It is quite similar to function of "down votes" on eg. Reddit and Hacker News, where the righteous can hide contributions from dissidents. I feel proper moderation against a rule set is the way to go, not automatic deletion or banning from "disagree votes".
I think one could argue that having downvote functionality at all is counterproductive. What exactly is gained by downvoting posts versus the undeniable censorship of dissenting views and enabling personal grievances and biases?
"I don't know why you were downvoted" seems to be HN's unofficial motto.
Downvoting is essentially denying someone the chance to have their voice be heard. If it's something egregiously bad, flag it. If you simply don't agree with the statement, leave a comment to hash it out.
We want all information that's not outright wrong or uncalled for so we can get to the best understanding. Downvoting hides viewpoints and makes us work with less information. It also powerfully biases people against a viewpoint, often unjustifiably.
Downvoting would be fine if we all always used strong reasoning in good faith. I don't think that happens for most downvotes.
I typically see this on remarks involving Apple or Microsoft, less so others. (Not sure about Tesla.)
I suspect that MS employs a mouse army, but the reason is a mystery; my guess is it is just because they can. Apple downvoting appears to be more fanboi driven.
I don't believe that's true. People imagine all kinds of things—invariably sinister, and invariably based on their personal likes and dislikes. The vast majority of this is over-interpreted randomness.
That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post evidenceless insinuations of astroturfing or brigading: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. There needs to be something objective to go on, not just however the mind connects the dots based on a few data points. People with opposite tastes to yours connect the dots in an entirely contradictory way, I assure you.
Obviously any claims I make are based on "anecdata", since you guys are the only ones who hold the full data.
But please don't dismiss this so quickly. I have seen pretty harmless types of post getting brigaded or flagged pretty consistently. This happens more often to new or less known users - who might have something interesting to say but are quickly shut down.
Now, we can always blame it on different tastes or whatever, but knowing that certain companies engage heavily in "online presence" wouldn't it be naive to think they don't operate on HN too??
Turn on "Show Dead" in your profile. The posts will all become visible and can be linked to (although you will need to instruct potential viewers to also enable the profile setting).
It's true that we have more data, but actually the public record is usually more than enough data to cast doubt on most such insinuations. The trouble is that the insinuators don't do the work of searching or checking, because the connect-the-dots activity of the mind feels so compelling. (There's sample bias here though: most people who do bother to either search or check will soon find that there's nothing convincing there and drop the idea. Or they might find a genuine pattern, in which case what they have is more than mere insinuation, and in that case they should send it to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. This is in the site guidelines: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
To pick an example from a different domain, when one commenter accuses another of being a communist shill for China (a ridiculously common recreation), it's easy enough to look at the latter's history. Frequently you'll find that that user has been posting about, say, Julia programming, and house prices in Boise, since 2014. (I made that up but this is typical.) Could they still be a communist agent? Sure they could, but this kind of thinking quickly becomes madness.
Occam offers a perfectly good null hypothesis: people just disagree. HN is a large enough population sample that you're going to see users from every background and disagreement about every topic, including on every big tech company, which many users have strong feelings for/against. For some reason, though, internet users aren't satisfied by that and crave much more sinister explanations when things they dislike show up in the forum.
There are cognitive biases underlying this (I've written about them at [1] and [2], if you or anyone is curious), and I'm not seeing any information in your comments here that isn't easily within the normal range of such biases. Real astroturfing and other abuses exist—you can look through the endless history of [3] to find plenty of times where I talk about that and a few cases where we actually find it. But there's no question that real abuse is dwarfed by the imaginary abuses that internet users love to speculate about. Therefore the rule is: if you're to going to bring this up you need something objective to go on. It can't just be based on memory and feeling, because memory and feeling are entirely unreliable on this.
Check out my post history. I use this account to comment on politically hot topics on HN, and my highest scoring comment was removed, in fact the entire thread of that comment is gone.
Was it because I broke some rule, or was it because someone didn't like what I said?
Accounts that have been created to do that are low-quality accounts that soon accrue moderation penalties and eventually get banned—not because we disagree with the politics but because this is the main form of flamewar destroying this site. HN is a place for intellectual curiosity and curious conversation. If you want to do ideological warfare on the internet, that's a different game and you need to play it elsewhere.
Your comment didn't get removed. It did get detached from its original parent. That's standard moderation when the top comment gets replies that don't respond specifically to what it says (a.k.a. topjacking).
Is there counter-action taken by YouTube against people who expressed a "bullying" or "harassing" vote?
When using a group-chat system, it's possible to abuse anti-spam reporting. One design idea is to punish those who were involved in an "unjust report". This requires a "justification evaluation" - that can be done by a moderator, or by a broader community vote.
Does YT remove the ability to harass other YT users if that power is clearly being abused?
I know there's an entire black mirror episode about this [1] but it would be interesting to have some skin in the game for people who submit "unjust reports", even if it's some sort of trust score.
Some video games take it a step further and say it may result in your account being banned if you are found to have filed to many false "cheating" reports against other players.
What is unbelievable about this story (and other similar ones reported here) is that YouTube enables bad actors by not making their own reviews definitive.
What's also surprising is Tesla's pettiness and thin-skin response to Rich's videos, having banned him from their referral programme because they don't like them, and which are entirely benign, if a little provocative.
> “The Tesla fanboys formed like Voltron and ganged up to flag my video for removal on youtube,” Benoit said in a tweet. “The video which was flagged for ‘inappropriate content’ was about me selling my Tesla and buying a gas car instead.”
The algorithms strike again. This had nothing to do with EV or gas cars, but rather people spam flagging a post. I see this happen all of the time on other platforms such as twitter, but that's almost always because of political reasons.
It should simply not be possible to have your video taken down automatically after having undergone a manual appeal for that same video. At the very least YouTube should have somebody look through the video again.
fwiw he’s getting rid of a rebuilt, salvaged vehicle, not a current production Tesla. So the video title is arguably a little bit misleading and clickbait.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 96.0 ms ] thread"I don't know why you were downvoted" seems to be HN's unofficial motto.
I hear you, but I don’t pay for this toy, and the owner(s) run it as they see fit. I do agree with you though that I dislike down voting.
We want all information that's not outright wrong or uncalled for so we can get to the best understanding. Downvoting hides viewpoints and makes us work with less information. It also powerfully biases people against a viewpoint, often unjustifiably.
Downvoting would be fine if we all always used strong reasoning in good faith. I don't think that happens for most downvotes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22794857
Say something that puts certain companies (you know who you are) in really bad light and your post will be magically flagged.
I suspect that MS employs a mouse army, but the reason is a mystery; my guess is it is just because they can. Apple downvoting appears to be more fanboi driven.
That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post evidenceless insinuations of astroturfing or brigading: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. There needs to be something objective to go on, not just however the mind connects the dots based on a few data points. People with opposite tastes to yours connect the dots in an entirely contradictory way, I assure you.
But please don't dismiss this so quickly. I have seen pretty harmless types of post getting brigaded or flagged pretty consistently. This happens more often to new or less known users - who might have something interesting to say but are quickly shut down.
Now, we can always blame it on different tastes or whatever, but knowing that certain companies engage heavily in "online presence" wouldn't it be naive to think they don't operate on HN too??
Can you link some you've recently encountered?
To pick an example from a different domain, when one commenter accuses another of being a communist shill for China (a ridiculously common recreation), it's easy enough to look at the latter's history. Frequently you'll find that that user has been posting about, say, Julia programming, and house prices in Boise, since 2014. (I made that up but this is typical.) Could they still be a communist agent? Sure they could, but this kind of thinking quickly becomes madness.
Occam offers a perfectly good null hypothesis: people just disagree. HN is a large enough population sample that you're going to see users from every background and disagreement about every topic, including on every big tech company, which many users have strong feelings for/against. For some reason, though, internet users aren't satisfied by that and crave much more sinister explanations when things they dislike show up in the forum.
There are cognitive biases underlying this (I've written about them at [1] and [2], if you or anyone is curious), and I'm not seeing any information in your comments here that isn't easily within the normal range of such biases. Real astroturfing and other abuses exist—you can look through the endless history of [3] to find plenty of times where I talk about that and a few cases where we actually find it. But there's no question that real abuse is dwarfed by the imaginary abuses that internet users love to speculate about. Therefore the rule is: if you're to going to bring this up you need something objective to go on. It can't just be based on memory and feeling, because memory and feeling are entirely unreliable on this.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716395
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Was it because I broke some rule, or was it because someone didn't like what I said?
Accounts that have been created to do that are low-quality accounts that soon accrue moderation penalties and eventually get banned—not because we disagree with the politics but because this is the main form of flamewar destroying this site. HN is a place for intellectual curiosity and curious conversation. If you want to do ideological warfare on the internet, that's a different game and you need to play it elsewhere.
Your comment didn't get removed. It did get detached from its original parent. That's standard moderation when the top comment gets replies that don't respond specifically to what it says (a.k.a. topjacking).
When using a group-chat system, it's possible to abuse anti-spam reporting. One design idea is to punish those who were involved in an "unjust report". This requires a "justification evaluation" - that can be done by a moderator, or by a broader community vote.
Does YT remove the ability to harass other YT users if that power is clearly being abused?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
This will cause other platforms to win eventually but Google might be too large to care.
What's also surprising is Tesla's pettiness and thin-skin response to Rich's videos, having banned him from their referral programme because they don't like them, and which are entirely benign, if a little provocative.
The algorithms strike again. This had nothing to do with EV or gas cars, but rather people spam flagging a post. I see this happen all of the time on other platforms such as twitter, but that's almost always because of political reasons.
In his videos he quite often reads hate mail he's receive from such people who are outraged by even the slightest dig at Elon, Tesla or EVs.
Maybe some threshold around subscriber count or views would help.
It should be able to distinguish that.