HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why are “Google memo” links being flagged and hidden?

48 points by notliketherest ↗ HN
Two major articles were shared on HN today regarding the Google memo: "Google CEO should resign" and "Why I was fired from Google." Both were flagged and hidden within an hour. I understand this is a deeply divisive topic, but it's clearly relevant to a large majority of readers on HN. Are we comfortable being a "close my plug my ears" echo chamber community? Or should we be brave enough to have lengthy discussions about hard issues that give others a chance to hear both sides of an argument. I like the approach we took when the original article was submitted - the thread was locked to new users.

23 comments

[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 30.3 ms ] thread
ratsmack
Is Hacker News deeply rooted in Silicon Valley, and isn't it well known that Silicon Valley do not share conservative views? I think the answer can be derived herein.
krapp
>and isn't it well known that Silicon Valley do not share conservative views

If Silicon Valley didn't share conservative views, there wouldn't be so many articles and comments defending said memos, and the views expressed therein. Certainly, what's "well known" about HN and SV seems to depend on what set of cultural or political strawmen one wants to punch down. I've seen both described as wretched hives of leftist cultural marxism and alt-right fascism.

>I think the answer can be derived herein.

Yes, but not for the reasons your comment implies. People who are strongly ideologically driven are more likely to engage with these threads - they're likely being flagged by people who are tired of seeing the deluge of content which they feel is off topic, or no longer delivering anything of insight or quality.

SamReidHughes
Defending the memo does not require having conservative views.
krapp
As the GP implies, either defending or denouncing it will get you sorted into one or the other camp.
dang
This is a common misperception, but no, the overwhelming majority of the HN community is located nowhere near Silicon Valley, and the flags are coming from HN users, not admins. So what you're seeing is (a) community behavior and (b) not particularly SV-related.
whipoodle
Because it's just the same shit over and over again
J-dawg
Thanks for asking this. Here's another one that was posted and then disappeared without a trace:

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6t1cpx/if_w...

notliketherest
Hackernews doesn't allow you to "downvote" submissions, but users with higher "karma" can flag posts, effectively giving the most active (or popular) users censoring powering.
soared
I think it requires 750 or 1k karma, which isn't a huge amount. I'd image a decent percent (~20%) of users have flagging power.
mtmail
I see the "Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14990494 from 5 hours ago with comments from 2 hours ago, so flagged within an hour doesn't match. 400+ comments.

"Why I Was Fired by Google (wsj.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14993683 isn't flagged. Or maybe it was and now no longer is.

Personally I get tired of yet more opinion pieces on the same topic. After reading through 5 long threads I feel like I've seen every opinion and counter opinion.

notliketherest
Sorry I meant "flagged and hidden". Just because it's flagged doesn't mean that people can't stop commenting on it. It just doesn't show up on the front page anymore.
mtmail
Weird indeed. That makes it the only flagged story in the top 100 https://news.ycombinator.com/best list. A lot, like hundreds, of users must have flagged it. (I don't know how ranking works, I just assume that there must be a ratio of upvotes vs flagging and the more upvotes the harder it is to flag).
notliketherest
Yeah, and I think it also has to do with weight of the user (more points = higher weight). That's why I'm asking this question because we give an outsized weight to higher karma users who effectively have censor power (which is a good thing when used against spam). But I'm worried we're curating our own "echo chamber" here.
ratsmack
This is especially true when people down vote on disagreement rather than quality.
thomasahle
This explains why the first 4 or so comments on the wsj article all focused on pointing out it had new information. Perhaps hacker news needs a separate "meta" discussion page, so we can have that debate aside from the normal discussion.
fav_collector
Opinion pieces aren't taken kindly in these parts of the woods.
notliketherest
That's true. Opinion pieces manifest themselves in all sorts of ways on hackernews though, and it's only these high profile contentious debate pieces that get flagged, even in the face of overwhelming user engagement (see other comment). I argue that this topic merits special considering by the mods to remove the flag.
soared
Personal opinions aside, they are technically against guidelines, as is this post.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

> Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Bucephalus355
Google, to some extent, sanitizes the web of comments they do not feel should be on the web.

I have no clue how much this is done, but the best example is Glassdoor. I've had multiple friends post their Google interview reviews, some posting multiple times and getting in (to Google that is) on their 3rd try.

Those reviews have vanished from Glassdoor (for both people not hired and also the people hired). It is the most bizarre thing, and I tried so hard to find them after being challenged once to do so because I did not believe Google would delete them.

At first I thought it was Glassdoor deleting them, but that's not the case at all. Look up reviews for Amazon Web Services, you'll see they blatantly give answers to questions, list terms, and summarize how the interview cycles go, and those are all up for anyone in the world to see.

dunkelheit
I don't quite follow. So who deletes them in the end and how?
jxramos
I was surprised when any of it got flagged given that I'm pretty sure I read earlier posts on HN that spoke about sex or race diversity in tech. I remember getting into a few comment threads on some so I'm sure there's prior stuff in this arena on HN. I guess this one was just too taboo or something.
tnone
This is a long standing pattern. Whenever a thread about a social justice topic gets too far away from the orthodoxy, it gets flagged and hidden. In some cases I've seen a thread without any noticable flags and with a high score nevertheless drop hundreds of places so it sits between week old content. The official response to the LambdaConf controversy was the most glaring example.

At this point the HN moderators are either incompetently letting the system get gamed for obvious political purposes by one particular camp, or they are quietly looking the other way when it goes down. Either way, it's a pretty open secret by now.

[dead] mathzthrowaway6
So, it turns our mathematically that discussion of the factual points (sharing data) can make the world a worse place (keep reading). I flag some of these articles for this reason. If you have approximately two hours and are a talented mathematician you can come to the same conclusion I have by following my derivation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14967445

I find most of the people in most of these discussions are wrong, or do not rigorously derive the correct conclusion, even if they name it.

So I flag some of these articles because they make the world a worse place.

(By the way I apologize if the reasoning and derivation in the above mathematical comment are difficult to follow - I realize it is highly technical.)

Other people might flag them for what are ultimately equivalent reasons, but without being able to name exactly why.