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Ask HN: Why are the Elon Musk topic submissions being suppressed?

14 points by anon_salary_1 ↗ HN
Maybe it was happening before, but I've noticed it a lot in the last few days - every time there is a thread about Elon Musk, it disappears from the front page extremely quickly, regardless of how many upvotes it has (or the speed of them).

I knew Hacker News had built in abilities for their moderators to promote and suppress content, but I am very surprised at the topic/consistency of this suppression in this instance. What gives?

34 comments

[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 95.1 ms ] thread
detaro
I assume people are annoyed by seeing every small iteration of the same overarching story and flag them. A bunch of the stories probably also tripped the flamewar detection, which downranks them automatically.
NigelThornberry
HN is currently being spammed with anti-Musk propaganda, there is one anti-Musk post after another about the same two topics
theCrowing
Sorry but we don't need to discuss every little shitty thing that happens three times per day just because you missed the thread with hundreds of replies when it was on the frontpage.
Narretz
The new submissions are about Musk banning journalists that he claims to have doxxed him, i.e. shared links to the flight tracker for his jet. However, some journalists have already come out and said they never shared the link. So it does seem worthy of discussion beyond the general change in Twitter policy.
theCrowing
Use the search function [0] [1]. Not even 12 hours old threads with combined over 1300 comments and that's not enough for you on HN?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008064

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008383

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Narretz
Thanks, yes I should have looked more thoroughly.
trasz2
And none of them is on the front side, despite the upvotes.
dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008383 was on the front page for over 6 hours. We turned off the flags on it for a while to allow for that.
fragmede
Just wondering, what's the reasoning for not applying more heavy handed moderation on which stories get dumped off the front page? Why not manually suppress a submission when you think the comments are likely to be of low quality, rather than leave an unrepliable comment at the top? A more curated place would be welcome, in order to stave off some of the eternal September-ness places undergo. There are other places on the Internet to have those discussions; HN doesn't have to be the place for that. There seem to be quite a few submissions on the frontpage these days that would fall under the "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" section of the guidelines and all I can do is flag them when I see them.
dang
Moderation is soft power. People think we have the power to be heavy handed, and a lot of users think that's what we do (just look at threads like this one), but we don't and we aren't. Mostly we just try to please the community, while doing our best to foster the mandate of the site. Of course this is impossible; the community can't be pleased, because different people want different things and many are incompatible. But if there's a way to keep it least-unpleased, that's what we're going for.

The posts you're asking about are in the vexed category where parts of the community feel they absolutely belong on HN while other parts believe they don't. Not only that, but the topics themselves have contradictory qualities: they're partly intellectually interesting, partly sensational gossip, partly a political slugfest. Unfortunately the slugfest is dominating everything else right now. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824. That's also why I pinned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010948 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010908 to the top of the two threads last night.

I don't know if that answers your question. It's hard to talk about this briefly. I've written a lot about how we moderate politics on HN, and some of it may make sense in this context. Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29219906

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844

Lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

If you take a look at those explanations and still have a question I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to hear what it is.

detaro
and there's a thread with thousand+ comments about that, so clearly it is being discussed?
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dang
Can you please make your substantive points without being mean? That's why we have site guidelines like: "Be kind", "Don't be snarky", and "Edit out swipes".

If you know more than other people (e.g. about how HN works—but it applies to anything), the thing to do is to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. What you said about the front page and using HN Search is true, but it's not good to deliver good information with poison.

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

Jensson
HN downranks threads with many comments, that is the main thing. Think of each comment as a downvote and it makes more sense why those quickly disappears from the frontpage.
fragmede
We can't downvote submissions, but we can flag them, which is way more punishing in the algorithm, and it's why they disappear from the front page so quickly, despite being highly up voted.
jstx1
I don't think it's flags, it's the high comments-to-votes ratio that pushes a thread down in the ranking.
Cheiree
The world does not revolve around Elon Musk.

And it says Hacker News in the title, not Twitter/Elon News. In fact if I would not see anything about Elon Musk or Twitter for a week then it would make me supremely happy.

smt88
I honestly don't think anyone here thinks what Elon is doing is important. Most of the comments seem to find it entertaining and validating.

It's fun when you've spent years reading pro-Musk brigades on every social media platform saying that Musk is one thing, and then he's proving himself to be a different thing altogether.

proc0
I'm seeing a lot of Musk posts, but they're mostly negative. I'm just saying, I visit dozens of online aggregators, and I've yet to come across one that is "balanced". It's almost impossible at this point. The polarization is real.
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yuppie_scum
Bud, not everything has “balance.” Some things are black and white.
NigelThornberry
Posting a controversial figure's location to the web in real-time puts his safety in jeopardy. That's as black and white as it gets, champ.
Quequau
I do not believe it is fair to characterise the moderation of stories related to Elon Musk and Twitter as "being suppressed". There are currently dozens upon dozens of submissions about Musk & Twitter, most of which are either low effort, low info, or outright duplicates.

Looking at what is being posted and comparing that what is allowed vs removed, it's clear that what is being removed are almost entirely duplicate submissions. This is an entirely reasonable and uncontroversial moderation policy / practice.

trasz2
HN is owned by YCombinator. They must not annoy their (potential) business partners.
dang
We don't moderate HN that way, as anyone can tell for themselves by looking at HN. There isn't any "business partner" who wouldn't have been "alienated" years ago by such shitty "moderation". (Btw, the only "business partners" that I know YC to be interested in are prospective startup founders who hopefully will apply and get funded. That's who YC's success depends on.)

You've been breaking the site guidelines badly, in exactly the way we banned https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=trasz for:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33265609 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33265508 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33254262 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33013513 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005522 (Sept 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32279647 (July 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916978 (Jan 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687837 (Dec 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27751799 (July 2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578442 (June 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578435 (June 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578417 (June 2020)

When we ban an account and someone immediately creates a new account to carry on in the same way, obviously we have to ban that one too. Therefore I've banned this one too.

Making sinister-vague criticisms of HN/YC doesn't change this, even though people love to do it because then they get to say "aha! see what they do to critics?!!". Similarly, pre-posting excuses in your profile ("Soon to be banned for pointing out that HN condones racism"!!) doesn't change this, even though people love to do that too because then they get to say "see? just as I predicted!"

Obviously we can't be influenced by that kind of thing because if we let any of them work, it would be a license to break HN's rules with impunity. Fortunately the community is fair-minded and can look through comment histories to decide for themselves whether an account was breaking the rules. Your accounts have been breaking the rules so badly that (a) I don't think we have a choice, and (b) I'm not worried about the community verdict.

Btw, I don't want to ban you at all and would be much happier to persuade you to just contribute to HN in a positive way, despite how limited and annoying it is. Believe me, I'm frustrated by its limitations too. I can't help but imagine that if we could sit down and actually talk about all this, it would not be so hard to agree.

It's t...

trasz2
Banned for pointing out that you are lying about your moderation policy, nice!
fragmede
If you click on "comments" at the top of the page, you'll see that there's plenty of commenting about the particular subject you have in mind.
fodldl
Because it's not very interesting. World's richest man misbehaves again on some website he bought? People protest by using an inferior clone of said website? Storm in a teacup. There are much more fascinating things going on in the world than this tedium.

If we're going to gauge how thought-provoking a topic is by how wealthy the main character is, might as well flood HN with submissions about what the Kardashians had for breakfast or how often Bill Gates uses the toilet or whatever. It's the same thing as following Musk's car crash behavior.

dang
It's a combination of user flags, software penalties, and moderation downweights. But there have also been moderation upweights - for example last night we turned off flags on the Twitter-Musk-journalists thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008383) so that it would be on the front page. It ended up being there for 6 hours.

If you want more explanation, I answered a similar question the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824 - though more in a cri de coeur style.

Btw, none of this is new—it happens every time there's a major ongoing topic with divisive qualities. The principles we use are: (1) downweight the follow-ups so there isn't too much repetition; (2) upweight (not a word - I just mean turn off user flags and software penalties) the ones that have significant new information*; and (3) downweight the hopeless flamewars, where the community is incapable of curious conversation and people are just bashing things they hate (or rather, bashing each other in the name of things they hate).

The most important is #3, because it's about preserving the ecosystem. We want HN to live another day. No thread is worth more than that, despite how huge and existential these stories always feel.

If HN were an art house theater, those principles would look like this: (1) don't show the copycat movies; (2) do show the interesting movies; (3) when the theater catches fire, stop the movie and deal with the fire.

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

8note
I'm flagging them at least

It's entertaining as /r/drama material, but it's not interesting

Nothing particularly new is added with each thread