4 ms·

I'd love to see posts about how hacker news buries articles too. Some kind of analysis would be great.

by blazespin 11y ago

bad_user 11y ago
You'd love to see that because you've witnessed such instances, or because you like scandals?
- blazespin 11y ago
  I frequently see extremely interesting posts vanish from the front page. Maybe there should be a section on HN where we can review 'banned' posts.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Do you have any examples?
    - darkmighty 11y ago
      There was an interesting article a while ago on weird beliefs of some intelligent people. It really shows why 'intelligence' is a limited world and we shouldn't try mirroring beliefs of people (outside their area of expertise) because they're "smart". Great examples are Gödels beliefs of ghosts and paranormal activity; some older Nobel laureates turned to 'weird' (for the lack of a better word) ideas at some point in time; etc. Not cited in the article, Gödel also believed to have found a logical proof of the existence of God: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kurt_G.C3.B6del http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kurt_G.C3..... People got upset that religions got included it. I can understand the disagreement, but I can't understand the need to censor the discussion. Whether you believe it or not, it shouldn't be a stretch to concede that religion is weird, in some sense. It's completely outside our usual phenomena, and it's an arbitrary explanation for several questions, or maybe it's a relief. But it's as strange as it is interesting that so many people hold those beliefs. The original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525645
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        That was a ridiculous and divisive article. I'm not surprised it was penalised - controversial stories like this attract flamers and trolls - and that killed K5.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - lnanek2 11y ago
    You used to be able to set your preferences to see dead ones and browse sections like new, but now they've unlinked them, so there is no way to check any more. It's sad because the moderators around here tend to do a really terrible job, butchering titles to be less informative and other harmful actions, and this just makes them even less accountable.
    - jaredsohn 11y ago
      Used to? I can configure my account to see dead comments (and have), maybe this is different for newer accounts (but I've never heard this)? Also, I can see the new section when I browse incognito, so I'm not seeing what I think you are describing. Also, moderation has become a lot more transparent over the last year or so (see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang) and I cannot think of a site offhand that does a better job of this. Edit: My comments about moderation are related to the parent statement about how Hacker News often indicates why thread contents (such as the title) have changed.
      - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
        Nothing against HN, but you must not visit a lot of sites if you can't name one site that moderates better than HN. Lest we forget, there are several people who have been hellbanned for multiple years without any clue. They waste a significant portion of their life talking to nobody because the person who developed the site felt passive aggressive was better than just banning someone outright and preventing them from rejoining. With incognito mode checking if you're hellbanned is a five second operation, yet dang hasn't replaced that aspect of HN despite its futility and childishness. Most of those bans I've seen have been enough to make me cock an eyebrow, as well. When you get banned from a subreddit you are told, by the system, via private message. Reddit has user-level shadowbanning as well, but I've only ever seen it used when it was warranted, like doxxing -- here, some of the hellbanned comment histories mystify me. Reddit certainly has its own share of weirdness but in my opinion, /r/askscience (to use one example) has absolutely incredible moderation that makes HN pale in comparison.
    - DanBC 11y ago
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago
  Many have identified the "flag" link as a super downvote. I've seen stories fly off the front page in a matter of minutes less than an hour after being submitted due to flags. It definitely happens. More than once I've been in a comment thread where conversation dried up, and it is because the story got flagged to page 2 and beyond. I won't list topics but the usual suspects are fairly obvious. (I'm not complaining, but it's intriguing to me that this comment shot from +3 to 0 between refreshes.)
  - bad_user 11y ago
    From what I understood many articles are flagged automatically based on certain rules, like spotting attempts of gaming the voting system. Of course it can have false positives, but I don't think there's any malice involved here. And while I agree that there have definitely been instances of articles being buried due to miss-usage of the "flag" link (which is necessary IMHO) or to overzealous moderators flagging based on certain topics, I don't remember seeing censorship because of a conflict of interest with YCombinator. Of course, I could be wrong - I used to think that Slashdot wouldn't ban negative pieces on Sourceforge either.
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      OP said "HN buries articles" without qualifying that YC is involved, and my comment followed up on that aspect without resorting to conspiracy theories. You are reading my comment in the context of nearby offtopic conspiracy fodder and have, as a result, completely misjudged my point. You even repeated and agreed with the sole point I'm making.
- mahouse 11y ago
  Everybody likes scandals.
  - dsjoerg 11y ago
    I could give a rats hiney about scandals
- derefr 11y ago
  Or because if everyone's doing it, that probably indicates a necessary systematic game-theoretic incentive.
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    Far simpler: it's a fundamental flaw in voting sites.
    - derefr 11y ago
      That is what I said, yes. But not even a flaw (though it can be seen as one), so much as just something that has to happen—like the CAP theorem, or more analogous, Arrow's impossibility theorem.
- pen2l 11y ago
  There are precedents of HN doing funny things. E.g. they mess with rankings of comments. They'll often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of the comment thread (it's clear here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354815 - that a comment made after some 30 days of the submission is sent straight to the top). There have been precedents in which comment threads critical of Dropbox and Stripe were messed with. After a lot of these occurrences, they did something really smart: they instituted a policy change on HN that "HN is not a support service for YC companies" -- that if anyone has complaints, they should take it to YC companies themselves. Now, whether that is really a good-faith policy change or a clever ploy to cut down anti-YC talk, I'll leave that up to you.
  - dang 11y ago
    Re 7354815, what we did was reopen the thread past the editing window so a concerned user could post relevant new information—that a controversy involving his company had been settled. That was only fair, and we'd do the same for anyone. I've done similar things a couple times for other HN users who wrote in to ask, and will continue to, because I'd feel bad not to. It has nothing to do with YC. That was a unique case in my memory. "Often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of a thread" is pure fabrication. As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest. It's literally the first thing PG emphasized to me when explaining how to moderate HN. A recent example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622711. That class of outrage thread is something we routinely penalize, but we penalized this one less because it was about Airbnb. There's no way it would have stayed on the front page for hours otherwise.
    - pen2l 11y ago
      > As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest. I think strictly speaking that may be true, however I suspect the reason that that is is because of the precautions already taken by the HN software and HN operators, e.g. by rankbanning. When users who have voiced anti-YC sentiments are already rankbanned, for example, you don't even need to intervene, because those comments will already have sunk to the bottom. So I think you can probably successfully refute my individual points but the larger spirit of my assertion remains.
moonbug 11y ago
Check out Matthew Garrett mjg59
- DanBC 11y ago
  Check out what? Gawker is one banned site among a lengthy list of banned sites. Or are you hinting at something else?
  - moonbug 11y ago
    mjg, most well known as a kernel developer, has poked about in HN metrics, starting around about here: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/33551.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/33551.html
marijn 11y ago
Here it seems user-driven (people flagging articles that are entirely appropriate as way to suppress them), but the fact that this happens often and doesn't seem to be perceived as a serious problem by the site maintainers does deserve attention.
- krapp 11y ago
  Karma based voting is supposed to drive attention to the most popular stories and users, and away from everything else. It's possibly not seen as a serious problem because the system is working as intended.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    What would be "most popular" doesn't get a chance to be seen if a concerted minority flags certain kinds of articles, as it seems the parent post is suggesting.
    - krapp 11y ago
      Part of being popular on HN is not being controversial enough to be flagged. Even something as contextually neutral as a thread having more comments than upvotes will flag it. It is elitist and undemocratic, and intentionally so, although the staff has mentioned that they do try to counteract the downward bias of the site when they feel a story has merit.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Han buries links routinely (for example they buried the story on Hola yesterday), but they don't bury stories just because they are sponsors.
  - dang 11y ago
    > for example they buried the story on Hola yesterday Pretty sure that was because it was a dupe and that the original had massive discussion here. One pattern I've noticed is that a story will often break on HN early, before it hits the main tech press. A day or two later, when more mainstream posts start appearing, we get a new wave of submissions about the story. Anyone who didn't see the original will wonder why those are getting buried. In the current system, there's no good answer to this—other than that a few indomitable users post links to the original discussion. We do have some ideas about how to fix it more systematically.

I'd love to see posts about how hacker news buries articles too. Some kind of analysis would be great.

bad_user 11y ago

You'd love to see that because you've witnessed such instances, or because you like scandals?

blazespin 11y ago
I frequently see extremely interesting posts vanish from the front page. Maybe there should be a section on HN where we can review 'banned' posts.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Do you have any examples?
  - darkmighty 11y ago
    There was an interesting article a while ago on weird beliefs of some intelligent people. It really shows why 'intelligence' is a limited world and we shouldn't try mirroring beliefs of people (outside their area of expertise) because they're "smart". Great examples are Gödels beliefs of ghosts and paranormal activity; some older Nobel laureates turned to 'weird' (for the lack of a better word) ideas at some point in time; etc. Not cited in the article, Gödel also believed to have found a logical proof of the existence of God: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kurt_G.C3.B6del http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Kurt_G.C3..... People got upset that religions got included it. I can understand the disagreement, but I can't understand the need to censor the discussion. Whether you believe it or not, it shouldn't be a stretch to concede that religion is weird, in some sense. It's completely outside our usual phenomena, and it's an arbitrary explanation for several questions, or maybe it's a relief. But it's as strange as it is interesting that so many people hold those beliefs. The original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525645
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      That was a ridiculous and divisive article. I'm not surprised it was penalised - controversial stories like this attract flamers and trolls - and that killed K5.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- lnanek2 11y ago
  You used to be able to set your preferences to see dead ones and browse sections like new, but now they've unlinked them, so there is no way to check any more. It's sad because the moderators around here tend to do a really terrible job, butchering titles to be less informative and other harmful actions, and this just makes them even less accountable.
  - jaredsohn 11y ago
    Used to? I can configure my account to see dead comments (and have), maybe this is different for newer accounts (but I've never heard this)? Also, I can see the new section when I browse incognito, so I'm not seeing what I think you are describing. Also, moderation has become a lot more transparent over the last year or so (see https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang) and I cannot think of a site offhand that does a better job of this. Edit: My comments about moderation are related to the parent statement about how Hacker News often indicates why thread contents (such as the title) have changed.
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      Nothing against HN, but you must not visit a lot of sites if you can't name one site that moderates better than HN. Lest we forget, there are several people who have been hellbanned for multiple years without any clue. They waste a significant portion of their life talking to nobody because the person who developed the site felt passive aggressive was better than just banning someone outright and preventing them from rejoining. With incognito mode checking if you're hellbanned is a five second operation, yet dang hasn't replaced that aspect of HN despite its futility and childishness. Most of those bans I've seen have been enough to make me cock an eyebrow, as well. When you get banned from a subreddit you are told, by the system, via private message. Reddit has user-level shadowbanning as well, but I've only ever seen it used when it was warranted, like doxxing -- here, some of the hellbanned comment histories mystify me. Reddit certainly has its own share of weirdness but in my opinion, /r/askscience (to use one example) has absolutely incredible moderation that makes HN pale in comparison.
  - DanBC 11y ago
jsmthrowaway 11y ago
Many have identified the "flag" link as a super downvote. I've seen stories fly off the front page in a matter of minutes less than an hour after being submitted due to flags. It definitely happens. More than once I've been in a comment thread where conversation dried up, and it is because the story got flagged to page 2 and beyond. I won't list topics but the usual suspects are fairly obvious. (I'm not complaining, but it's intriguing to me that this comment shot from +3 to 0 between refreshes.)
- bad_user 11y ago
  From what I understood many articles are flagged automatically based on certain rules, like spotting attempts of gaming the voting system. Of course it can have false positives, but I don't think there's any malice involved here. And while I agree that there have definitely been instances of articles being buried due to miss-usage of the "flag" link (which is necessary IMHO) or to overzealous moderators flagging based on certain topics, I don't remember seeing censorship because of a conflict of interest with YCombinator. Of course, I could be wrong - I used to think that Slashdot wouldn't ban negative pieces on Sourceforge either.
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    OP said "HN buries articles" without qualifying that YC is involved, and my comment followed up on that aspect without resorting to conspiracy theories. You are reading my comment in the context of nearby offtopic conspiracy fodder and have, as a result, completely misjudged my point. You even repeated and agreed with the sole point I'm making.
mahouse 11y ago
Everybody likes scandals.
- dsjoerg 11y ago
  I could give a rats hiney about scandals
derefr 11y ago
Or because if everyone's doing it, that probably indicates a necessary systematic game-theoretic incentive.
- jsmthrowaway 11y ago
  Far simpler: it's a fundamental flaw in voting sites.
  - derefr 11y ago
    That is what I said, yes. But not even a flaw (though it can be seen as one), so much as just something that has to happen—like the CAP theorem, or more analogous, Arrow's impossibility theorem.
pen2l 11y ago
There are precedents of HN doing funny things. E.g. they mess with rankings of comments. They'll often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of the comment thread (it's clear here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354815 - that a comment made after some 30 days of the submission is sent straight to the top). There have been precedents in which comment threads critical of Dropbox and Stripe were messed with. After a lot of these occurrences, they did something really smart: they instituted a policy change on HN that "HN is not a support service for YC companies" -- that if anyone has complaints, they should take it to YC companies themselves. Now, whether that is really a good-faith policy change or a clever ploy to cut down anti-YC talk, I'll leave that up to you.
- dang 11y ago
  Re 7354815, what we did was reopen the thread past the editing window so a concerned user could post relevant new information—that a controversy involving his company had been settled. That was only fair, and we'd do the same for anyone. I've done similar things a couple times for other HN users who wrote in to ask, and will continue to, because I'd feel bad not to. It has nothing to do with YC. That was a unique case in my memory. "Often rank a pro-YC comment to the top of a thread" is pure fabrication. As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest. It's literally the first thing PG emphasized to me when explaining how to moderate HN. A recent example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9622711. That class of outrage thread is something we routinely penalize, but we penalized this one less because it was about Airbnb. There's no way it would have stayed on the front page for hours otherwise.
  - pen2l 11y ago
    > As I've explained many times, we intervene less, not more, when stories are anti-YC, precisely because of the conflict of interest. I think strictly speaking that may be true, however I suspect the reason that that is is because of the precautions already taken by the HN software and HN operators, e.g. by rankbanning. When users who have voiced anti-YC sentiments are already rankbanned, for example, you don't even need to intervene, because those comments will already have sunk to the bottom. So I think you can probably successfully refute my individual points but the larger spirit of my assertion remains.

moonbug 11y ago

Check out Matthew Garrett mjg59

DanBC 11y ago
Check out what? Gawker is one banned site among a lengthy list of banned sites. Or are you hinting at something else?
- moonbug 11y ago
  mjg, most well known as a kernel developer, has poked about in HN metrics, starting around about here: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/33551.html https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/33551.html

marijn 11y ago

Here it seems user-driven (people flagging articles that are entirely appropriate as way to suppress them), but the fact that this happens often and doesn't seem to be perceived as a serious problem by the site maintainers does deserve attention.

krapp 11y ago
Karma based voting is supposed to drive attention to the most popular stories and users, and away from everything else. It's possibly not seen as a serious problem because the system is working as intended.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  What would be "most popular" doesn't get a chance to be seen if a concerted minority flags certain kinds of articles, as it seems the parent post is suggesting.
  - krapp 11y ago
    Part of being popular on HN is not being controversial enough to be flagged. Even something as contextually neutral as a thread having more comments than upvotes will flag it. It is elitist and undemocratic, and intentionally so, although the staff has mentioned that they do try to counteract the downward bias of the site when they feel a story has merit.
chris_wot 11y ago
Han buries links routinely (for example they buried the story on Hola yesterday), but they don't bury stories just because they are sponsors.
- dang 11y ago
  > for example they buried the story on Hola yesterday Pretty sure that was because it was a dupe and that the original had massive discussion here. One pattern I've noticed is that a story will often break on HN early, before it hits the main tech press. A day or two later, when more mainstream posts start appearing, we get a new wave of submissions about the story. Anyone who didn't see the original will wonder why those are getting buried. In the current system, there's no good answer to this—other than that a few indomitable users post links to the original discussion. We do have some ideas about how to fix it more systematically.