It seems to me that it's healthy if we as a community are able to discuss issues with how the community is policed. Some may find it boring, but I'd argue that it's useful.
I agree. I thought the write-up was fair and reasonably level headed.
If something popular (and surely by definition of being on the front page it is) is suddenly removed, people are bound to be interested in the reason why? Was the source discredited? Was it just a copyright issue? A simple filter for spiked stories would be good, just with a note on the reason why.
Of course HN don't have to implement this, but it would be of benefit to the community.
But the answer is always going to be "users flagged it", or "the flamewar detector was triggered", or "the vote ring detector was triggered". And advice is always going to be "if you notice something unusual email the mods to discuss it, because they can fix it if you send them an email; they might not see it if you leave a comment in a thread".
My point is you don't notice every post that gets removed and there is currently no transparancy on the reason why.
HN doesn't have to be transparent, it's just a site with it's own agenda (by that I don't mean evil agenda, but it is there for a reason) but if you want to grow the community, I think clearly identifying why things were removed is a reasonable thing to ask. If every one it marked "flagged by users" I'd worry that there is no manual intervention.
I did an Ask HN one time something along the lines of "how would you game the HN ranking algorithm?". It seems like good security practice IMO to have a discussion on what is publicly known / discernible about the ranking algorithm.
This was during the time of the election so I was thinking along the lines of political astroturfing, but also to guard against companies unfairly promoting their products or suppressing posts related to a rival company. For instance, if someone really wanted to keep a discussion off HN, all it would take is to tangentially start a flame war over some sensitive issue and watch the ranking algorithm punish the ensuing vitriol.
I don't really read this terribly as complaining. It is an interesting analysis of some posts (including his own) that seemed to behave atypically in a non-transparent manner to the user base, that may suggest some manipulation of the ranking. At no point does it seem to take any accusatory tone, or complain. The hypothesis may be incorrect, but it is not unreasonable, and it does seem relevant to readers of hacker news.
I don't think being "bored" by something is generally considered a good reason to flag content. I don't see how it could possibly be considered off-topic either.
Posting on a social news site is a privilege, not a right. I've had stuff removed from Reddit and a few from Hacker News that got flagged after going on the front page...I've had stories on Reddit that got many upvotes and still removed just as it was going viral because the mods didn't like it...it's just the way it goes. It def. can seem unfair at times. No question about it.
This is technically true but misses important social aspects: does the average HN reader know which stories were removed at all, and why? If a certain political viewpoint, criticism of popular companies, etc. is being moderated or flag-killed that'll come as a surprise to anyone who never saw it and would have been interested if they'd had the chance.
> Posting on a social news site is a privilege, not a right.
I certainly don't share the sentiment. There are lots of places I or other people can visit and post to, what makes this particular site commend value is precisely the community and user-base it has fostered over the years. Thus, I believe that this kind of meta discussion does provide considerable value to the community.
It may be a privilege, but in this case my reading Hacker News is a privilege for them, and not their right. And I want to know what stories are manually suppressed in order to decide if i still grant them that privilege.
Also, check out Tim Berner Lee's article about the internet being hijacked by the likes of Facebook and Google in order to understand why your 'I am grateful for the privilege' attitude is wrong...
Edit: argh, I attached this to the wrong post. I was responding to paulpauper of course.
If content is filtered, those filtering the content can bias what's shown; influencing their audience. E.g. imagine if Amazon filtered out all the <4 star reviews of their products, and filtered the 5 star reviews of their competitors'). If that's transparent it's not so bad; you can see that things are being influenced, and ideally can see justifiable reasons behind those decisions. Otherwise the site's worth is devalued as you cannot trust what you see.
So whilst it's a privilege to have such a resource, it's also acceptable to complain about issues with that resource; especially when things are being manipulated for unclear reasons with no transparency.
That said, the author wasn't complaining; just doing analysis and pointing out an oddity which was of interest given the context of their research.
The site is being crushed by traffic right now -- but without reading the article, I've also found that some stories that I thought were important that were scrubbed from HN's front page just about as soon as I saw it (when I doubled back to read the comments)...
While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated. Maybe it could even be automatic, whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front, they could leave a comment and it'd show up on some page?
[EDIT] - After reading the article, if a mod did indeed take down the post because it discussed reverse engineering the rank algorithm, I think that's pretty naive. Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it.
I say this naively myself, as I've never had to maintain a ranking algorithm with these many users who depend on it (or any at all for that matter), but surely the problem isn't intractable?
There can be the reverse though. A controversial post may get flagged repeatedly but the impact of flagging could be disabled by mods to not disable the post.
Here's an example of a submission that does not include the [flagged] label, but which has a moderator saying it got flagged, and that the flags are the reason it's not on the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276
Just a few flags from high karma accounts can knock a submission off the front page if it isn't getting enough counter up-votes. It wont be marked as flagged.
As others have pointed out, the [flagged] annotation means heavily flagged. A story can be downweighted off the front page by user flags long before [flagged] shows up. Indeed that's what happened to the submission the OP is complaining about. Moderators never saw it.
As others have pointed out, the [flagged] annotation means heavily flagged. A story can be downweighted off the front page by user flags long before [flagged] shows up. Indeed that's what happened to the submission the OP is complaining about. Moderators never saw it.
I am of the mind that Mods can also prevent submissions from an account from ever being displayed in the page rankings.
Many months ago, I had several submissions that were visible when I was logged in, and yet when I accessed HN as a guest, they were not in the submission ranking.
My comments were like this, and found out I had been shadowbanned. I talked to a Mod, and they told me my shadowban was reversed, but I still don't get any responses from my comments and rarely see them as a guest. Is it possible you have a shadowbanned? I have my settings turned on so I see dead comments (not sure if that's the same thing or not)
Edit: this comment is not showing up when not logged in either, so guess my shadowban was not reversed or something else is going on.
That's something that happens. It's always worth talking to the mods to sort that out. There's a bunch of stuff to detect vote rings, spam, etc etc and sometimes it unfairly blocks the wrong stuff.
From what I've seen mods are happy to fix any problems.
I agree with you overall regarding transparency. It would be nice to see removed pages listed somewhere, or perhaps just the fact that it was done with a counter and maybe a timestamp. But as someone who reverse engineers a new mobile app nearly once a week these days: candidly, you can summarize nearly the entire discipline as security through obscurity :).
You use the word "suppress", but we generally can't use words stronger than that in security. We deal in abstractions that are hard to reasonably quantify, so we do so by approximations of monetary or temporal costs, and frequently both. We also try to limit absolutes. Reverse engineering exists as a discipline because 1) contrary to popular opinion, security through obscurity is valid, if incomplete and 2) there's frankly not much more that you can do in many cases other than obfuscation.
There are situations where algorithm secrecy gains you nothing defensively and is actually a strategic disadvantage, such as in encryption or hashing. But in situations where you fundamentally cannot discriminate between authorized users, such as in email (spam), search results (SEO) or, here, Hacker News (front page), you cannot rely on the strength of the algorithm to properly discriminate between users, because that's not its intended purpose. In these situations, obscurity is essentially your only remaining option.
To be fair the Hacker News moderators have more control of the ranking algorithm being reversed as it's on a remote server they control, as opposed to embedded in a client deployed to inherently untrustworthy hands. And once the information is out, it's out. But I don't agree that they have a trust or transparency imperative to keep that sort of submission on the front page. Even if the information exists, there's no reason to make it even more accessible. They can remove it and also improve the ranking algorithm.
If you want to design a general purpose web application without significantly reducing usability, functionality that is not restricted through authentication or higher levels of authorization is susceptible to reverse engineering. Being that the ranking algorithm is not client-side, there are fundamental protections we cannot bypass, but much of it is still inherently obfuscation. There is rate-limiting of course, and you have to log in, but the inherent inputs and outputs can still be somewhat flexibly assessed over reasonable timespans because there are hard usability requirements in place.
The tl;dr: algorithms which cannot be gamed because their inputs have significant quantifiable and controllable time/monetary costs do not require secrecy - these are excellent for implementing authorization. Algorithms which do not have such costs are not appropriate for authorization and, unless also paired with significant authorization constraints, require some degree of obfuscurity.
> Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it.
Obscuring an algorithm or making it more tedious to reverse may not make it perfectly secure, but that's not the goal. It's not like actual information security, where loss of the encryption keys means your product is broken or your database is on the Internet. You're just trying to minimize the workload on humans who act as a back-up for the few posts that slip through.
If an email spam detection algorithm was public, spammers could precisely craft their content to slip through. If the heuristics for showing a CAPTCHA were public, bots could automate their requests to avoid it. If a ranking algorithm was public, people who might financially benefit from the front-page traffic could force content there through vote rings and sock puppets.
If the algorithm is secret, far fewer will be able to do so, and this small fraction of abusers can be handled by humans.
You can always find reasons why something has to be a certain way. But at the end of the day, you can't expect to attract and retain curious hackers/entrepreneurs in this way. The author presumably spent some time compiling the original story, the math symbols and graphs are quite nice for instance, just to have it removed without explanation. It's not a very good way to treat people.
Does it matter? The author seems representative of exactly the type of users you want in a community like this. Long standing user account, high karma, produces decent comments and great content (the visualizations in the Swype article is another example [0]) and even puts HN comments on the blog. Whatever mechanism that ends up discouraging people like this in favor of trigger happy flaggers is broken. Fortunately for the community the author didn't go "fuck it", but instead wrote another sensible blog post which makes them an even better community member.
The debate is not really whether the algorithm should be made public or not, it's about the method used to try and keep it secure.
If the algorithm can be reverse engineered then trying to suppress the knowledge that is already "out there" will only create an illusion of it being a secret, and the fewer people know about it the more damage they can potentially do (i.e they more they can financially benefit from their knowledge).
It's the same as with information security - if you discover an exploitable bug then chances are someone else has already discovered it too (or can discover it any time) so making it public is one of the most sensible things you can do.
Well, probably not for such a broad description of "ungameable", but there is an entire research field dedicated to try and come up with such algorithms/systems: Mechanism design!
What does "verifiably" mean for you? Are you talking about provable security?
First establish an upper bound, worst case scenario cost (as a function of time + resources) to fully reverse engineer the algorithm. Use that as the comparison benchmark, and if you can come up with a design that eliminates any reverse engineering efforts with fewer costs than worst-case, you've done it.
Here's where that breaks down: "ungameable" is not precise enough to establish worst-case bounds for, in the same way that we can establish worst-case bounds for breaking an MD5 hash (brute-force it - what does "brute-force it" mean for gaming a ranking algorithm, or reverse engineering more generally?). Other than that, were you to come up with such a measurement, it would almost assuredly increase the costs of reverse engineering to infeasibility by increasing the authorization controls in place and decreasing the usability requirements.
It's not the same as with exploitable bugs, because exploitable bugs are fundamentally preventable. Not necessarily in aggregate; but individually, all bugs can essentially be patched given enough time or effort. There's no benefit to keeping them secret if their threats can be neutralized.
As I outlined in another comment in this thread, algorithms that do not offer or adopt significant authorization constraints (as quantified by time/monetary costs) cannot be "fixed." This is fundamentally why reverse engineering e.g. HMAC signing algorithms, search results ranking, spam filtering or front page listing algorithms is possible. The generous usability requirements do not allow for authorization that would mitigate reversing the algorithm, even when it's not embedded in an untrustworthy client.
Suppression is essentially all you can do to prevent reverse engineering, and suppressing the knowledge of how to reverse engineer an algorithm is in effect the same as suppressing the algorithm itself.
Once it's public (even unofficially), people will begin to rely on the current implementation and then complain if it is ever tweaked or changed. They build towards the value it grants and then complain that the value was arbitrarily stolen from them.
That's for sure. I rarely visit SEO websites or forums, but the few times I did I saw lots of complaints from people who seemed to think that Google owed them something after tweaking their page ranking algorithms.
We're on a discussion board web site. Using it to discuss the subject would seem the obvious place, right? Perhaps the mods could use their own site and be responsive to everyone...
I'm pretty new here, so take this with a grain of salt. My impression of this place is that it's a pretty highly regulated forum. In particular, it's designed to serve the needs of YC, and is not particularly free. That's the good and the bad of HN. It's a walled garden essentially, but instead of a wall it has very busy gardeners.
Honestly, it's why I like it, but I also recognize that behind all of this is a business, not a chatroom.
Edit: To clarify: there are so many places online to speak whatever is on your mind. What's lacking are places to have a decent conversation, any conversation, that can remain a conversation. How many places like this, with this many users, exist? I can't think of many.
I didn't understand why the guy's PayPal story was removed from the front page -- the one about PayPal seizing a $40k USD balance without warning, allegedly due to a 2% chargeback rate over several years of doing business and hundreds of thousands of dollars in successful transactions.
I thought that the point of HN was auto-moderation? Perhaps now that HN has seen great increases in popularity, the quality of content has to be more carefully controlled, lest the quality of posts on the HN front page slowly enter a death spiral towards that of reddit.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
I don't think the Paypal story was "removed". That story is now on page 2. Yesterday, it stayed on the front page all day. It's decay from the 1st page to the 2nd page a day later seems comparable to other stories with ~200 comments.
The author's meaning of "remove from the frontpage" means abruptly disappearing from the front page and you still don't see it in the subsequent 6 or more pages.
That's not quite true. "Buried" just means "gravity has been increased." Sometimes the gravity is adjusted massively, which moves stories to the 50th page. But it's very common for stories to go from page 1 to page 2. Even more common is to go from rank ~5 to rank ~29.
I flagged the Paypal story because it lacked supporting details that would allow me to evaluate the claims. For example, what was the person selling and how was it priced. Since one of the few leaked details was that the account involved USD to Canadian Dollar currency exchange, such information might have been relevant due to US currency control laws. In addition, people in the thread indicated that the dispute rate was high for e-commerce and the nature of the transactions might have clarified that.
In the end, the absence of detail meant there was no actionable information in the post, just 'Paypal sucks'. And I did not find that intellectually interesting.
As much as I like HN, I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc.
I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]".
Some websites manage to fight spam while remaining reasonably transparent (eg. StackExchange, where pretty much everything is documented - flags, closing reasons, edits, etc.).
The problem with that is that they have various tools like adjusting things off the frontpage or banning comment threads to the bottom of the list; but the UI itself does not provide information on those. If the mods do any of these things but don't also leave a human comment on them, then it's unlikely people will notice.
I think the perspective some people are taking here is that if it's invisible in the UI, then how would they ever know to ask? Short of running a continuous scraper and then compiling statistics as article did.
I'd be all for tagging a generic "Downvoted by moderation" onto any article this happened to. The poster will probably still be annoyed, but I imagine most would agree with moderation most of the time. And if they like, they can contact.
What they're less likely to agree with is this happening invisibly. And if it's invisible, then how do we know whether we (as a community) agree with it or not?
PS: Side note, strongly against "toggle a non-default option" as a solution. Filter bubbles are incompatible with democracy and true, diverse community.
>the UI itself does not provide information on those //
Which is down to the varying desires of the community and the administration. The admin/mods have at least in part a goal of promoting their commercial ends whilst the community in general are neutral wrt those same ends. If the mods upgrade YC companies visibly and downgrade competitors, for example, then the chances are that will cause problems between the admin and the community.
Based on that I can't see YC ever agreeing to do their moderation in public. I think we have to remember that this is not a neutral forum but has an inbuilt bias, through moderation, towards the administrations benefits.
I've got my account (with 9+k point) banned. Which is, of course, annoying, but the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well.
There was also a lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the guidelines, so…
And while some of my comments might be harsh I sometimes wonder if overzealous moderation leads us to creation of some kind of Stepford here.
When you get banned I'm pretty sure you get banned. So that account/accounts is/are closed but the person is banned. Clearly it's not enforceable but indicating a new account of a banned person would surely have that account removed?
Not necessarily. If we see some sign that the user is turning over a new leaf, we're happy to give another chance. The purpose of banning isn't to cast anyone out, it's to preserve a place for civil, substantive discussion. I sometimes hear people defend uncivil comments by saying that other people shouldn't be so fragile. But it isn't individuals who are fragile—it's the community.
Plenty of users have gone from being banned or penalized to being positive contributors on HN. Once someone understands why the rules and moderation are the way they are, things almost always go fine. It's not, for example, about "needing to sugarcoat everything", "avoiding uncomfortable truths", or any of that kind of explanation. It's about the extreme weakness of the social contract on the internet.
To be fair, sometimes this is a security feature so that folks don't go off hating one individual moderator. I've seen this in games more often, but I imagine it works out here as well. It sucks for normal folks, but sometimes that's the way it works.
Well, yeah, I kind of get it, but still smells fishy somehow.
You still can be anonymous and say "I did something" now it just sounds like you are washing your hands and avoid being responsible.
OTOH, I was never a moderator of any kind, so I have no idea what problems they have to deal with.
If they want to 'protect' the moderators they should use more neutral language focusing on the actions. You can easily say "This account has been x" instead of "We've x this account" or "x has been changed to reflect y" instead of "We've changed x to reflect y". It's less personal, but that's the point.
I think that works best; a moderator is / should be only a member that happens to be responsible for maintaining the site's user behaviour policy and tidiness of articles posted, and thus decisions shouldn't be an "I" or "we" thing, but "the site". Of course, that's an utopia and no amount of rules will cover every situation.
It may sound stupid, but it'd make me feel better if moderators still used "I" even if otherwise completely anonymous. Still add human touch and personal responsibility to the act even if there is no way to call some particular person out.
It seems likely that the mods talk to each other and critique one another's decisions. It's quite reasonable to say "we" to mean "the moderators of HN as a collective group" if banning your account was a group decision. The fact you're getting a comment from an individual doesn't mean it was necessarily just that person's decision to ban you. It's pretty uncharitable to assume moderators don't take their 'job' quite seriously.
Also even if the moderator made that particular decision alone, he will not have to stand up for it as an individual if it gets challenged. Any sensible organization will back him up as long as he acted in good faith and did not break some basic rules. He is, at all times (except when not acting as a moderator), representing a larger entity.
(They might of course still have an internal disagreement over an issue, and maybe take internal action for bad decisions, and might overthrow that decision if warranted, but not by blaming it on one individual.)
There was also a lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the guidelines, so…
I think you've unfairly jumped from the evidence you see (I don't recall receiving any warning) to an accusation that Dan was lying. Since lying about this doesn't seem to be to Dan's benefit (why risk adding false information?) it seems more likely that Dan may have confused you with another user, or that you may not have seen (or remembered) the warning.
Scanning back through your comments, I fairly quickly found the warning from a couple months ago that I think Dan was referring to: [redacted]. Likely you didn't notice this (or didn't consider it to be a warning?) but even if he's wronged you elsewhere, you probably should apologize to Dan for the false accusation.
while some of my comments might be harsh
Having just scanned through a couple months of your comments, I think that's unfortunately an understatement. A surprisingly large percentage of your recent comments are, as Dan warned, "personally abrasive". If your intent was to cause offense with each of these comments, I think Dan was right to ban your account. If the offense you were causing wasn't intentional, then there would appear to be a cultural misunderstanding that would be to your benefit to address.
the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well.
I agree with you about the use of "we". It often comes across oddly when it seems clear that the decision was made by an individual. I don't think a blanket switch to "I" solves it, but it seems like there should be a better phrasing.
First, I don't remember mentioning that the account you are pointing to was mine. And while it is true in this case this kind of exposing does not sit well with me at all.
Second, it is a bit of a stretch to call Dan's (I still have no idea who 'dang' is, there is no name or personal address on his profile, but based on your doxing skills I will believe you) comment a warning. You can see that in other cases he's a bit more explicit ("stop doing that or we will ban you"). Also, I may be wrong, but if you read his comments a bit of different treatment is applied, I guess this is up to personal likes and dislikes.
As for offensive comments… well I am firmly in a camp of thinking that offense is taken, not given. Sure, one can be excessively rude, but I do not think this applies here. Calling opinion you consider bullshit is worth banning? Well, sad day indeed, then. More so because you can find plenty of stronger expression here which are posted without repercussions—likely because mods agree with them?
Cultural differences? Close enough I guess. I am still not sure if shaping this place into a Stepford where everyone is all fake smiles and nods in agreement is a best way, but it is not up to me to decide.
I am glad that at leas on topic of "we" we are in some agreement. As I've mentioned previously there may very well be solid reasons for this kind of anonymity, but it still feels very inhuman.
I don't remember mentioning that the account you are pointing to was mine.
You clearly didn't. I happened to recall your comment about "we" from the thread where that account was banned, and thus knew where to look. I thought at the time about commenting to agree with you, but decided I was too late to the party for anyone to notice.
this kind of exposing does not sit well with me at all
I think there's a difference between "doxing" and a link showing that a warning was given to the other account, but I don't know where the line should be. I'll ask to have the link removed.
I still have no idea who 'dang' is, there is no name or personal address on his profile
I'm not sure why he's chosen the ultra-low-profile approach, but at this point it's clearly something that he's consciously chosen. Here's the official post introducing him several years ago: https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac....
Second, it is a bit of a stretch to call Dan's ... comment a warning.
Arguably, but I was only aiming for the lower bar of showing why Dan might have considered himself to have given you a warning, and thus might more charitably be considered to be mistaken rather than "lying". And while he didn't use the words "this is a warning", I do think most people would have correctly taken his admonition as a warning.
Calling opinion you consider bullshit is worth banning?
No, disagreement is fine, even if it involves telling someone that something they said is completely wrong. The moderators are (properly I think) very sensitive to the difference between saying that a particular idea is stupid and foolish, and claiming that person who said it is a stupid fool.
It's possible this distinction is considered more essential in North America than elsewhere. Personally, I'd suggest writing to 'hn@ycombinator.com' and asking if they would unban your previous account. If nothing else, you'll probably get a better explanation of where the line is between acceptable and bannable.
More so because you can find plenty of stronger expression here which are posted without repercussions—likely because mods agree with them?
I'm sure there is occasional bias in this direction, but I'm also sure that there is a conscious attempt of the moderators to compensate for this by being more forgiving to those whom they personally disagree with. I don't know what the end effect is, but I'd guess that (by design) the two effects mostly cancel out in the long run.
I am still not sure if shaping this place into a Stepford where everyone is all fake smiles and nods in agreement is a best way, but it is not up to me to decide.
While there are probably companies and even governments that have fallen prey to this problem, I'm doubtful that excessive civility has ever resulted in the downfall of an online community. It's fun to envision the endgame, though, with the "moderators" desperately trying to goad people into being more assertive and combative, and being met with unflappable peace and harmony.
I've had dang detach a post of mine, and IIRC give me a few other similar warnings. In the case of the detach, I was way out of line based on a misunderstanding of the original article (in my defense this misunderstanding wasn't cleared up until after my post).
But what it might come down to is, I'm from New York and a lot of people running HN are, if not actual San Francisco flower children of the 1960s, then perhaps their spiritual descendants.
And to flower children, the tone matters. They don't like you 'harshing' them. The opposite of how in-your-face New Yorkers often communicate. The HN moderators want you to make your points in a more subdued and less personal manner than New Yorkers might want to.
And it's not just dang. I've often been downvoted because of the tone of my posts, rather than because of (and even in spite of) the content.
So, if you want to play on HN, you need to play by their rules. It's their site.
In credit to HN, I'll mention a book written by Ken Hamblin, supporting the USA. The title is "Pick a Better Country" (if you don't like the USA).
So, pick a better alternative to HN? But I don't think there is one. HN probably is as good as it is because of, rather than in spite of, pg and dang and all the other (oppressive?) overlords?
You should have stayed hellbanned. We could make a parallel forum, without the possibility to reply to each other's comments directly and limited to about 4-5 comments per day, but visible only to that minority with "showdead" enabled in settings.
Any time I've reached out to dang (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang) via email, he's always been responsive and super helpful and pretty transparent. Moderating HN isn't an enviable task IMO.
I'm glad you had such a good time interacting with Ian Murdock's friend in need. He hellbanned me on a whim and I saw him hellbanning someone else just for daring to downvote him after being told to stop.
I remember a few weeks back I was looking for a comment reply to my comment. The original post got flagged and the comment itself didn't appear in my comments block!
I was really disappointed as the comment I was looking for wouldn't even show up in search.
If you take a look at the comments, it's theorized there that the story got pulled not because of moderator action, but because people abused the flagging mechanism. Given the content, and given the principal person under discussion, this seems pretty likely to me.
Why would it be abuse if people flag it as being off-topic for HN? The article is about some community code of conduct text which the article author comments on by adding their own interpretations to it. It look political and it uses inflammatory language.
The tug of war between upvotes and flags, as commented by dang, seems a strong sign that the article is very much political in nature. The question is if it also gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, but personally, in this case it did not do that for me.
I'd say tech culture is 100% fair game for Hacker News. In fact, it's been the subject of a fair number of front page articles recently (look at the Fowler stories, for instance). The flagging suggests to me that they didn't like what was being said, rather than they thought it was off-topic.
A good test for this that the moderators could run is to see if those that flagged this article flagged any other articles about LambdaConf's policies and if so, which.
Another one is to compare its performance to other, similarly political articles by the same author (e.g. his free software posts) and see how they performed.
Historically, the mods have not killed a post for discussing Hacker News meta, although on occasion they apply a penalty to meta submissions. (the original post only had 32 upvotes, which is enough to get swallowed)
Presenting the facts out of context isn't helpful. The original post might have "only had 32 upvotes" but, as mentioned in this article, it received about 20 in less than an hour. More than enough to get to the front page, where it was steadily receiving more upvotes until it just vanished. The post was not "swallowed".
The point is that the post wasn't swallowed in the usual sense. We now know that the original post fell drastically because it was being flagged by users.
When a story gets to the front page more people will see it and some may upvote it. Likewise more people will see it and some may flag it. I'd hypothesize that longer term or more active users are among the people who are more likely to use flags. Likewise, I suspect that long term and active users are more likely to not want to see meta posts on the front page.
Another possibility is that voting rings for _other_ posts flag maliciously to remove the competition and give their posts a relative boost. Maybe author can find correlations with other posts that were showing on the front page at the same time as the flagged ones and see how _their_ rankings got boosted due to the flagging.
I've chatted to mods on various sites over the years and I've heard that "voting rings", particularly the automated ones, often try to obscure their upvotes by also upvoting obscure stories and downvoting competing stories.
Does HN actually suffer this? I know its done on Reddit and by who in one case; just having a family member active in politics gets you good insight how many sites they try to manipulate.
I was hoping that HN's flag system would sufficient for the community to self censor. Perhaps we need a flag on comments too, something you can't see. I would also prefer that posts don't transition through the lighter grays as they get down voted but disappear completely once the dead threshold is met. That would prevent some piling on that does happen
Likely if IP A posts a story and IP X,Y,Z always upvote it first, it likely flags that as suspicious. Or if IP X,Y,Z go directly to the link and upvote, instead of organically finding the post.
If you notice something weird happening with your submissions you should email the mods. They're happy to explain what's going on and to have a look to see if the flags are fair.
It's probably a combination of flagging and other factors. Obvious the mods aren't going to want to make their algos transparent. Flagging removes story completely but perhaps mods have the power to bump a story off the page but without flagging it.
I can comment on the "Books that Aaron Swartz read, loved and hated" story. OP posted that link to HN and it made the front page. The story was soon flagged by the community (people viewed it as Amazon affiliate spam) and it fell off the rankings. When the moderator dang noticed that the story had been flagged, he decided to restore it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840869). So yeah, that explains why this particular story fell off the front page quickly but does not have any [flagged] or [dupe] tags attached now.
I've learned that it's best not to jump to conclusions based on what you think is true (however sound your analysis might be). Always ask the other side(s) for an explanation. In this case, you could have sent an email to the mods asking for an explanation. If you find their response unsatisfactory, go ahead and write a post explaining why.
> There are also a few articles that are thinly veiled affiliate spam. For example, the ShelfJoy links about books that Aaron Swartz and David Bowie loved fall into this category. They get called out in the comments for being very low-effort lists of Amazon affiliate links.
OP uses this story as an example of having "moderator fingerprints on them" i.e moderators censoring posts, which is not true. What happened was the opposite : the moderator uncensored a post flagged by the community.
Well, the author tried to account for that by saying that normal flagged posts don't go down near as fast.
If what is being said in other threads is true, high karma accounts clicking flag could push a post off the front page without showing the "flagged" tag, then that could be an explanation instead. Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.
That's an interesting point. I hadn't even considered the possibility that a single user would have the power to drop a story by hundreds of positions. If that's the case then those users do have a lot of power.
Especially when it's a bit too easy to flag an article by mistake due to progressive rendering causing a misclick, or just being careless. I know I've done it, noticed, and then gone back to unflag. I wonder how often I've clicked off by a few pixels and didn't notice.
This is called "burying" and it is unremarkable. (This story is likely to be buried.)
The stories that are buried are not appropriate for the front page. The reason you come to Hacker News is because it has a better front page, with better comments under it, than other places. You experience the benefit of this editorial intervention each and every day.
The quality of the comments was inordinately low and it didn't look like it would be improving, which is the reason it was buried.
No complaints from me around this. You can email the moderators if you want to know their reasoning. (I'm not one.)
People here need to understand and be thankful for the extraordinary and ongoing work that the moderators do every single day to keep this place an appropriate place for interesting, deep discussion along the editorial lines chosen. It is not a democracy (see: reddit) but I find the moderators generally extremely fair.
As far as I understand the moderators bury tons of stories (often political, link-bait, etc), which do however get traction quickly until they do so. It is easy to get traction through click-bait.
Generating serious discussion is harder. For example, this title promises "the stories that Hacker News removes" -- but is not really about the stories that Hacker News removes. For example the author does not analyze the comments under them or see why it derails or is not a good contribution to HN.
It is more of a click-bait title is bait-and-switch, and is designed to generate easy outrage.
There's nothing remarkable here despite the traction this story is getting. It is part of the hidden workings that keep HN great. Dan and Scott (the moderators) do an extremely good and thankless job keeping the principles of this place alive.
You have no idea how hard they work and I've seen them make difficult and intricate decisions. (Sometimes as simple as detaching a thread that was derailing an important discussion.) In my opinion this story does not belong on the front page.
That's not what flamebait means, you likely mean clickbait. There's nothing to disagree with there - all commenters agreed that lightweight sites are great. The title was also completely true.
But you are right, it was inappropriate. My point is there were 43 upvotes in a matter of a few minutes (and more coming) but it was not generating good discussion. The top comment:
>>hyperbovine 269 days ago [-]
>>Loads instantly, looks fine on mobile, the thing(s) you are probably interested in are linked right from the front page. As usual, Buffet is onto something here.
Which is why I submitted it. I simply thought it was interesting.
However, although all the comments agreed with it (there was no flaming) and it was getting traction, the comments were simply not very high quality or generating any good discussion. It simply wasn't worthy of the front page despite getting voted there organically. I have no problem with it being buried.
I think flamebait is the correct word, because the discussion would have just ended in the usual "modern web" complaints interspersed with people saying that these things have legitimate uses, and so on and so on. They're never productive discussions, just full of ranting and flaming.
But as you can see, no one in the discussion actively disagreed with anyone else. (No one flamed anyone.) It just wasn't very substantive and the reason it was buried.
I guess the acid test will be what happens to this post. If the first one was removed via manual intervention for whatever reason, then this one surely will be too.
Hacker News is nothing but a censored echo chamber, pretending otherwise at this point is pure ignorance. Anything that doesn't fit the narrative will be beaten down or removed.
In any case, I don't necessarily disagree, but I've yet to see good evidence of the shadowy cabal, rather than user-directed flagging. I mean, just look at the list in the article: does it point to any kind of "beating down stuff that doesn't fit the narrative"?
I mean at some level, completely understandable/expected that the community at news.ycombinator.com will have the corporate/VC dick up its ass to a degree.
And not always a bad thing, even if I think this place could use a GNAA troll every now and then. I don't need 10 cynical articles about big tech every morning. Those views need to be heard but at some point it's not interesting to me, that's not the stuff that keeps me refreshing HN while I should be programming.
It's sad but true. Everyone here likes to think they're an open minded intellectual, but when you see completely reasonable comments get downvoted for not fitting the narrative, it's hard to believe that.
If that's true, that seems like the sort of thing that would lead to a ton of false positives getting flagged for removal. I'm sure big news events like the Wikileaks Vault7 release would generate lots of comments. Doing a quick search on HN, I see the top posts related to Vault7 have <15 points and no more than single digit comments.
I find this worrisome. Vault7 is the type of thing that I would expect to generate significant discussion here.
I origionally posted with the title "For a moment, I thought bing was down" or something (I don't remember the origional title). The title was later changed to:
Later, the story was was removed entirely after I wrote the following comment:
"
Actually, it's been like this a really long time. I just noticed, that HN stories which have nondescript titles fare better, so I decided to conduct a little experiment. 1st spot on the front page seems to confirm my hypothesis.
"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576342
I certainly understand why the mods removed the "story", but at the same time, I felt that the discussion of the "non-descript title bias" would have been an interesting one to have.
At some time, the post with few upvotes (perhaps < 5 or something) had the rel="nofollow" attribute to discourage spammers to get a "follow" until the post was flagged. I'm not sure if that is still the current criteria or if they are using some additional signal to enable/disable the "nofollow" attribute.
Probably the mods don't want to disclose the complete criteria, because it may change constantly without warning. Try to send again an email again, but I guess you will get in the reply only a general idea of the system.
If you see something horribly misclassified, try sending an email to the mods.
The list of stories the author claims "have moderator fingerprints on them" does not seem to have any kind of common pattern at all which would support such a claim.
Edit: to be clear, with common pattern I mean the topics of the submission (obviously they have one common pattern, which is dropping out of the front page quickly). They do not reveal some secret agenda moderators might follow or something like that.
- This is a bug / happens randomly; you just noticed it because you were looking (i.e. as you analyse this data); all the posts it's happened to before and since went unnoticed. That's supported by the evidence of your analysis; most of the results don't look any different to other posts.
- It's not the link, but the related activity. Presumably if you're running analysis on HN data, there are a lot of HN requests coming from your machine. Maybe any posts made by your IP are therefore treated as suspect (i.e. the sort of protection you'd expect to avoid automated posting or upvoting... just without that extra sophistication). Perhaps the other posters had something similar... Would be good to see if any of those posts were by the same author; as that may add weight to this theory.
- Other variables... Maybe the algorithm has rules which cause this behaviour under some conditions; e.g. posts made the previous day (not 24 hours ago; but rather before midnight UTC / something like that) lose weight when midnight hits; so posts made moments before suddenly lose enough score to knock them off the top spot; whilst those which had more score before midnight, or were posted just after survive... Many other possibilities such as this may exist; and we'd only know by looking at those variables in the data... What else is common about the posts which are in your post's club vs those which aren't?
Good points! I use the official Hacker News API [1] and my requests come from an ip address that is completely disconnected from my personal account. Even if the API usage were a red flag, there would be no way to automatically connect it to me.
You're definitely right about there being miscellanious rules in there. Something that I mentioned in passing in the article is that many stories exhibit a significant drop in position once they're 15 hours old. If you look closely at the typical story trajectories you can also see various other jumps of about 10-30 positions which I would guess are triggered by these various rules.
The stories listed in the article exhibit very different behavior where they jump hundreds of positions instantaneously. It's absolutely possible that this is triggered by some automatic mechanism but if that's the case then there's an enormous amount of signifance being assigned to the corresponding rules. If there's some random component to the ranking then I highly doubt that it would be responsible for jumps of this magnitude.
I try to emphasize in the article that I do think it's possible that there's a hidden flagging threshold that's responsible and that the data can't tell us with certainty whether or not that's the case. I just personally find it unlikely that that's what happened for all of these stories. If you ran a site like Hacker News then would you put an admin link next to each post that pushes it off of the front page? I know that I would.
326 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadIf something popular (and surely by definition of being on the front page it is) is suddenly removed, people are bound to be interested in the reason why? Was the source discredited? Was it just a copyright issue? A simple filter for spiked stories would be good, just with a note on the reason why.
Of course HN don't have to implement this, but it would be of benefit to the community.
HN doesn't have to be transparent, it's just a site with it's own agenda (by that I don't mean evil agenda, but it is there for a reason) but if you want to grow the community, I think clearly identifying why things were removed is a reasonable thing to ask. If every one it marked "flagged by users" I'd worry that there is no manual intervention.
This was during the time of the election so I was thinking along the lines of political astroturfing, but also to guard against companies unfairly promoting their products or suppressing posts related to a rival company. For instance, if someone really wanted to keep a discussion off HN, all it would take is to tangentially start a flame war over some sensitive issue and watch the ranking algorithm punish the ensuing vitriol.
I don't think being "bored" by something is generally considered a good reason to flag content. I don't see how it could possibly be considered off-topic either.
It is appropriate that we readers/"consumers" have an interest in how our sources of information are controlled.
I certainly don't share the sentiment. There are lots of places I or other people can visit and post to, what makes this particular site commend value is precisely the community and user-base it has fostered over the years. Thus, I believe that this kind of meta discussion does provide considerable value to the community.
Also, check out Tim Berner Lee's article about the internet being hijacked by the likes of Facebook and Google in order to understand why your 'I am grateful for the privilege' attitude is wrong...
Edit: argh, I attached this to the wrong post. I was responding to paulpauper of course.
So whilst it's a privilege to have such a resource, it's also acceptable to complain about issues with that resource; especially when things are being manipulated for unclear reasons with no transparency.
That said, the author wasn't complaining; just doing analysis and pointing out an oddity which was of interest given the context of their research.
While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated. Maybe it could even be automatic, whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front, they could leave a comment and it'd show up on some page?
[EDIT] - After reading the article, if a mod did indeed take down the post because it discussed reverse engineering the rank algorithm, I think that's pretty naive. Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it.
I say this naively myself, as I've never had to maintain a ranking algorithm with these many users who depend on it (or any at all for that matter), but surely the problem isn't intractable?
Mods (as far as I know, I'm not one) never forcibly remove things from the front page. These are almost always the result of user flagging.
This article however is about stories that disappear without receiving either.
Here's an example of a submission that does not include the [flagged] label, but which has a moderator saying it got flagged, and that the flags are the reason it's not on the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276
The moderators bury things on the front page pretty routinely.
That's a pretty big (and vague!) accusation to just throw out there, especially in light of this comment elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858327
dang 6 minutes ago
As others have pointed out, the [flagged] annotation means heavily flagged. A story can be downweighted off the front page by user flags long before [flagged] shows up. Indeed that's what happened to the submission the OP is complaining about. Moderators never saw it.
Many months ago, I had several submissions that were visible when I was logged in, and yet when I accessed HN as a guest, they were not in the submission ranking.
Edit: this comment is not showing up when not logged in either, so guess my shadowban was not reversed or something else is going on.
From what I've seen mods are happy to fix any problems.
You use the word "suppress", but we generally can't use words stronger than that in security. We deal in abstractions that are hard to reasonably quantify, so we do so by approximations of monetary or temporal costs, and frequently both. We also try to limit absolutes. Reverse engineering exists as a discipline because 1) contrary to popular opinion, security through obscurity is valid, if incomplete and 2) there's frankly not much more that you can do in many cases other than obfuscation.
There are situations where algorithm secrecy gains you nothing defensively and is actually a strategic disadvantage, such as in encryption or hashing. But in situations where you fundamentally cannot discriminate between authorized users, such as in email (spam), search results (SEO) or, here, Hacker News (front page), you cannot rely on the strength of the algorithm to properly discriminate between users, because that's not its intended purpose. In these situations, obscurity is essentially your only remaining option.
To be fair the Hacker News moderators have more control of the ranking algorithm being reversed as it's on a remote server they control, as opposed to embedded in a client deployed to inherently untrustworthy hands. And once the information is out, it's out. But I don't agree that they have a trust or transparency imperative to keep that sort of submission on the front page. Even if the information exists, there's no reason to make it even more accessible. They can remove it and also improve the ranking algorithm.
If you want to design a general purpose web application without significantly reducing usability, functionality that is not restricted through authentication or higher levels of authorization is susceptible to reverse engineering. Being that the ranking algorithm is not client-side, there are fundamental protections we cannot bypass, but much of it is still inherently obfuscation. There is rate-limiting of course, and you have to log in, but the inherent inputs and outputs can still be somewhat flexibly assessed over reasonable timespans because there are hard usability requirements in place.
The tl;dr: algorithms which cannot be gamed because their inputs have significant quantifiable and controllable time/monetary costs do not require secrecy - these are excellent for implementing authorization. Algorithms which do not have such costs are not appropriate for authorization and, unless also paired with significant authorization constraints, require some degree of obfuscurity.
Obscuring an algorithm or making it more tedious to reverse may not make it perfectly secure, but that's not the goal. It's not like actual information security, where loss of the encryption keys means your product is broken or your database is on the Internet. You're just trying to minimize the workload on humans who act as a back-up for the few posts that slip through.
If an email spam detection algorithm was public, spammers could precisely craft their content to slip through. If the heuristics for showing a CAPTCHA were public, bots could automate their requests to avoid it. If a ranking algorithm was public, people who might financially benefit from the front-page traffic could force content there through vote rings and sock puppets.
If the algorithm is secret, far fewer will be able to do so, and this small fraction of abusers can be handled by humans.
[0] http://sangaline.com/post/finding-an-optimal-keyboard-layout...
If the algorithm can be reverse engineered then trying to suppress the knowledge that is already "out there" will only create an illusion of it being a secret, and the fewer people know about it the more damage they can potentially do (i.e they more they can financially benefit from their knowledge).
It's the same as with information security - if you discover an exploitable bug then chances are someone else has already discovered it too (or can discover it any time) so making it public is one of the most sensible things you can do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
First establish an upper bound, worst case scenario cost (as a function of time + resources) to fully reverse engineer the algorithm. Use that as the comparison benchmark, and if you can come up with a design that eliminates any reverse engineering efforts with fewer costs than worst-case, you've done it.
Here's where that breaks down: "ungameable" is not precise enough to establish worst-case bounds for, in the same way that we can establish worst-case bounds for breaking an MD5 hash (brute-force it - what does "brute-force it" mean for gaming a ranking algorithm, or reverse engineering more generally?). Other than that, were you to come up with such a measurement, it would almost assuredly increase the costs of reverse engineering to infeasibility by increasing the authorization controls in place and decreasing the usability requirements.
As I outlined in another comment in this thread, algorithms that do not offer or adopt significant authorization constraints (as quantified by time/monetary costs) cannot be "fixed." This is fundamentally why reverse engineering e.g. HMAC signing algorithms, search results ranking, spam filtering or front page listing algorithms is possible. The generous usability requirements do not allow for authorization that would mitigate reversing the algorithm, even when it's not embedded in an untrustworthy client.
Suppression is essentially all you can do to prevent reverse engineering, and suppressing the knowledge of how to reverse engineer an algorithm is in effect the same as suppressing the algorithm itself.
I wonder how responsive the mods will be when I publish just how hackable the YC infrastructure is next week.
To heck with responsible disclosure since HN mods apparently don't believe in such a thing.
It's fair game, boys. This is how the mods want to treat us, the users can respond in kind.
No, as a community we are all owed a public explanation.
And if stcb and dang can't provide it, they need to step down and make room for someone who can.
Honestly, it's why I like it, but I also recognize that behind all of this is a business, not a chatroom.
Edit: To clarify: there are so many places online to speak whatever is on your mind. What's lacking are places to have a decent conversation, any conversation, that can remain a conversation. How many places like this, with this many users, exist? I can't think of many.
I thought that the point of HN was auto-moderation? Perhaps now that HN has seen great increases in popularity, the quality of content has to be more carefully controlled, lest the quality of posts on the HN front page slowly enter a death spiral towards that of reddit.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
The author's meaning of "remove from the frontpage" means abruptly disappearing from the front page and you still don't see it in the subsequent 6 or more pages.
In the end, the absence of detail meant there was no actionable information in the post, just 'Paypal sucks'. And I did not find that intellectually interesting.
I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]".
Some websites manage to fight spam while remaining reasonably transparent (eg. StackExchange, where pretty much everything is documented - flags, closing reasons, edits, etc.).
This feels pretty transparent:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sctb
I'd be all for tagging a generic "Downvoted by moderation" onto any article this happened to. The poster will probably still be annoyed, but I imagine most would agree with moderation most of the time. And if they like, they can contact.
What they're less likely to agree with is this happening invisibly. And if it's invisible, then how do we know whether we (as a community) agree with it or not?
PS: Side note, strongly against "toggle a non-default option" as a solution. Filter bubbles are incompatible with democracy and true, diverse community.
Which is down to the varying desires of the community and the administration. The admin/mods have at least in part a goal of promoting their commercial ends whilst the community in general are neutral wrt those same ends. If the mods upgrade YC companies visibly and downgrade competitors, for example, then the chances are that will cause problems between the admin and the community.
Based on that I can't see YC ever agreeing to do their moderation in public. I think we have to remember that this is not a neutral forum but has an inbuilt bias, through moderation, towards the administrations benefits.
I made some experiments. Mix of fear of cross voting and anti spam technique I guess.
Plenty of users have gone from being banned or penalized to being positive contributors on HN. Once someone understands why the rules and moderation are the way they are, things almost always go fine. It's not, for example, about "needing to sugarcoat everything", "avoiding uncomfortable truths", or any of that kind of explanation. It's about the extreme weakness of the social contract on the internet.
(They might of course still have an internal disagreement over an issue, and maybe take internal action for bad decisions, and might overthrow that decision if warranted, but not by blaming it on one individual.)
I think you've unfairly jumped from the evidence you see (I don't recall receiving any warning) to an accusation that Dan was lying. Since lying about this doesn't seem to be to Dan's benefit (why risk adding false information?) it seems more likely that Dan may have confused you with another user, or that you may not have seen (or remembered) the warning.
Scanning back through your comments, I fairly quickly found the warning from a couple months ago that I think Dan was referring to: [redacted]. Likely you didn't notice this (or didn't consider it to be a warning?) but even if he's wronged you elsewhere, you probably should apologize to Dan for the false accusation.
while some of my comments might be harsh
Having just scanned through a couple months of your comments, I think that's unfortunately an understatement. A surprisingly large percentage of your recent comments are, as Dan warned, "personally abrasive". If your intent was to cause offense with each of these comments, I think Dan was right to ban your account. If the offense you were causing wasn't intentional, then there would appear to be a cultural misunderstanding that would be to your benefit to address.
the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well.
I agree with you about the use of "we". It often comes across oddly when it seems clear that the decision was made by an individual. I don't think a blanket switch to "I" solves it, but it seems like there should be a better phrasing.
Second, it is a bit of a stretch to call Dan's (I still have no idea who 'dang' is, there is no name or personal address on his profile, but based on your doxing skills I will believe you) comment a warning. You can see that in other cases he's a bit more explicit ("stop doing that or we will ban you"). Also, I may be wrong, but if you read his comments a bit of different treatment is applied, I guess this is up to personal likes and dislikes.
As for offensive comments… well I am firmly in a camp of thinking that offense is taken, not given. Sure, one can be excessively rude, but I do not think this applies here. Calling opinion you consider bullshit is worth banning? Well, sad day indeed, then. More so because you can find plenty of stronger expression here which are posted without repercussions—likely because mods agree with them?
Cultural differences? Close enough I guess. I am still not sure if shaping this place into a Stepford where everyone is all fake smiles and nods in agreement is a best way, but it is not up to me to decide.
I am glad that at leas on topic of "we" we are in some agreement. As I've mentioned previously there may very well be solid reasons for this kind of anonymity, but it still feels very inhuman.
You clearly didn't. I happened to recall your comment about "we" from the thread where that account was banned, and thus knew where to look. I thought at the time about commenting to agree with you, but decided I was too late to the party for anyone to notice.
this kind of exposing does not sit well with me at all
I think there's a difference between "doxing" and a link showing that a warning was given to the other account, but I don't know where the line should be. I'll ask to have the link removed.
I still have no idea who 'dang' is, there is no name or personal address on his profile
I'm not sure why he's chosen the ultra-low-profile approach, but at this point it's clearly something that he's consciously chosen. Here's the official post introducing him several years ago: https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people-taking-over-hac....
Second, it is a bit of a stretch to call Dan's ... comment a warning.
Arguably, but I was only aiming for the lower bar of showing why Dan might have considered himself to have given you a warning, and thus might more charitably be considered to be mistaken rather than "lying". And while he didn't use the words "this is a warning", I do think most people would have correctly taken his admonition as a warning.
Calling opinion you consider bullshit is worth banning?
No, disagreement is fine, even if it involves telling someone that something they said is completely wrong. The moderators are (properly I think) very sensitive to the difference between saying that a particular idea is stupid and foolish, and claiming that person who said it is a stupid fool.
It's possible this distinction is considered more essential in North America than elsewhere. Personally, I'd suggest writing to 'hn@ycombinator.com' and asking if they would unban your previous account. If nothing else, you'll probably get a better explanation of where the line is between acceptable and bannable.
More so because you can find plenty of stronger expression here which are posted without repercussions—likely because mods agree with them?
I'm sure there is occasional bias in this direction, but I'm also sure that there is a conscious attempt of the moderators to compensate for this by being more forgiving to those whom they personally disagree with. I don't know what the end effect is, but I'd guess that (by design) the two effects mostly cancel out in the long run.
I am still not sure if shaping this place into a Stepford where everyone is all fake smiles and nods in agreement is a best way, but it is not up to me to decide.
While there are probably companies and even governments that have fallen prey to this problem, I'm doubtful that excessive civility has ever resulted in the downfall of an online community. It's fun to envision the endgame, though, with the "moderators" desperately trying to goad people into being more assertive and combative, and being met with unflappable peace and harmony.
I've had dang detach a post of mine, and IIRC give me a few other similar warnings. In the case of the detach, I was way out of line based on a misunderstanding of the original article (in my defense this misunderstanding wasn't cleared up until after my post).
But what it might come down to is, I'm from New York and a lot of people running HN are, if not actual San Francisco flower children of the 1960s, then perhaps their spiritual descendants.
And to flower children, the tone matters. They don't like you 'harshing' them. The opposite of how in-your-face New Yorkers often communicate. The HN moderators want you to make your points in a more subdued and less personal manner than New Yorkers might want to.
And it's not just dang. I've often been downvoted because of the tone of my posts, rather than because of (and even in spite of) the content.
So, if you want to play on HN, you need to play by their rules. It's their site.
In credit to HN, I'll mention a book written by Ken Hamblin, supporting the USA. The title is "Pick a Better Country" (if you don't like the USA).
So, pick a better alternative to HN? But I don't think there is one. HN probably is as good as it is because of, rather than in spite of, pg and dang and all the other (oppressive?) overlords?
Maybe you're a special snowflake ;-)
I was really disappointed as the comment I was looking for wouldn't even show up in search.
If you take a look at the comments, it's theorized there that the story got pulled not because of moderator action, but because people abused the flagging mechanism. Given the content, and given the principal person under discussion, this seems pretty likely to me.
> It is the usual tug of war between upvotes and flags
The tug of war between upvotes and flags, as commented by dang, seems a strong sign that the article is very much political in nature. The question is if it also gratifies one's intellectual curiosity, but personally, in this case it did not do that for me.
A good test for this that the moderators could run is to see if those that flagged this article flagged any other articles about LambdaConf's policies and if so, which.
Another one is to compare its performance to other, similarly political articles by the same author (e.g. his free software posts) and see how they performed.
Indeed, HN recently allowed a post that advocated gaming the system because it encouraged debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362
A conspiracy theory, even backed by data, is not the best application of Occam's Razor.
The point is that the post wasn't swallowed in the usual sense. We now know that the original post fell drastically because it was being flagged by users.
So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.
See dang's comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276
I was hoping that HN's flag system would sufficient for the community to self censor. Perhaps we need a flag on comments too, something you can't see. I would also prefer that posts don't transition through the lighter grays as they get down voted but disappear completely once the dead threshold is met. That would prevent some piling on that does happen
I think there's a small karma threshold for flagging - something like 30 or 50 karma.
Oh yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749685
If there was a middle ground it probably would be a section where you can specifically view threads that were removed from view.
I disagree. Just a few flags can cause a story to drop off the front page.
I've learned that it's best not to jump to conclusions based on what you think is true (however sound your analysis might be). Always ask the other side(s) for an explanation. In this case, you could have sent an email to the mods asking for an explanation. If you find their response unsatisfactory, go ahead and write a post explaining why.
> There are also a few articles that are thinly veiled affiliate spam. For example, the ShelfJoy links about books that Aaron Swartz and David Bowie loved fall into this category. They get called out in the comments for being very low-effort lists of Amazon affiliate links.
If what is being said in other threads is true, high karma accounts clicking flag could push a post off the front page without showing the "flagged" tag, then that could be an explanation instead. Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.
And on top of that are allowed to use HN as a platform to ask other users to jump to their aid in flagging stories they don't like.
The stories that are buried are not appropriate for the front page. The reason you come to Hacker News is because it has a better front page, with better comments under it, than other places. You experience the benefit of this editorial intervention each and every day.
I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very quickly: this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431
The quality of the comments was inordinately low and it didn't look like it would be improving, which is the reason it was buried.
No complaints from me around this. You can email the moderators if you want to know their reasoning. (I'm not one.)
People here need to understand and be thankful for the extraordinary and ongoing work that the moderators do every single day to keep this place an appropriate place for interesting, deep discussion along the editorial lines chosen. It is not a democracy (see: reddit) but I find the moderators generally extremely fair.
As far as I understand the moderators bury tons of stories (often political, link-bait, etc), which do however get traction quickly until they do so. It is easy to get traction through click-bait.
Generating serious discussion is harder. For example, this title promises "the stories that Hacker News removes" -- but is not really about the stories that Hacker News removes. For example the author does not analyze the comments under them or see why it derails or is not a good contribution to HN.
It is more of a click-bait title is bait-and-switch, and is designed to generate easy outrage.
There's nothing remarkable here despite the traction this story is getting. It is part of the hidden workings that keep HN great. Dan and Scott (the moderators) do an extremely good and thankless job keeping the principles of this place alive.
You have no idea how hard they work and I've seen them make difficult and intricate decisions. (Sometimes as simple as detaching a thread that was derailing an important discussion.) In my opinion this story does not belong on the front page.
I would have flagged that submission if I saw it since it's flamebait.
But you are right, it was inappropriate. My point is there were 43 upvotes in a matter of a few minutes (and more coming) but it was not generating good discussion. The top comment:
>>hyperbovine 269 days ago [-]
>>Loads instantly, looks fine on mobile, the thing(s) you are probably interested in are linked right from the front page. As usual, Buffet is onto something here.
>>> walrus01 269 days ago [-]
>>> Looks fine in Lynx, too!
>>> http://imgur.com/yAEimmZ
Which is why I submitted it. I simply thought it was interesting.
However, although all the comments agreed with it (there was no flaming) and it was getting traction, the comments were simply not very high quality or generating any good discussion. It simply wasn't worthy of the front page despite getting voted there organically. I have no problem with it being buried.
In any case, I don't necessarily disagree, but I've yet to see good evidence of the shadowy cabal, rather than user-directed flagging. I mean, just look at the list in the article: does it point to any kind of "beating down stuff that doesn't fit the narrative"?
And not always a bad thing, even if I think this place could use a GNAA troll every now and then. I don't need 10 cynical articles about big tech every morning. Those views need to be heard but at some point it's not interesting to me, that's not the stuff that keeps me refreshing HN while I should be programming.
I find this worrisome. Vault7 is the type of thing that I would expect to generate significant discussion here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13813160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840544
https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
I origionally posted with the title "For a moment, I thought bing was down" or something (I don't remember the origional title). The title was later changed to:
Title: "Bing doesn't support SSL" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041
Later, the story was was removed entirely after I wrote the following comment:
" Actually, it's been like this a really long time. I just noticed, that HN stories which have nondescript titles fare better, so I decided to conduct a little experiment. 1st spot on the front page seems to confirm my hypothesis. " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576342
I certainly understand why the mods removed the "story", but at the same time, I felt that the discussion of the "non-descript title bias" would have been an interesting one to have.
I asked this before and a mod said I should ask again via mail, but never got a response from hn@ycombinator.com.
Probably the mods don't want to disclose the complete criteria, because it may change constantly without warning. Try to send again an email again, but I guess you will get in the reply only a general idea of the system.
If you see something horribly misclassified, try sending an email to the mods.
Edit: to be clear, with common pattern I mean the topics of the submission (obviously they have one common pattern, which is dropping out of the front page quickly). They do not reveal some secret agenda moderators might follow or something like that.
- This is a bug / happens randomly; you just noticed it because you were looking (i.e. as you analyse this data); all the posts it's happened to before and since went unnoticed. That's supported by the evidence of your analysis; most of the results don't look any different to other posts.
- It's not the link, but the related activity. Presumably if you're running analysis on HN data, there are a lot of HN requests coming from your machine. Maybe any posts made by your IP are therefore treated as suspect (i.e. the sort of protection you'd expect to avoid automated posting or upvoting... just without that extra sophistication). Perhaps the other posters had something similar... Would be good to see if any of those posts were by the same author; as that may add weight to this theory.
- Other variables... Maybe the algorithm has rules which cause this behaviour under some conditions; e.g. posts made the previous day (not 24 hours ago; but rather before midnight UTC / something like that) lose weight when midnight hits; so posts made moments before suddenly lose enough score to knock them off the top spot; whilst those which had more score before midnight, or were posted just after survive... Many other possibilities such as this may exist; and we'd only know by looking at those variables in the data... What else is common about the posts which are in your post's club vs those which aren't?
You're definitely right about there being miscellanious rules in there. Something that I mentioned in passing in the article is that many stories exhibit a significant drop in position once they're 15 hours old. If you look closely at the typical story trajectories you can also see various other jumps of about 10-30 positions which I would guess are triggered by these various rules.
The stories listed in the article exhibit very different behavior where they jump hundreds of positions instantaneously. It's absolutely possible that this is triggered by some automatic mechanism but if that's the case then there's an enormous amount of signifance being assigned to the corresponding rules. If there's some random component to the ranking then I highly doubt that it would be responsible for jumps of this magnitude.
I try to emphasize in the article that I do think it's possible that there's a hidden flagging threshold that's responsible and that the data can't tell us with certainty whether or not that's the case. I just personally find it unlikely that that's what happened for all of these stories. If you ran a site like Hacker News then would you put an admin link next to each post that pushes it off of the front page? I know that I would.
[1] - https://github.com/HackerNews/API