HN Explorer

Ask HN: Are HN comments automatically downvoted by algorithms?

7 points by gull ↗ HN
I'm starting to wonder if comments posted on HN are examined by algorithms and automatically downvoted. Like an attempt to mute stupidity and block malice.

Has anyone noticed this with comments they've posted?

27 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 70.5 ms ] thread
mschuster91
It's rather the upvoting of threads as well as their subthreads. Active threads move to the top.
lgieron
There seems to be an algorithm which demotes some posters (at least one) voicing opinions unfavorable to YC.

EDIT: just got downvoted without any comment. I wonder if I am on the kill list as well.

DanBC
HN mods repeatedly say that they do not penalise people who post negative stuff about YC or YC companies.

But negative comments tend to get downvotes, (avoid gratuitous negativity) so people posting negative stuff should try to support it.

lgieron
My own post was taken down before, so I'm pretty sure some form of censorship exists. I don't know if it's enforced by mods or implemented otherwise, but that's a minor point.
mod
Posts can be flagged by users. If you were overtly offensive, I wouldn't be surprised.
DrScump
there was a decidedly sexist article overnight (1AM-ish PST) which I (apparently among many others) flagged... and it was gone within a couple of minutes!
lgieron
I wasn't offensive at all.
dragonwriter
Whether you think your post was offensive and whether it actually was seen as offensive by other readers are, well, very different questions.
DanBC
Don't say mods censor anti-YC stories if it's users who are doing it.
lgieron
My post wasn't downvoted, but was visible only to me (no other user could see it). It looked like a scheme to kill my post without me realising it.
DanBC
Was it a comment or a submission? Some domains are auto-killed. If you think it's worth posting you could email mods to ask them about it.
dang
We go out of our way not to kill stories and comments that are critical of YC or YC-funded startups. When such posts break the HN guidelines, we may penalize them, but always less than we would if the story were about something else. That's a pretty big deal around here—it's literally the first rule of HN moderation.

Beyond that, we'd need to know what post you're talking about. If you'd like to provide a link, we can look into it.

001sky
HN not only shadow bans commenters, they will also poison placement of comments (algorythmically) in a sub thread based on who writes the comment.
dang
We nearly always inform people when we ban their accounts: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....

Lots of software affects both story and comment rankings. "Poison" is a rather tendentious way to describe that. HN's goal is high quality in all things, to the extent it's possible. That doesn't just happen by default; systems are necessary, and it gets harder as numbers grow.

001sky
"Poison" is a rather tendentious way to describe that

NB...The words in my signature didn't come from a random sampling of the dictionary...they were from a screen grab of HN moderation tools...

On the topic of changing subjects, no not really.

Those words are outrageously inflamatory.

dang
Nobody found them inflammatory when they sat in the public HN source code for years, but once they appeared in an accidental screenshot, they became outrageous!

We're happy to answer good-faith questions about HN moderation, but this seems like trying to stir up drama.

001sky
The verbiage of 'poisoning the well' is a well understood figure of speech.
lgieron
This comment is shown as fine to me, whereas it really is dead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10245424

I'd love to hear a non-malicious explanation for that.

dang
That comment was killed by a spam filter. Those generate false positives sometimes. We've fixed that and also unkilled the comment.

In the future, please do what the HN guidelines ask and email such questions to us at hn@ycombinator.com. I only saw this thread by accident.

lgieron
I'm sure you can see that the post linking to the (simplifying) anti-YC blog being accidentally killed by spam filter can raise questions about whether it was really an accident. I'm not saying it was not - I'm just saying the bayesian probability of this being an accident doesn't look that great to me.
SamReidHughes
Imagine making a scoring system for domains that that takes into account flags and votes on comments that include said domain. Also, your post had a word written in ALL CAPS, arguably two. You can see other comments linking to the same domain at around the same time [1] that aren't marked as spam.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/

brudgers
Personally, I downvote destructive comments and flag harmful ones. My impression is that others do the same. I've never seen anything to suggest that there is algorithm beyond those that affect community members under shadow bans. My understanding is that people wind up in that state by hand, but I have no direct knowledge.
gull
Thank you for this. I hadn't realized there is a difference between downvoting and flagging comments until I read your post. I hope other HN users know of this difference.
rnovak
There are a lot of people on HN, and a lot of people with downvote privilege, and there are a lot of people who just generally downvote because they disagree with something.

Even if your opinion is completely positive, if people disagree, and a lot of people see it, you will get downvoted just because they disagree (and no one will reply to your comment to disagree, it's a drive-by-downvote).

There's also verification of this by HN mods: Several comment threads exist where they keep increasing the downvote threshold (from 300, to 400, to 500, and beyond). But it still doesn't solve the problem.

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veddox
I find that really annoying when people downvote a comment because they don't agree with it. IMO, the downvoting privilege should be used only to indicate a flawed argumentation or negative content.
runawaybottle
Perhaps some random percentage of down-votes should require a response (every third, or something).