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"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. Se

by spcoll 12y ago

"Snowden", "NSA", and similar keywords are auto-flagging triggers. The HN team has algorithms in place to minimize discussion and awareness of these topics. See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... "It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".

nashashmi 12y ago
Which is why they should be upvoted again and again.
virtuabhi 12y ago
I thought you are being smart-ass/sarcastic with saying that "Snowden" and "NSA" attract a penalty. I wonder how much %age of users know about the penalty system. I predict that it is a very small number. Personally, I am very disappointed after knowing this information. I hope, at the very least, the homepage should have a disclaimer saying that the links are not a collective effort by the community but rather a filtered list by administrators.
AceJohnny2 12y ago
More specifically, HN tries to avoid inflammatory topics that cause a lot of ultimately fruitless discussion ("flamewars"), typically identified by news items with more comments than votes. Political topics are frowned upon for causing this. I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on
- whyever 12y ago
  > I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics Well, the effect is still the same, isn't it? > it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on That seems contradictory. If I recall correctly, I've heard the mods explicitly say that they also like non-tech/web/startup topics.
- john_b 12y ago
  The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this discussion is in the best interest of HN because developers on the whole are obviously passionate about the issue and will be a part of how it evolves in the future, one way or another. I get HN's policy and the reasoning behind it; I just think it's wrong. Not all important discussions are constructive, and not all constructive discussions are important.
  - hueving 12y ago
    >because developers on the whole Careful. You are projecting here. This is the very reason that these topics get penalties. When it comes to politics, people assume that everyone must fall on a side and have strong feelings about a given topic. A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone with stories related to these topics and it turns a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it. They can't say they don't care because that's seen as being ignorant to people that are passionate so it just alienates them.
    - nickysielicki 12y ago
      >that's seen as being ignorant. Not having a valid counter-argument to being accused of apathy, is ignorance.
      - hueving 12y ago
        You missed the whole point. It doesn't matter whether or not the person actually is ignorant when it comes to the topic. If someone doesn't want to waste the limited time in their life arguing about this stuff, they don't have to. When every other article is related to it, it's pretty exclusionary.
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      > A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone > a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it talk about projecting. i'm sure it was super democratic and indeed the voice of the people that got an NSA/snowden filter put in place and how robin hood of you to spring to its defence.
- dang 12y ago
  > mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on No, that's incorrect. The first thing the site guidelines say is: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. There's no question of the Snowden stories being off-topic. The issue is purely one of balance. The right principle seems to me to be that articles with significant new information are more HN-appropriate than those without it.
sliverstorm 12y ago
Do you remember when every other article on the HN frontpage was about one of the two? Not that they are unimportant subjects, but it wasn't Hacker News anymore, it was NSA News. As other replies to you have mentioned, the discussion surrounding those articles were vitriolic and heavily partisan, to boot.
virtuabhi 12y ago
Does this penalty acts on comments too? Or, is it limited to only submissions? Now I don't know if this comment thread is (currently) at the bottom of the page because of +/- votes or a ploy to stifle discussion on NSA and Snowden.
lawnchair_larry 12y ago
HN mods have more recently said that penalty was temporary and no longer applies. No way of knowing though.
dang 12y ago
There hasn't been any penalty on NSA/Snowden stories for a long time. I'm surprised to see this even come up, since I've commented on it quite a bit and thought the information had gotten around by now. "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we ever want to, or even think that way. The reason there was a penalty—the mildest possible—was procedural. For several months after the Snowden news broke, HN's front page was overrun with copycat stories that were simply follow-ups and added no new information. Many users complained about this, and they were right. So we applied the best tool we had available, with the intention of taking it off when the flood died down, and so we eventually did.
- TillE 12y ago
  The discussions got very redundant, but I don't recall many duplicate articles. Early on, there was a ton of information being released every few days, and of course a lot of drama with Snowden himself. I don't see how a blanket penalty works better than manually removing the small number of genuinely pointless articles.
  - dang 12y ago
    This depends on how you define "duplicate". I said "copycat", meaning the plethora of follow-up stories that invariably appear when something big happens that don't include any new information, but either report on what has already been reported or are garden-variety commentary. Obviously, HN's front page doesn't have room for all of those. If you think that there aren't many of them, we must be working with different data. It's true that during the initial period there were major revelations coming out every few days. But I was talking about later.
    - Galacticus 12y ago
      You are a bunch of PC busybodies who whine incessantly. The moderation, hidden bans, all very childish. Grow up.
- ChrisAntaki 12y ago
  > "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we ever want to, or even think that way. The higher up on Hacker News an article is, the more awareness will typically be allocated to the story. If a story drops from the front page, significantly less attention will be allocated to it. While the penalties might not have been intended to minimize awareness of these stories in the greater scheme of things, they were certainly meant to minimize awareness of the stories on Hacker News.

by spcoll 12y ago

nashashmi 12y ago

Which is why they should be upvoted again and again.

virtuabhi 12y ago

I thought you are being smart-ass/sarcastic with saying that "Snowden" and "NSA" attract a penalty. I wonder how much %age of users know about the penalty system. I predict that it is a very small number. Personally, I am very disappointed after knowing this information. I hope, at the very least, the homepage should have a disclaimer saying that the links are not a collective effort by the community but rather a filtered list by administrators.

AceJohnny2 12y ago

More specifically, HN tries to avoid inflammatory topics that cause a lot of ultimately fruitless discussion ("flamewars"), typically identified by news items with more comments than votes. Political topics are frowned upon for causing this. I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on

whyever 12y ago
> I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics Well, the effect is still the same, isn't it? > it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on That seems contradictory. If I recall correctly, I've heard the mods explicitly say that they also like non-tech/web/startup topics.
john_b 12y ago
The obvious counterargument to HN's policy is that the developers building the next generation of web services should be able to openly discuss mass surveillance and how our present technology enables it. And that, furthermore, this discussion is in the best interest of HN because developers on the whole are obviously passionate about the issue and will be a part of how it evolves in the future, one way or another. I get HN's policy and the reasoning behind it; I just think it's wrong. Not all important discussions are constructive, and not all constructive discussions are important.
- hueving 12y ago
  >because developers on the whole Careful. You are projecting here. This is the very reason that these topics get penalties. When it comes to politics, people assume that everyone must fall on a side and have strong feelings about a given topic. A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone with stories related to these topics and it turns a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it. They can't say they don't care because that's seen as being ignorant to people that are passionate so it just alienates them.
  - nickysielicki 12y ago
    >that's seen as being ignorant. Not having a valid counter-argument to being accused of apathy, is ignorance.
    - hueving 12y ago
      You missed the whole point. It doesn't matter whether or not the person actually is ignorant when it comes to the topic. If someone doesn't want to waste the limited time in their life arguing about this stuff, they don't have to. When every other article is related to it, it's pretty exclusionary.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    > A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone > a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it talk about projecting. i'm sure it was super democratic and indeed the voice of the people that got an NSA/snowden filter put in place and how robin hood of you to spring to its defence.
dang 12y ago
> mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on No, that's incorrect. The first thing the site guidelines say is: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. There's no question of the Snowden stories being off-topic. The issue is purely one of balance. The right principle seems to me to be that articles with significant new information are more HN-appropriate than those without it.

sliverstorm 12y ago

Do you remember when every other article on the HN frontpage was about one of the two? Not that they are unimportant subjects, but it wasn't Hacker News anymore, it was NSA News. As other replies to you have mentioned, the discussion surrounding those articles were vitriolic and heavily partisan, to boot.

virtuabhi 12y ago

Does this penalty acts on comments too? Or, is it limited to only submissions? Now I don't know if this comment thread is (currently) at the bottom of the page because of +/- votes or a ploy to stifle discussion on NSA and Snowden.

lawnchair_larry 12y ago

HN mods have more recently said that penalty was temporary and no longer applies. No way of knowing though.

dang 12y ago

There hasn't been any penalty on NSA/Snowden stories for a long time. I'm surprised to see this even come up, since I've commented on it quite a bit and thought the information had gotten around by now. "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we ever want to, or even think that way. The reason there was a penalty—the mildest possible—was procedural. For several months after the Snowden news broke, HN's front page was overrun with copycat stories that were simply follow-ups and added no new information. Many users complained about this, and they were right. So we applied the best tool we had available, with the intention of taking it off when the flood died down, and so we eventually did.

TillE 12y ago
The discussions got very redundant, but I don't recall many duplicate articles. Early on, there was a ton of information being released every few days, and of course a lot of drama with Snowden himself. I don't see how a blanket penalty works better than manually removing the small number of genuinely pointless articles.
- dang 12y ago
  This depends on how you define "duplicate". I said "copycat", meaning the plethora of follow-up stories that invariably appear when something big happens that don't include any new information, but either report on what has already been reported or are garden-variety commentary. Obviously, HN's front page doesn't have room for all of those. If you think that there aren't many of them, we must be working with different data. It's true that during the initial period there were major revelations coming out every few days. But I was talking about later.
  - Galacticus 12y ago
    You are a bunch of PC busybodies who whine incessantly. The moderation, hidden bans, all very childish. Grow up.
ChrisAntaki 12y ago
> "Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we ever want to, or even think that way. The higher up on Hacker News an article is, the more awareness will typically be allocated to the story. If a story drops from the front page, significantly less attention will be allocated to it. While the penalties might not have been intended to minimize awareness of these stories in the greater scheme of things, they were certainly meant to minimize awareness of the stories on Hacker News.