicit about the censorship to which you refer? Can you give specific examples and back it up with concrete data? Personally, I'm not sure what you might be thinking of ...
- Istof 12y ago
  by censoring, I mean any action by HN admins that are meant to decrease visibility of comments and/or stories
  - yaur 12y ago
    Comments are voted down by other users, not site admins. You don't get this privilege until you have shown yourself to be a good member of the community. This is the one of the key mechanisms that elevates discussions here. Most stories die because they get flagged by users. Duplicates, things that are boring, plagiarized, etc. Interesting links almost always get submitted multiple times, so it isn't a huge loss to the site if one of them dies unfairly. Stories can get demoted of the front page by triggering "flame war" like behavior. This is fine IMO because it keeps otherwise reasonable people from feeding the trolls, while the trolls are likely to keep trolling each other (and burning karma) out of public view. The moderator does review at least some of these and fixes the demotion if necessary. Stories can be manually demoted if deemed "not interesting" by the site admins. This could be problematic, but from what I've seen it is used rarely and reasonably. There is a proposed thing called "pending comments" which I'm not a huge fan of. I think the tools we have today are good enough and that it unnecessarily burdens the new user experience. IMO people who post low quality comments already get punished by the community at a sufficient level that they either improve or leave. Note that this is theoretical since we haven't seen what this feature looks like in practice. I do wish there was some more concrete guidance on how the moderation tools were meant to be used (flagging stories specifically) but in those cases you just use the tools cautiously until you have a better understanding of community norms. Note that I have no affiliation with Hacker News or YCombinator and this solely represents my personal opinions.
  - ColinWright 12y ago
    The comment[0] by yaur[1] pretty much says it all, and gets to the heart of why I was asking the questions I did. You seem convinced that there is some nefarious, under-handed, and sinister censorship going on, whereas most of what I see is adequately explained by the published mechanisms of voting and flagging. What makes you think there is deliberate skullduggery in play? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7827383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7827383 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yaur https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yaur
    - Istof 12y ago
      I often see an admin posting a comment saying that they are burying a story (or marking a story as dead, I forgot the exact wording) because they don't agree with it... don't tell me that you have never seen it before? I will repost my question when I see it happening again and I will include examples, thanks for your input.
      - ColinWright 12y ago
        I've seen it - dang[0] does it regularly. It's not censorship - it's curation, and so far every instance I've seen I've agreed with. That's why I asked if you could provide specific examples that you don't agree with. In particular, look at these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826943 In both cases the posts were explicitly unkilled - the opposite of censorship. I'm going off-line now, but I'll see any replies in the morning. To answer your question, my feeling is that, in general and overall, the actions of the moderators are having a positive effect in the quality both of submissions and discussions. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang
        Istof 12y ago
        If the curation process was based on very specific rules, I guess I would not call it censoring.
yaur 12y ago
Most of the top stories here end up on another site I visit, but here we have thoughtful discussions on the topic even if its controversial where over there it devolves into religious wars, stupid jokes, and trolling within about 5 minutes. The difference is not the stories, the difference is that the moderation system encourages a different kind of discourse. or, if you prefer the low quality version: Yes. Next question.
px1999 12y ago
A few months ago, there was a time where a measurable percentage (like 25-50%) of the stories on the first news page were btc-related. The topics weren't that interesting (stuff like directly linking to peculiar transactions on the blockchain with no critique etc). The feed returned to normal quite abruptly so I'd assume that there was some censorship around bitcoin-related topics (and I think I've read comments in the past that indicate this to be the case). If this was censorship by HN, then yes, I think it brings a lot to the table. It prevents small groups of fanatics from ruining the site for everyone by promoting their niche interest to excessive levels (which results in lower quality comments anyways).

4 points by Istof 12y ago

Would you care to be explicit about the censorship to which you refer? Can you give specific examples and back it up with concrete data? Personally, I'm not sure what you might be thinking of ...

Istof 12y ago
by censoring, I mean any action by HN admins that are meant to decrease visibility of comments and/or stories
- yaur 12y ago
  Comments are voted down by other users, not site admins. You don't get this privilege until you have shown yourself to be a good member of the community. This is the one of the key mechanisms that elevates discussions here. Most stories die because they get flagged by users. Duplicates, things that are boring, plagiarized, etc. Interesting links almost always get submitted multiple times, so it isn't a huge loss to the site if one of them dies unfairly. Stories can get demoted of the front page by triggering "flame war" like behavior. This is fine IMO because it keeps otherwise reasonable people from feeding the trolls, while the trolls are likely to keep trolling each other (and burning karma) out of public view. The moderator does review at least some of these and fixes the demotion if necessary. Stories can be manually demoted if deemed "not interesting" by the site admins. This could be problematic, but from what I've seen it is used rarely and reasonably. There is a proposed thing called "pending comments" which I'm not a huge fan of. I think the tools we have today are good enough and that it unnecessarily burdens the new user experience. IMO people who post low quality comments already get punished by the community at a sufficient level that they either improve or leave. Note that this is theoretical since we haven't seen what this feature looks like in practice. I do wish there was some more concrete guidance on how the moderation tools were meant to be used (flagging stories specifically) but in those cases you just use the tools cautiously until you have a better understanding of community norms. Note that I have no affiliation with Hacker News or YCombinator and this solely represents my personal opinions.
- ColinWright 12y ago
  The comment[0] by yaur[1] pretty much says it all, and gets to the heart of why I was asking the questions I did. You seem convinced that there is some nefarious, under-handed, and sinister censorship going on, whereas most of what I see is adequately explained by the published mechanisms of voting and flagging. What makes you think there is deliberate skullduggery in play? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7827383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7827383 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yaur https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yaur
  - Istof 12y ago
    I often see an admin posting a comment saying that they are burying a story (or marking a story as dead, I forgot the exact wording) because they don't agree with it... don't tell me that you have never seen it before? I will repost my question when I see it happening again and I will include examples, thanks for your input.
    - ColinWright 12y ago
      I've seen it - dang[0] does it regularly. It's not censorship - it's curation, and so far every instance I've seen I've agreed with. That's why I asked if you could provide specific examples that you don't agree with. In particular, look at these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826943 In both cases the posts were explicitly unkilled - the opposite of censorship. I'm going off-line now, but I'll see any replies in the morning. To answer your question, my feeling is that, in general and overall, the actions of the moderators are having a positive effect in the quality both of submissions and discussions. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang
      - Istof 12y ago
        If the curation process was based on very specific rules, I guess I would not call it censoring.

yaur 12y ago

Most of the top stories here end up on another site I visit, but here we have thoughtful discussions on the topic even if its controversial where over there it devolves into religious wars, stupid jokes, and trolling within about 5 minutes. The difference is not the stories, the difference is that the moderation system encourages a different kind of discourse. or, if you prefer the low quality version: Yes. Next question.

px1999 12y ago

A few months ago, there was a time where a measurable percentage (like 25-50%) of the stories on the first news page were btc-related. The topics weren't that interesting (stuff like directly linking to peculiar transactions on the blockchain with no critique etc). The feed returned to normal quite abruptly so I'd assume that there was some censorship around bitcoin-related topics (and I think I've read comments in the past that indicate this to be the case). If this was censorship by HN, then yes, I think it brings a lot to the table. It prevents small groups of fanatics from ruining the site for everyone by promoting their niche interest to excessive levels (which results in lower quality comments anyways).