Looking at the list of removed stories makes me really happy with the moderators here. They're all sensationalist, advertising for some company, clickbait, way off topic, or some combination of above. In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel should not have been removed.
dang has been doing a fantastic job for years now. How big is his team? What kind of tools are they using? Would love to read a writeup sometime, but I guess there are good reasons to keep this secret.
Then downvote it, that's what the button is for! The other commenter said they were interested in a write up with more information than that one question. But hey, can't please everyone.
(Perhaps that last one could be renamed to be less hyperbolic, but the content was still an interesting opinion piece)
I don't think this is being done by the mods, by the way. It's more likely some spam filter with false positives, report brigading, or an anti upvote ring mechanism.
Flags are sufficient. I just posted a comment on the comment you linked to: I have many times been the person who pressed "flag" on a story and then watched it immediately disappear.
I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.
I like Sam, but "$celebrity says $thing about $common-topic" is almost never a good basis for a frontpage thread on HN.
It's vital to HN that user flags and/or software like the flamewar detector clear most such submissions off the front page. They tend to attract a lot of upvotes because that's what sensational (and especially indignant-sensational) stories do. Without countervailing mechanisms, HN would be completely taken over by those stories.
> I don't want to see Altman's fearmongering and hyperbolic statements
His statement wasn't even hyperbolic or fearmongering.....?
He just extrapolated based on current amounts of compute and estimated a possible model size that could be equivalent to AGI (based on current architecture).
Training a model of that size would require too much electricity.
Dupes generally drop off the front page, whether or not someone links up the previous stories in the thread. The whole point is not to let the duplicate story crowd out other stories on the front page. Redirecting would defeat the purpose.
We do redirect to earlier posts that had the exact same URL. But most dupes, in the sense of repeated posts about the same story, don't have the exact same URL. What do you do then? That's a hard problem. It would be great to have an automated solution to that but I don't know of one.
> something akin to topic amalgamation or cosine similarity
Yup. We played with that years ago and dropped it as much too big of a potato. Another HN user spent a lot of time working on it and eventually gave up too. Someone should have a go using the newer AI tools though.
> could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are
Also yup - building support for the community to take care of this is how we plan to do it, whenever we get to working on it. I think this could work well because people care about this problem.
The last story is so full of outdated and misinformation that I tried to find out whether it was written a few years ago (though it would have still been full of misinformation back then).
I suspect that it has been flagged for that reason by multiple people.
The things you see on HN are not purely decided by the community. Mods can and do "freeze" the vote count on comments and posts, and do other non-obvious things too. You will notice the effect after participating for a while.
Exactly, the front page is heavily moderated. Almost every day you'll see posts with 50+ upvotes falling of the front page within an hour or two when some article about LISP with < 10 upvotes will remain here for a whole day.
It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.
Could you make your accusation more clearly? Are you saying it's 'dang' and 'pg'? One or two regular users abusing the flagging system? Or a couple dark and shadowy figures who have no public presence?
I don't mean to make accusations or invent "shadowy figures". HN has a very small number of moderators and their actions are not transparent, that's all.
Thanks for clarifying. I think part of my confusion was that HN only has one moderator at this point. Also, I'd probably say "not always obvious" rather than "not transparent". While there is no public record of moderation, at least for me Dan has been excellent about answering questions when asked.
I think you've misinterpreted my tone. I was not trying to tell you how to speak, but rather how I view the issue. You are welcome to share your own view.
What people maybe don't realize is how many constraints there are on HN's system. There aren't many degrees of freedom for us to change things that wouldn't lead to a massively different site, and most of those outcomes would be worse, because most of them would be closer to internet default.
It's easy imagine "HN, but without the things that I personally find annoying". But try to generalize that for a moment and the problem quickly becomes intractable.
We definitely don't. But I'd love to see any links to posts where you've seen that—or if you see it in the future. It's an unusual case that I've never heard of before!
The reason I say we definitely don't is that we'd have to write code to do that, and I'd remember writing such code.
Two out of three currently aren't removed. There's no moderator comment on the third, but a fair number of upvotes and user comments; I think it was flagged by users.
How can you tell? Those are from a week and a half ago. The OP's definition of 'removed' is (if I understand correctly) 'dropped from the top-30 to below the top-90 in 1 minute'.
I don't agree with the GP at all. Most seem normal for the front page or the intellectual curiosity standard (I mean, personally I'd like a much higher standard, but I'm basing it on what HN already has).
What these are is evidence of your parent comment's point that this isn't direct moderator action, rather a combination of algorithms and user flags.
Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's overblown.
I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people because they're tired of LLM stories (as repeatedly attested in this thread).
Based on the ratio of comments to upvotes, I suspect the Open Source Builds and Ford discussions ran afoul of the overheated discussion detector. Usually when the ratio gets too lopsided the software automatically drops the post off the front page, because that's an indicator that a lot of people are arguing in the thread without actually reading or enjoying the article.
I think you're probably generally correct, but "blaming the algorithm" sure smells to me like a whole lot of camouflage for censorship, which we ought to know by now has as much to do with 'quality' as it does 'shaping the narrative'
Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in successful community moderation, but you have to wonder 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost entirely at the behest of big tech.
Enable showdead in your profile if you want to see dead posts. You can't see deleted posts as the author deaded or asked HN to delete the post. See the HN FAQ [0].
I don't care if its a right-wing talking point and I don't care if a company has given themselves permission to censor themselves.
My interest is broadly about the attitudes towards speech as they continue to be shaped by corporations who continue to privatize the public square. See Taibbi's 'Twitter Files' for ample examples.
Users are privatizing the 'public square'. We come to HN by choice. I'm sure others use Twitter by choice. And users subject themselves to the TOS by choice.
This is definitely one of those 'if you don't like it, build (or buy) it'. It has worked out disastrously in the conservative realm so far, but perhaps you have better ideas.
There ought to be a time-based flagging limit, so that people don't abuse the system. I've already raised this earlier.
If Company A makes a killer product announcement, rival Company B could simply get its employees to spam down votes on and flag that post. Company A gets less visibility, and dang won't be able to come on time to stop it.
This is an easily plausible hypothetical, which may already be happening.
Flagging requires high HN karma. You get that by being a positive member of the community. Most such people, if a company even has one, would find it against their personal ethics to do that. And dang can see the karma ratio and unflag any actually worthwhile announcements.
I think as people have become more and more aware that flag negatively weights items for rankings, and isn't just a "hey have the mods look at this rule breaking thing", more people have started using it as a downvote button. It was my understanding that HN originally didn't have a downvote feature to avoid the kind of issues that the flag usage is now causing.
Even the highest karma users can lose their flagging privileges, temporarily or perhaps even permanently, if they do it enough times within a time window or if abuse is detected. So from what I understand that issue should be taken care of.
I think generally it works well- when there are actual major events like early COVID or Ukraine - HN managed to inform we way ahead of mass media with various interesting sources. But I’m happy to have a “news” thing pop up only a few times a year. You’re gonna have someone be mad about every instance when you moderate
I am one of the (few? many?) people (devs) who haven't look into LLMs or even tried out ChatGPT yet :), except to make jokes about it here once in a while.
The second one is both sensationalist clickbait[1] and politics. It was rightly removed:
>Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, 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.
The second story is evidence of a new phenomenon: The far right political movements thinking about an anti-constitutional policy, a new step on the ladder of escalation.
There's a reason it's a big deal in German politics and already had some fallout (and thankfully multiple dozens of counter-demonstration of ten of thousands of people all over Germany.)
Users flagged them. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case it might have been the desire to avoid gender flamewar hell, which is mostly always the same and which HN has had more than enough of. Also, one of the submissions was paywalled (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39104886), while the other was just the tweet of a graphic.
We sometimes turn flags off on such submissions, assuming that the article is substantive enough to have a chance at supporting a thoughtful discussion; and also assuming that the topic hasn't been discussed recently. But neither of those particular submissions was likely to be such a solid foundation.
Of those 4, the Ford one and the open-source builds one set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector); the Germany one was flagged; and the Show HN one got moderated down. Let's look at what happened in that order.
The Ford one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is easy to understand: hatred for modern car UIs is one of the most popular topics on HN these days and always gets people going (me too! but never mind)...which no doubt is one reason why the media sites keep playing it up. We wouldn't turn the penalty off in such a case. The discussion might not have been a flamewar but it was nearly entirely generic - for example the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090622. Given how over-discussed this topic already is, I'd say this is a case of HN's software working as intended.
The open-source one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is also unsurprising as open source stuff is also highly discussed and also gets people going. In this case I could make a case for turning off the penalty, but in the end would probably decide against it, because the article isn't very deep, the discussion is rather generic, HN has a surplus of such discussion already, and nothing here really clears the quality bar. But it's more of a borderline call; I can see how others could interpret it differently.
"Secret plan against Germany" was flagged by users. That's a political story with a baity title, so the default would be for it to get flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on such stories but I don't know that this one clears the bar. It's more current-events than deeply-interesting, the ideological material is inflammatory and nobody is going to approach it with curiosity. The thread was already showing clear signs of turning into a flamewar. Even then, we might still turn off the flags, but only if the story were intrinsically of great significance—the sort of thing it just wouldn't make sense not to discuss at all. I doubt this clears that bar.
The Show HN, we moderated down because "star for free trial" is not a valid thing to do in a Show HN and is something the community here would strongly oppose (see the top comment). Here's what I emailed the submitter: "We downweighted the post after getting complaints from users. 'Star repo for free trial' is way too much of a hard sales tactic for HN, and even more so for Show HN, which implies that users can try out the product (see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Asking them to star your repo first may be an ok tactic in other communities, but in the HN context it comes across as manipulative and is not in your interest at all."
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I guess the summary here is that this list is a mix of clear calls and borde...
dang - thanks for taking the time to respond in detail. You really go above and beyond. I imagine this whole discussion landing like a concrete block on your plate (but hey, maybe you dig this part of the job).
I have/had no objection to the moderation on these posts. In fact, if I were monarch of HN and the Internet, I'd want an order of magnitude higher standard for the quality of posts, comments, and conduct. I want to spend my time and on the actual very best intellectual content and discussion possible - it would probably be mostly the very best books and papers from journals if I had my way. (Not that I think HN should serve my personal preference, I'm just demonstrating that I am far away from criticizing the moderation.)
My GP comment and my other one that you responded to [0] were trying to recenter at least part of the discusson on a factual basis, which I find much more interesting than the (completely unintersting) conspiracy theory aspect. That is, if we explore it factually, objectively, intelligently, how does it work? how does it work out? For example, I imagine there are some interesting emergent properties which would tell us about the HN population, emergent properties of algorithms, and the interaction between them.
The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector. The last one was downranked by users. Admins didn't touch any of them.
Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of people's questions.
That would create one more thing for people here to complain about. People here would just accuse the mods of faking the mod log to hide their "real agenda" whatever that is.
> The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector.
Just some feedback that I've found a number of articles fall off the FP due to the flamewar detector that I've felt were good articles/discussions. In fact, I think some of the more valuable discussions tend to have a lot of back and forth discussions relative to the votes.
But I also recognize that flamewars can also look a lot like that.
So I'm wondering if it may be worth revisiting the algorithm for this, and maybe having it factor in a few other things vs. simply the vote:comment ratio (which is what I'm understanding it currently is, but correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't think it necessarily needs to be a lot more complex, maybe simply add to it some standard deviation of upvotes/downvotes (or just a simple ratio), if that's not already part of it.
But I've seen some discussions fall off that I don't remember seeing a particularly toxic discussion happening (e.g. relatively little to no downvoted comments).
Again, happy to see flamewars fall off, but just hoping to see some more interesting/helpful discussions not get caught in the crossfire.
Absolutely. We review the list of stories that set off that software penalty and restore the ones that are clearly not flamewars. No doubt we miss a few, and also - not everyone interprets these things the same way. But if you (or anyone) notice a case of a good thread plummeting off the front page, you can always get us to take a look by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
Yes, the carrot of automation would be so much easier than the stick of manual review. I haven't seen any system that works well enough yet though.
The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a go—and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd certainly like to see it. As would the entire community I'm sure!
You don’t really need a state-of-the-art anything here. People get too distracted with building the perfect system when it comes to use cases like this because they are paralysed thinking about the avoidance of false positives and make a bunch of sub-optimal decisions on that basis. False positives are much less of a problem with a human in the loop, and putting a human in the loop doesn’t require moderator effort.
You can probably put a big dent in the number of low-quality comments by just showing a “hey, are you really sure you want to post this?” confirmation prompt and display the site guidelines when you detect a low-quality comment. That way you can have a much more relaxed threshold and stop worrying about false positives. Sure, some people will ignore the gentle reminder, but then you can be more decisive with flags and followup behaviour because anything low quality that has been posted will by definition already have had one warning.
Even a bad implementation isn’t going to be showing this warning to people often enough to desensitise them. And if they make a habit of ignoring the warning to post flamewar stuff… that’s solved with moderation by a human. The intent is to add friction for knee-jerk low-quality comments, not solve for people who persistently, intentionally post low-quality comments after a warning.
Not sure what you're referring to, but you don't need a showdead feed to train an LLM for this purpose. Only 2% of comments are dead, and the number of bad comments that aren't dead is certainly higher than 2%. That's the problem, in fact!
I posted an on-topic supporting quote to explain why this item was newsworthy and got one unhelpful one-word response and my comment got inexplicably flagged (not the commenter) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138481
How did that slip past detection? How do I get the abusive flag on my comment reversed? This behavior seems to have managed to push an important story off the frontpage quickly. (yes there was a badly-worded dupe headline, but that's a separate thing)
If I understand correctly, you have three concerns here: (1) the story was downranked off the front page; (2) your comment was flagged; (3) a comment that replied to you was not flagged. I'll try to respond to these in turn:
(1) the story was downranked off the front page because the topic had already been discussed a bunch—for example in these threads, two days earlier:
Culling repetition from the front page is one of the most important things HN's systems need to do. Actually, it's probably the single most important thing. Certainly it's best if we can link to the previous discussions so people can know where to find them—but we can only do that some of the time. Users help out a ton by posting links to earlier threads. Ultimately we need better software support for dealing with this, but that's not done yet.
(2) Your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138481 was flagged by users. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I'm pretty sure I know why: comments that do nothing but quote from the article, or post a summary of it, are considered too formulaic by readers here. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but please do it in your own words and share your own thinking. To simply paste a quote from the article is too superficial. On HN the convention is to assume that readers are smart enough to evaluate an article for themselves.
Edit: I'm going to copy the above paragraph into a reply below, so I can link to it in the future when this comes up, without the rest of the post.
(3) The reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138536, which only said "and?", was definitely an unsubstantive comment that deserved to be flagged (and killed) even more than yours did. The reason it escaped detection was simple, albeit unsatisfying: pure randomness. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here—there's far too much. I've flagged it now.
Your comment was flagged by users. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I think I know why: comments that do nothing but quote from the article, or try to summarize the article, are considered too formulaic by readers here. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but please do it in your own words and share your own thinking. To simply paste a quote from the article, or a summary, is too superficial. On HN the convention is to assume that readers are smart enough to evaluate an article for themselves.
(I copied this from the parent comment so I can link to it when this comes up in the future).
I have a compliant : sometimes there a proliferation of anti-scientific posts, in example I can mention those related to the "50 years nuclear battery", I remember particularly one from techradar.com that was especially misleading and anti-scientific and more similar to a PR campaign then scientific information, they was stating che you can power a smartphone or a drone with a betavoltaic battery (millionth of Ampere ). This is only an example, I noticed similar article , often related to green energy with the same anti-scientific cut and sometimes anti-scientific is a euphemism. Could nice to have a way to report them , even for occasional readers like me. Often the same articles have approval posts that IMHO are bot made. we live in times where scientific fraud amplified by the media is becoming a serious problem and I think everyone should do more to stop the phenomenon.
Trying to assess what's scientific vs. anti-scientific is outside the scope of what mods can do. I have my opinions just like you do, but hashing these things out is a community process, not a moderation issue. We could put our fingers on the scale, I suppose, but nothing good would come of that, so we don't.
How can users downrank headlines? I only have an option to upvote them. While it's not too frequent, there are things that make it to the front page that I'd like to express my disapproval of.
User flags, once they've accumulated above a certain threshold, have a downranking effect. Pretty sure this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
I'm curious why there's no actual downvote for submissions. Was that ever discussed on here? I did a quick search for prior discussions on the topic but didn't find anything.
To me, "flag" means "this is a serious violation that requires moderator attention". Something I'd want you to see and deal with because it's bigoted, illegal, spam, etc. I wouldn't flag something simply because I didn't think HN was the right audience, or because I personally dislike the topic. You seem to be encouraging me to use it simply as a downvote.
I'm not going to start flagging things, nor do I feel that strongly about the lack of a downvote, but if flags are effectively downvotes behind the scenes, and if that's how users are treating flags (which they obviously are, from other comments on this thread), I think the UI should have a downvote button.
I assume there's been discussion about this before and I'm curious about the thought process behind the decision. I don't find the FAQ to be informative about this.
The only person who could answer that is pg because that design choice was part of the embryo of HN.
He must have been thinking something though, because Reddit was originally his conception and he was an influence on the earliest development of Reddit as well (edit: and Reddit does have story downvoting - forgot to mention that bit).
It's good that this is in this thread, as I bet a ton of power users (I check HN multiple times a day for years but likely only a time or two have glossed over the FAQ), did not know FLAG could be used as a downvote tool. Interesting choice by PG, I agree with the previous comment, we have all come to know FLAG as a violation tool on most platforms. Now we know.
I never flag anything because it's recorded on my profile, and I don't want stuff recorded on my profile that isn't useful to me. I only upvote submissions and comments that I intend to refer back to in the future. Upvotes are simply bookmarks to me, so my only tool for voting on the quality of conversation is downvotes. Which, apparently, I can't do for articles without spamming up my profile.
Actually I just checked my profile and saw several flags that must have appeared on a mis-click, just like how sometimes upvotes appear on a mis-click. Fortunately, unlike mis-clicked upvotes, you can still remove these.
Do you happen to remember if the misclicks were on mobile or not? I'm planning to add a confirmation screen to cut down on flags-by-misclick, but the current intention is to make it mobile-only.
Almost certainly they were on mobile, where the small font and use of touch screen to scroll makes mis-clicks much more likely. I'd be happy with a confirmation screen because I rarely or never intend to flag, but by the sounds of it there are a lot of liberal flaggers who could find the extra step annoying.
I've ran into this a few times, not just with flagging but with hiding too. It would be really helpful to have a confirmation dialog and/or a banner on the screen after the action was taken that would let you undo it. To answer your question: I think most of mine were on mobile but it would be nice to be able to have it in all environments if possible.
Tbh if you just upvote what you like and do not vote what you don't like it's almost the same thing.
The one exception is if some group organizes to upvote something that fits their agenda / business plan. But in this case it's generally something worth flagging and it gets flagged?
"Transparent" means different things to people, but if you mean a full moderation log: I think most likely it would produce more questions and effort, for no clear gain. I've written about this over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Here's how I look at it: if trust is present, then we don't need to publish a full log, as long as we answer questions when people ask them. That degree of transparency has been available here for many years. If, on the other hand, trust isn't present, a moderation log won't create it. It will just generate more data for distrust to work with—and distrust always finds something.
Thus our focus is on building trust with the community and maintaining it. That happens through lots of individual and group interactions, answering questions whenever we get them, in the threads or by email. That's what I spend most of my time doing.
We're never going to take the community's trust for granted because it's what gives HN the only real value it has, and it would be all too easy to lose. But I would tentatively say that this approach has proven to work well for most of the community. If people learn they can always get a question answered, that's a powerful trust-building factor.
Equally clear is that it does not work for everybody; but that's always going to be the case no matter what we do. I don't mean that we dismiss such users' concerns—quite the contrary, I make extra efforts to answer them. I'm just not under any illusion that we can satisfy everybody. It's satisfying enough if a few people can occasionally be won over in this way—which does happen sometimes!
Envision an airline withholding safety records, a car manufacturer keeping crash test results private, a restaurant refusing to provide health inspection logs, or a government refusing to disclose details of its budget allocation — all claiming that transparency would only complicate matters and provide "more data for distrust". In each case, the flawed nature of your core argument becomes obviously evident.
I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change (unless forced), but just wanted to point out that your argument against transparency is a cop-out and that you're on the wrong side of history here.
That's interesting! But I don't think the "flawed nature of my core argument" is obviously evident—and I don't think the community would consider that obvious either.
It could be fun to look into it together, but the fun stops at "I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change". Why dance if someone wants to kick you in the shins?
I hear you, but relying solely on the community's perception, particularly when it's predominantly of a certain mindset, doesn't guarantee objectivity. After all, recent years have seen an accelerating trend where leftist-controlled media and social-media companies have normalized the suppression of opposing viewpoints under the guise of 'fairness'.
It's one thing for private communities to set their own rules, but it's quite another to publicly tout these restrictions as universally fair when they're essentially projections of biased viewpoints coming from human-beings in positions of power. Actual transparency permits genuine openness and dialogue, rather than masking personal ideologies as righteous principles.
I don't think you can reasonably compare the importance of transparency in your examples to that of editorial decisions in a private moderated community.
In the first set, the stakes are far higher, which is why the collection of objective data is legally mandated in the first place.
In the second set, you have only the subjective opinions of people who have an explicit goal to cultivate a specific variety of community. As members of that community, we select into the cultivation regime under which we participate.
Not everyone will share the same preferences, and that's OK.
It's perfectly reasonable for private communities to have their own sets of rules and regulations. I'm simply pointing out an example of the all-too-common situation pervading certain communities where clear mechanisms of ideological projection and indoctrination (i.e. censorship, non-transparency, etc) are present but unseeable to many members of the community since it supports their existing ideological beliefs. a.k.a. Cognitive dissonance
I think the fundamental difference is that an airline or government is working according to objective rules and regulations, while HN is not. HN is trying to build a community, and I think that communities need subjective rules rather than objective
My original account was shadow-banned by HN years ago (probably by @dang) due to some overly heated political discourse bs.
Hence my interest in debating @dang's straw-man response....and nowadays, using throwaway accounts is often the only way others even see opposing viewpoints on topics like this.
The flags on the last item don't seem to be made in good faith. This looks like abuse of the flag system to me. Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
By "the last item" you're referring to "Avoid Async Rust at All Cost", right? Personally I don't think that's abuse; I would have flagged that post if I'd seen it. That's despite the fact that I agree with a lot of what's in the post. The title is just too inflammatory. And there are more inflammatory bits in the post, such as saying the feature is "objectively bad", and saying that a community member's post "gracefully omits" some information (where the word "gracefully" sounds like an accusation that they were being disingenuous). Totally unnecessary. Chop off the inflammatory bits and you'd have a perfectly good blog post making an interesting point, but as-is that post was not going to lead to a productive discussion.
I can make an argument either way there. The argument in favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this much-discussed topic; its title was flamebait and arguably misleading as well since the article seems more about async in general; and generally it was more of a drama submission on a classic flamewar topic than an interesting technical piece. I'm not saying all that is fair but it's easy to imagine good-faith users flagging for such reasons.
I checked the flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases where a user had previously flagged a different article about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4] below. A few of those might be borderline calls but I don't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags are legit if the story has had a large amount of discussion recently. Otherwise HN would consist of the same few discussions over and over, and we have enough of that as it is!
> Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
There are some software protections in place against that, but like all such protections, they don't catch all the bad cases and they have false positives as well.
We review the flags and turn flags off sometimes. I would not say it's perfect because although we try to look over all the flagged stories, it has to be done hastily (or one wouldn't get much else done). That makes it easy to miss things. However, users often email us at hn@ycombinator.com when they think a story has been unfairly flagged, and in those cases we always take a closer look. I don't know what percentage of the time we turn flags off in such cases, but it's not a low number. So if we include "users sending emails" as part of "the system", then yes, there's a system for monitoring flag abuse.
Last point: this is a pretty typical case. I'd say it's borderline but in the end I probably agree with the flaggers. If the topic of Rust (and async Rust in particular) weren't already so thoroughly covered, and/or if the flamewar aspect hadn't been there, then I'd probably disagree with the flaggers.
dang, thanks for taking the time for such a thoughtful response. I didn't know about the policy regarding topics that have been on a lot lately, that makes sense. I've not been around as much lately and hadn't noticed that this topic was well-trodden.
a tame story that got some discussion, but was marked as a dupe. But I didn't see any other posts linked in the comments as expected. I search for other submissions and see two other posts... with 0 comments:
Of those, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165981 had been just a few days earlier. And it turns out that there actually was a link to it in the later thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39204186, but this comment was flagkilled, probably because of the personal swipe in it. (You can still see it but only if you turn on 'showdead' in your profile.)
I could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
No problem! I see these threads as opportunities to explain things to the entire community so I try to make the explanations as thorough as possible, and to answer every question that I see. (though I'm sure I don't see them all - if anyone has (or sees) a question that didn't get answered, you can always let me know at hn@ycombinator.com)
This is the kind of explanation that makes sense when the association happens to come to mind—in this case, something like: HN -> YC -> Sam -> Helios -> nuclear -> obvious conflict of interest -> QED. But such chains of associations rarely have anything to do with what happened to a story on HN. The explanation is almost certainly much simpler.
In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738, it just set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. We sometimes turn that penalty off, but in a case like this we wouldn't do that because "$Celebrity says $thing about $common-subject" is almost never a substantial story. It's essential to HN to clear such stories off the front page in order to make room for more interesting, less sensational things. If we didn't, the front page would consist of little else.
It really is impressive how HN has been such a quality community for so long. I can’t think of any of many other online communities that I have been using for 10+ years. So definitely much gratitude to the mods from me for the work they do.
One thing I've learned today, after 11 hours of posting in this thread, is that it's easy to look at an article in isolation and say "Really? That got moderated?" - when in fact if you know the larger context there's nearly always a straightforward explanation.
One can certainly argue that 86 points and 46 comments is too low a threshold to treat the repost as a dupe, but that's a different question, no?
We haven't touched those stories except reduce the penalties on them (user flags mostly) and moderate them less than we normally would (per https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). I put one back on the front page last night despite this contradicting every principle HN stands for—every other principle, that is, than the first one, which is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of a story.
I posted detailed explanations in those other threads:
If you (or anyone) read those explanations and still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is. These practices have been in place for many years and haven't changed.
One questions I do have–I would guess posts critical of HN/YC are going to get a log of flags and have not the best discussion. This has a side affect of biasing the home page to not have posts critical of HN/YC. Do you see this as a problem?
The home page already has a massive bias in favor for pretty much any kind of negativity, but doubly so for anything involving a tech company. It doesn't matter whether the stories are untrue, unverified, repetitive, etc, they'll still get voted up, and the comment threads will half full of low quality complaints repeated from past discussion, often only tangentially related to the submission.
And it creates a very visible feedback loop, as users start to think that this is what HN is supposed to be. They're probably the biggest quality problem of HN.
> posts critical of HN/YC are going to get a log of flags
You can take this with a grain of salt as I'm obviously not the most neutral observer, but from everything I've seen (which at least is a lot!), yes they get a lot of flags, but they get even more upvotes. It's hard to say which side wins out in the tug-of-war. The tendency towards negativity that jsnell's comment describes is very real, and it's on the upvote side in these cases.
Most probably the tug of war goes one way some of the time and the other way the rest of the time. The funny thing is that as mods, we have to have a regulating influence either way. What I mean is that if a rage story hits the top of the front page, we'll downweight it (though not necessarily all the way off the front page); but if a rage story about YC gets too many flags, we'll reduce those or remove them altogether. The recent shitfest is a good example; let me dig up some links for you... Edit: oh wait, I already mentioned those links in the GP. Sorry, I'm getting a bit tired here!
@dang You did–thank you. I hope my question didn't come across as accusatory. This is a hard problem and, unfortunately for you, many of us enjoy discussion of difficult problems. What many of us may not see is you having to have the _same_ conversation over and over. Thanks again for your work. I don't envy your position.
Oh you're welcome, thanks for the kind reply. One thing I've learned from this thread is how much misunderstanding there is around follow-up or duplicate articles that get moderated because they're repetitive, not because they're off-topic in themselves.
Yeah this list seems to be pretty low quality stuff. There's a couple economic/political links that I think are interesting but I can totally see why they would be removed as off-topic or likely to produce a flamewar.
It's pretty clear to me that any online forum needs good moderation to be healthy long term. HN has been good about this with a strong community providing upvotes/downvotes and a moderation team that seems pretty light handed but not afraid to say no when necessary. Please keep doing what you're doing.
You're right, but I'd like to add that we do turn off flags sometimes when we think a story (a) has a good (if not high) chance at a substantive discussion and (b) hasn't had much discussion previously. If anyone notices such a case, they're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look.
I witnessed a recent front page link silently get changed to point to a parody video, then silently changed back later, with the top comment that remarked on the change silently removed.
That told me all I needed to know about the moderation of this site.
I expected a matter-of-fact explanation of a simple error, and a comment thread that was collapsed - exactly what I found. reductum implied there wasn't an explanation and that the complaining comment thread had been deleted without comment, both of which were hard to believe, so I went looking.
You just need to move your game theory to a different level. The expected value of lying about such things is super negative and the expected value of telling the truth is super positive.
I'm sure there's a model in which lying some of the time but not too often has marginally higher expected value, but it's also going to have significantly higher risk and that's not worth it, plus you have to be disciplined enough to actually apply such a strategy. One slip and you're dead! I'm too lazy for that.
My point is obviously that you’d tell a lie that looks like the truth people want to believe. Which when you get away with it is the biggest EV of all.
You could 100% edit any post you want here and replace it with a link to a funny YouTube video and call it a fat-finger typo and get away with it. There’s no risk for you (as long as you don’t try it too often).
That would be reckless. We must estimate risk differently.
Btw the more accurate reason why we don't do things like that is that we don't want to because it would feel bad. It's not who we want to be. However, the actual reason doesn't always have much persuasive power and when I'm sensing that's the case, I use the cynical argument ("not in our interests", basically), because it's also true. But as the cynical argument isn't persuading you, maybe I should switch back!
YC's a business and operates HN in the end for business reasons*. I don't have a problem with calling that marketing, but I'm puzzled why you bring that up in this context.
If what you require from an internet forum is that the moderators under no circumstances will ever commit a copy/paste error, HN is definitely below your standards.
Edit: the mods would like to share that they weren't drunk when they made that mistake, just rushed and watching a rather gripping tennis final.
That prompted me to check other dates in the archive: apparently the "Startup News" title lasted for around six months before changing to "Hacker News". I was pretty sure the change was before I made my account, but I didn't realize the "Startup News" period had been so short.
> I don't see a single story that I personally feel should not have been removed
Another way to look at this is that the mods have the same biases you do. Depending on how you’re feeling on a given day, you could call that an echo chamber.
Agree, and to be clear, that's why I upvoted this submission -- it really is an endorsement of the algorithm and moderation we see here. I know the person who wrote the article did it from a place of skepticism, but it functions as a nice gold-star transparency report.
That rule does not generally apply to HN meta debates, which this is, so it's a bit of a corner case. If there was a duplicate of this story on the front page tomorrow, I'd expect HN to honor the user flags on it.
I really don't like Musk but I don't flag things Musk related. I frequently upvote them because I'm interested in the discussion.
Unfortunately those stories often turn into flamewars. That's probably why people are flagging them.
I don't think it's wise to draw so many inferences about why people vote the way they do. Frequently I see comments where someone makes a reasonable point, but also drops a bunch of flamebait, and when they're inevitably flagged they edit their comment to claim that the flags prove their point and that the problem who disagree with them are overly sensitive and censorious. But in reality a lot of the people flagging them probably agree with them, but don't want them to start a flamewars. I flag a lot of comments like that, even when I am agree with their overall point. (I actually did that with a comment just now.)
It's a form of self fulfilling prophecy and further entrenches you into your position, which is antithetical to curious discussion.
> certain things (e.g. anything pro-Musk) get mass flagged for emotional reasons.
Lots of Musk stuff, including positive stuff, on the front page. Yesterday there was a story about petabytes of data on the Starlink laser network, based only on Starlink PR afaict.
Only saw one Gary tan link removed. I thought I'd see more. Maybe it was only removed because it was a dupe? I'm referring to the "Gary tan tupac lyrics" one.
There was a bunch of Gary Tan links -- you can see in my comments I was arguing with a bunch of HNers today about whether he's right or wrong on that "Die Slow" tweet. Probably dang removed it because it's a dupe story.
He could have phrased it a little better but the people calling for his removal from YC are just plain silly.
It took about 10 years for the crypto headline hysteria to taper but it might have been only because ai is now the big annoying thing to shoehorn into everything. Monkeys pawl will curl and you will emerge out of your hibernation to more disgust at whatever the next annoying thing will be.
Eh? I'm not pretending digital coins or dubious "tokens" were all particularly useful, but crypto (in the sense of cryptography) has been around for decades and is definitely here to stay...
The people who made coins and tokens bad for society are doing the same thing with GenAI...
Both are useful and both come with huge problems. Neither one is some panacea or a sustainable get-rich-quick scheme (obviously, both people in "crypto" and in "GenAI" are getting rich, but neither are going to lead to some sort of great societal good).
> but crypto (in the sense of cryptography) has been around for decades and is definitely here to stay...
But that's not the sense under discussion. "Crypto"=cryptography lost the language war and was completely supplanted by "crypto"=cryptocurrency. I really wish the word could regain its original and useful meaning, but it's too late now.
Ironically, "I work in crypto" went from meaning something useful to society to meaning being a parasite on society, and you'd best not accidentally use the phrase expecting people to understand it to mean the original thing (cryptography).
(Yes, not all uses of cryptocurrency are a parasitic detriment. But if you happen to be working on actually useful stuff and we meet socially, then please be very quick about saying that you work at doing something with cryptocurrency or blockchain that is intended to provide actual benefit. If you just say "I work in crypto", I will excuse myself at the first opportunity.)
> "Crypto"=cryptography lost the language war and was completely supplanted by "crypto"=cryptocurrency.
On the timescale of the past 4-5 years, you are correct about the popular usage.
However, if cryptocurrency continues to recede from the public eye, then in another 4-5 years I think "crypto" will no longer mean "cryptocurrency".
Understanding both the current lexicon and the "archaic" and "recently archaic" uses of the term I hold is both useful and pertinent to being able to communicate effectively. Which is why I immediately clarified, I'm talking about the 40+ year definition of the term, not the current whimsical linguistic fad.
Was at a networking event recently and "I was in the crypto/NFT space but I'm now pivoting to GenAI" was by far the most common way people introduced themselves.
At least it made it easy to figure out who I didn't need to talk to.
There was some heavy handed moderation decision that moot made, can't remember what, but he enforced it by saying "One man's shitpost is another man's board culture". I think about that a lot when it comes to moderation because people tend to assume everyone in the community is just like them; and really only moderators have a gauge on how saturated certain can be.
It's also why I don't like the "free speech at all costs" meme that gets thrown around when $corporation bans $person_i_like. Every community needs moderation and it's often a thankless job that feels like nothing is being done at all when it's being done right.
> it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news
For sure many are. This happens with every Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) and LLMs are way beyond a MOT [1]. The hivemind tires of repetition extremely quickly [2]. The trick is to try to separate wheat from chaff, where 'wheat' means the stories that bring Significant New Information (SNI) [3] and 'chaff' means the follow-up and copycat stories, which are legion [4].
It's important to understand are that there's a wide spectrum of opinion about this stuff. If you imagine a slider with "allow zero posts about $TOPIC" at one end, and "allow all posts about $TOPIC" at the other end, pretty much every user would slide it to a different position. This is true for every $TOPIC and especially for the biggest ones.
Frontpage space is the scarcest resource HN has [5] and every reader has a different 'signature' of preferences that they would like to see (or not see) there. This means not only that it's impossible to satisfy everybody, but that it's impossible to fully satisfy anybody—because nobody's 'signature' is perfectly matched on the front page, and (lest any of you be thinking of this quick riposte) certainly not the mods'!
I'd be pretty miserable doing that, but one of these years I'd like to condense the past explanations into something a bit more definitive and put them up as sort of glosses on the site guidelines. I imagine most of those HN Search links I'm constantly posting could be replaced by a link to some sort of canonical paragraph on the topic.
I will occasionally flag things that will result in discussions that are always the same because I'm tired of them. Stories about tipping at restaurants or Trump or Biden, for example -- literally every argument for or against has been made and there's nothing new or interesting to say. But I'm more likely to hide them.
I would also include the periodic Monty Hall re-post (everything that ever comes up in the discussions can be found in the Monty Hall problem wikipedia page).
LLMs are like crypto, where scams and scam-adjacents are everywhere.
I am the biggest local ML advocate you will find. My 3090 is either running Yi 34B queries or other experiments all day, my job is with local LLMS... But I am totally OK with heavy handed AI-related moderation. I dont want the sea of AI grifters to have a single second on the HN front page.
I'm sick of LLM-related news. I'm fascinated by the technology and the progress, but for every one article about something novel, there are dozens rehashing the same points about social impact, bias, deepfakes, plagiarism, etc. These topics are of some interest to me, but the vast majority of the articles bring nothing new to the table and are reactionary responses to the latest infraction.
I believe that is close to what the median HN reader feels: interested by the significant new developments, fatigued by the endless incremental updates, and grossed out by the hypemeisters.
> I sent an email to the moderator. @dang, who was very kind and quick in his response, explained to me that the Story had been flagged by users even without being explicitly [flagged], and that he could therefore only hypothesize the causes of the flag.
Maybe this is a consequence of Hacker News not having a way to downvote stories?
I only flag stories that are blatant violation of HN's guidelines: SPAM, politics, racist... Otherwise, if I don't like a story I don't do anything.
Maybe I'll start flagging stories that I don't like?
Yea, I suspect a sizable number of people use "flag" as a mega-downvote for things they passionately don't like, rather than for policy violations and spam.
For recent dead comments, click on the time ("31 minutes ago") to bring up the comment's own page where there's a "vouch" option next to the other comment options if you have enough karma.
For dead stories in the "new" queue, I see a "vouch" option already without going to the story's own page.
Yeah, like you I would have never thought to use the flag unless it was violations etc but turns out it's a weird behaviour of many users. Not sure why or when it originated but seems like its been driving the up/downs of a number of topics/posts for years now. Still use with moderation.
"While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news."
If you believe that HN is a hive mind and all users must believe in the exact same things, then yes, this is probably hard to believe.
I however, am tired of LLM news, but I just simply ignore them as I'm well aware that many people here are very much interested in them. So at least an anecdotal response of one that some HN users are tired of LLM related news.
You might also be surprised that not all HN users like social media while some do. Some are very privacy conscious while others will freely post all of their everythings to anywhere. You might find it hard to believe that some lean left while others lean right with some even landing straight in the middle. Why you would think anything is hard to believe in this day and age is very strange to me.
That "While I have no reason" line has been quoted in six top-level comments so far, obviously it struck a nerve here.
It would be ultra-cool to have rough topic filters here, so I could just go to settings and hit a checkbox to ignore all the LLM-this and AI-that articles. Easier said than done, I'm sure.
Any time you paint with a broad brush with comments like that, you're going to miss some of the details. Looking at the time stamps of those comments shows they were pretty much at the same time. I use the phrase "group think" a lot, but intentionally do it to in part rabble rouse, but also to get those in the group think to maybe think and take a second to question if it truly is group think behind their current position.
I think this is an unnecessarily uncharitable reading, that the author assumes HN is a hive mind.
Replace "HN users" with "most HN users" (it's common to use general language when one's intention is to point out a trend in a population) and, as another person tired of AI/LLM news, I would also be surprised given how much popularity (upvotes, comments) HN users tended to give to those stories.
I'm tutoring a friend's homeschool kids (who live in the US, I'm in Central America) in Spanish and the mom couldn't set up Payoneer so yesterday she asked if I'd accept bitcoin.
I'm an Urbiter and everyone in that scene is all about crypto.
It's still big but you're right, it's more confined to specific niches, instead of MSNBC talking about NFTs
Yes the corpse that just got approved for a BTC ETF with an ETH ETF on the way and with multiple companies winning lawsuits against the SEC. But sure, because it's not on HN anymore it's a corpse.
The state of the crypto world is such that i genuinely can’t tell if you’re being satirical by using a bunch of jargon and acronyms that mean nothing in the order you used them, or not
You should probably learn what an ETF is…it’s one of the most basic investment vehicles that will grow your savings reliably over the years, and most people put their 401ks (or equivalent) into them, so yes a ton of normal people know what it is.
The SEC enforces regulation (or it’s supposed to at least) around securities passed by congress.
The real question here is if you don’t even know a basic finance term like ETF, why are you trying to talk down to my statement and crypto when you clearly have no knowledge of the sector? It’s just ignorant
I wasn’t talking down the financial aspect of your comment, I was saying that the language you use is so idiosyncratic with that community that, in being an outsider, I can’t tell if you’re making fun of it, or are a part of it. “…basic investment vehicles that will grow your savings reliably…” this is what I’m talking about.
Also I’m not American so it’s not reasonable to expect me to know what the SEC is, and I don’t have a 401k. We have an entirely different retirement system in my country.
Especially when none of it brings anything new. A lot of the AI announcements are from companies who are basically saying "we can send what you typed through GPT-4 with maybe a slightly specialized system prompt". And when it comes to blogs, there's only so many times one can tolerate reading the same exact arguments for or against AI.
I don't know why this has happened with both AI and cryptocurrency that people feel personally attacked when others just don't want to be bombarded with it 24/7.
Probably because if they bring that tone to enough topics, eventually they will be right. Though also probably not for the reasons they think (e.g. they say a post will be removed because it discusses a controversial topic when in reality it was removed because it was just plain garbage content).
When I had more downtime I’d spend a lot of time browsing /new.
There’s a wealth of great blogposts that show up there which don’t always make it to the front page (understandable; we only have so much attention to give).
What I will say is that there is a ton of cruft that spams the board. Thinking of spammed blog posts from one or more accounts, sensationalist news, etc which wouldn’t provide much value here.
Flagging really helps on /new IME. It’s worth spending time there if you haven’t tried HN other than via the front page
I think my comment was early before all your responses, thank you for your work!
I didn't expect to get an answer from Daniel Gackle himself - shows the amount of dedication.
Don’t the vast majority of these get removed via flags from users?
Edit: I’m not asking a rhetorical question. There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page. Can anyone attest to this?
> There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page. Can anyone attest to this?
I don’t get the impression from that article that Daniel and Scott are curating the front page in the way the thanks in this thread suggest. I am still of the impression that the front page composition is decided by upvotes, downvotes, and flags. Contrary to the implication in this repos’ text.
Besides upvotes, downvotes, and flags, there are software penalties like the flamewar detector and various anti-abuse measures, and moderation downweights. We do a lot of the latter—I don't want to underemphasize this. The HN system is a combination of these three subsystems.
You're right that user flags do more than mods do, just because the numbers work that way: there are many orders of magnitude more users flagging things than there are mods.
There are stories on this list that deserved to be seen, were popular, were important, and were not in fact dumpster fires in the comments - but a particular crowd with a particular bias decided to flag them.
Does this crowd think it's cool and normal that all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed, based on the opinion of a dedicated minority?
US tech giants are heavily implicated in this, so no one can seriously argue the topic isn't relevant. A World War could come from these "plausibly genocidal" actions, which are enabled in various ways by US tech giants.
There's a certain element that doesn't want to discuss politics at all, so I imagine these ran afoul of that crowd. This is a tech-oriented site, and we're not going to come up with a Middle East peace plan in the comments.
Exactly. Big tech has been staggeringly complicit in these oh-so documented war crimes. For example, AI is being used to 'target' people, even in refugee camps and residential areas; even when hundreds of civilian casualties are predicted. This has been admitted - even boasted about.
As tech people, we can't just stick our heads in the sand and expect this not to come back on us. We're enabling this destruction in myriad ways, from funding to coercion to suppression of discussion [cough].
Genocide isn't just politics. We are legally bound as a nation, and morally obligated as humans, to prevent it. Instead, the US and many its tech companies are complicit.
If we can't even discuss the ICJ ruling that this may well be in fact a genocide, even when people are behaving and upvoting without breaking guidelines, then imo something very important has been broken.
"We" ain't all americans. There are people here coming from opposing sides in various wars. And there are more wars and slaughtering going on, than in the middle east. And "we" are just tech people. Not better or worse by principle, which shows off very easily as there can be religious flame wars about software already.
So it would be good, if we could debate all this in a nice way. But apparently we cannot. This is why many people want NO politics here at all. As there is usually nothing coming out of it, except more of the usual - and not interesting discussions.
The basic metric this site optimizes for is: "interesting discussion". So yes, sometimes there can be interesting discussion about political topics. But most of the times - not so much. And what you apparently want is activism, not discussion. Not to say your activism is bad - but this site is simply not made for activism of any kind. Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
> what you apparently want is activism, not discussion
I'd call the flaggers colluding to spike stories with lively and non toxic discussions the 'activists'.
> Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options. Suppressing anything with a whiff of controversy doesn't result in positive outcomes.
Besides; freedom of speech, and free exchange of ideas, are both decidedly in the "good hacker" wheelhouse.
Have you seen one discussion about Gaza free of that? I haven't. (My main account is rate limited, because of a recent Gaza debate btw. Because I like heated discussions from time to time. But I can respect that it is not wanted here)
"So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options."
So one of those options are, you start your own forum, where you can have all that, instead of demanding that other people and places change to your liking. Just a suggestion.
> Have you seen one discussion about Gaza free of that? I haven't.
I have. I linked them as examples above.
> demanding that other people and places change to your liking
I haven't made any demands. I've said what I'd like to see improved.
On the whole I like this community, and I try to contribute to it positively. Making suggestions on how it could be run with less censorship and suppression is not an unreasonable thing to do, and it's odd you think it is tbh.
And this one is really bad, as the ICJ did not do such a thing. The ICJ has not made any ruling, whether what happens in Gaza is genocide or not, so what good can come out of such a manipulative headline?
The ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has "international significance". It's by far the most significant development in months.
From the submission guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
People here were clearly finding those stories interesting, as measured by upvotes and comments.
> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
US mainstream TV mostly declined to air South Africa's side of the case, as well as the actual verdict; opting instead to only air Israel's defense.
> Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar will be on topic.
"Something with drones" = on topic, but a plausible genocide verdict from the ICJ is not of "international significance" and therefore off topic... This isn't computing for me, sorry.
>ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has "international significance". It's by far the most significant development in months
The verdict had a thread with over fifteen hundred comments and was on the front page most of the day. Others were presumably down ranked as they were dupes.
The linked deleted thread was 90 minutes older than the thread that 'survived'.
Also, it was removed within a minute of hitting the front page (if I'm reading the graphs right). Doesn't quite line up with your presumption.
Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?
Besides - the point is this: Not all the stories that are in OP's list are spam, or unsuitable. Some topics hit a third rail.
They are easily removed by a small group of users, and then Daniel can come by months later and say, well, users flagged it [ie, 0]. It even happens to PG [1]. This isn't ideal, and pretending it isn't happening is uncool.
I'm not saying Dang doesn't do a great job. But there are some topics that are verboten, despite their impact/relevance on the tech community and our general interest. And this particular topic is too important to allow for such narrative control by a tiny group of flaggers.
Presumably users flagged both posts almost immediately, and by the time mods decided that the topic was worth discussion the second thread had more engagement. The first thread was still a dupe despite being posted earlier.
>Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?
While the verdict was a major event like you said, The Guardian's story was not. Users flagged it, like all posts on the topic, and the mods decided it was not different enough from previous discussions to justify a new flame war.
The ongoing wars are topics worthy of discussions, and they get discussed here. They don't need daily discussions. If you want daily discussions, there are plenty of places you can go to do that.
Yes, nearly all major media sites have a mild downweight, as do most of the tech sites that mostly recycle the same stories.
We don't ban these sites, because all of them occasionally produce solid original articles. But we downrank them because if we didn't, the frontpage would consist of little else—and many readers still feel they're over-represented, even with the downranking.
While those stories may be important, they are all off-topic for Hacker News. This is not a general news/discussion site, and there are other places on the internet to discuss those things. HN is explicitly set up to discourage stories which would incur flame-war-like political arguments.
Per the guidelines:
>What to Submit
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The latter two stories are not new phenomenon (the war has been ongoing), and the former, literally being a decision by a political body, falls squarely under "politics", and is highly likely to lead to nonproductive flamewars.
(1) These stories feel incredibly important to me now!
-and-
(2) Complete strangers, all over the internet, and with no official duties or obligations regarding the subjects of these stories, should be required to pay attention to them!
The first one is fine. The second one suggests a somewhat immature worldview, or limited social skills.
Your comment was fine until the end, but that last sentence crosses into personal attack. Please don't do that—it just makes everything worse, and you can make your substantive points without it.
I don’t think these things, or even a lot or the other political topics are uninteresting. I’ll often still flag them, however, since I’m really very uninterested in what the HN crowd who responds to these sort of things have to say about it.
Part of this is because I’m European, and the whole “red vs blue” team sort or politics a lot of Americans seem to do these days is just silly, and often hateful. But part of it is also that we’re a bunch of people who know tech and business, but not international politics. I guess I could just ignore them, but I’d frankly rather they were kept to other places on the internet.
The question here isn't whether the topic has been suppressed; it's how much of it HN can handle. This site is not designed for frequent repetition, especially of flamewar topics—it's designed for precisely the opposite. That makes the question of how to handle a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) a tricky one. HN has a reasonably well-defined approach to this, which has been stable for many years:
I addressed the big ICJ thread below. The suppressed threads were posted much earlier, and showed clear signs of being flagged as soon as they were visible.
Which is the point - a small crowd of partisans can flag third rail topics here, no matter how much interest or how much positive discussion is happening.
I remember, in particular, the time all the posts about a lead torturer from Abu Ghraib were suppressed. Although she destroyed Congressional evidence, she was promoted to a top position at at a top tech hirer. We should be able to talk about things like that.
Your response then was the same as now; to deflect responsibility to 'users'. I don't buy it. The same happened with Annie Altman's claims about her brother. The same has happened with quite a few Zionism related threads, recently and historically. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37953737, which clearly is squarely in our domain.
There is room for improvement here. A minority of strongly biased participants, on any issue, shouldn't be able to completely disappear whole sides of the story, as has been happening.
Just to clarify one misunderstanding: most flags on submissions (nearly all actually) come from users, not mods. So if you see [flagged], it's almost always there because of users and in many cases the mods haven't even seen it yet.
But there are other ways besides flags for stories to fall suddenly off the front page: software penalties (e.g. the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector, various abuse detection systems, etc.) and moderation downweights. Users don't do either of those.
These points are covered in the FAQ although necessarily tersely. See "How are stories ranked?" and "What does [flagged] mean?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page.
IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.
Yes, there is dang, the single admin who posts publicly, and I guess it's possible/probable there are other HN admins who assist him. But 99.9% of the time when I hear people complaining about "the mods" or "power tripping mods" or "censorship", it's basically that other users saw what you had to say, and we just don't want to see it here.
It's also weird that occasionally people think there is some sort of "rule" about what can be flagged. There are obviously guidelines, but as this power is held by any normal user, it's basically whatever they want it to mean. For example, I frequently flag stories where I think the topic and article is totally valid, but where every single time I've seen the topic debated on HN it becomes a useless flamewar or is filled with the lowest quality commentary. At least for me, flagging isn't a value judgment on the "worthiness" of an article, it's simply about stuff I don't want to see on HN.
> IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.
Partially, but I think these are all symptoms for a more fundamental root cause: HN is just comprised of too many emotional, passionate users with fundamentally differing beliefs.
The usual song and dance with flagging goes something like the following with cryptocurrency:
1. User posts cryptocurrency article
2. People who passionately hate cryptocurrency start adding in emotional comments about how they hate it.
3. People who want to fight this passionate hate respond in kind.
4. The thread turns into a giant argument where nobody is willing to concede anything and everyone is just shouting at each other.
5. Either the flamewar detector kicks in (as it should) or everyone not in the thread tires of the shouting and flags it.
That's fine but regrettable when limited to some topics like crypto. But it's happening with social media company earnings reports, layoff posts, RTO discussions, posts about Musk, autonomous vehicles, and on and on.
dang (and the mod team?) are doing great work, but this is despite the feeling I have that HN is barely being held together into a cohesive community, and I'm struggling to even use the word "community" here. I feel the temperature of discussions has gotten a lot hotter here than it used to be and some basic work I've done with sentiment classifiers on comments here mirrors my perspective.
I just don't think a single community can handle so many passionate, opposed groups. It bubbles up by proxy in these sorts of flagging wars where so many articles get bumped off the page due to the inability of the community to discuss it well. Maybe the solution is to just discuss software as some people really want, but even then you get massive flamewars over things like Rust async. Even with interesting topics like VR posts, the overall temperature of the comments here is high enough that I've stopped bothering to comment as much as I used to.
It has always been the case and is in fact the stated premise of the site that it's barely held together in a cohesive community. The original mission statement was "see how long we can fend off Eternal September". So that's not alarming; it's how things are supposed to be. I suppose a perfectly stabilized cohesive community would be worrying, a sign that the site is staling.
I agree that a stable, cohesive community is a sign that the site is failing but I think we've hewed too far to the side of "barely holding it together" on this spectrum. I feel that it dissuades new, quality contributors from joining and instead attracts contrarians and arguers.
I think it's just that the community is so big now. If 1% of 100 regular posters are likely to get into flamewars over crypto, then that may result in a dozen comments or so. If 1% of 10,000 regular posters are flamewarriors, well...
An interesting heuristic I've seen play out a few times now across different communities (and that HN is starting to suffer from now on more contentious topics) is that too many comments on a post means that it's low quality. A handful of comments on an old post means there's not a lot to say about a topic; too many comments means that there's not a lot to change your mind about
i feel like every news source, forum, link aggregator, ... has its own target audience and scope of topics that make for productive discussion, its own biases and predispositions, its own trolls and need for pruning and moderation.
i feel like yes of course there are many things i disagree with on this site. but ultimately i value the information shared and the discussion enough to keep coming back. any relationship where people always agree there is probably only one person doing the actual thinking.
i have learned so much about tech here, i have learned about many best practices and projects that i would have never heard of, i have made no bones about my thoughts on various subjects that could easily be classified as touchy, i have really enjoyed the discourse. for the time being i definitely plan and hope to continue doing so.
(so while this site is an interesting artifact, and maybe it is good that someone is taking a look and keeping a record, i personally won't bother unless/until i see a pressing need. at which point i will maybe just move on instead tbh.)
531 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadThanks, mods.
The answer to OP’s first question, but there was a second one:
> How big is his team? What kind of tools are they using?
Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds
https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/
Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost
https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html
(Perhaps that last one could be renamed to be less hyperbolic, but the content was still an interesting opinion piece)
I don't think this is being done by the mods, by the way. It's more likely some spam filter with false positives, report brigading, or an anti upvote ring mechanism.
At this point he's indistinguishable from a bitcoin advocate or a tv preacher.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.
It's vital to HN that user flags and/or software like the flamewar detector clear most such submissions off the front page. They tend to attract a lot of upvotes because that's what sensational (and especially indignant-sensational) stories do. Without countervailing mechanisms, HN would be completely taken over by those stories.
His statement wasn't even hyperbolic or fearmongering.....?
He just extrapolated based on current amounts of compute and estimated a possible model size that could be equivalent to AGI (based on current architecture).
Training a model of that size would require too much electricity.
That was his point.
... that is a hard question, something akin to topic amalgamation or cosine similarity on the bulletpoints?
could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are both sufficiently simultaneous about baz?
.... is there any dataset one might be able to play around with on this topic?
[0] there's like 3 good mods left online and you are one of them, so thanks for that.
Yup. We played with that years ago and dropped it as much too big of a potato. Another HN user spent a lot of time working on it and eventually gave up too. Someone should have a go using the newer AI tools though.
> could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are
Also yup - building support for the community to take care of this is how we plan to do it, whenever we get to working on it. I think this could work well because people care about this problem.
I suspect that it has been flagged for that reason by multiple people.
It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.
There are a billion forums with less stringent moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN good and not so game-able like most sites
What people maybe don't realize is how many constraints there are on HN's system. There aren't many degrees of freedom for us to change things that wouldn't lead to a massively different site, and most of those outcomes would be worse, because most of them would be closer to internet default.
It's easy imagine "HN, but without the things that I personally find annoying". But try to generalize that for a moment and the problem quickly becomes intractable.
The reason I say we definitely don't is that we'd have to write code to do that, and I'd remember writing such code.
Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387
Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost (flagged)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078
IIRC: Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on the front page.
That's a big change?
How can you tell? Those are from a week and a half ago. The OP's definition of 'removed' is (if I understand correctly) 'dropped from the top-30 to below the top-90 in 1 minute'.
All from only one day:
* Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-scr...
* Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germany about a far-right planning meeting): https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-...
* Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development: https://vxdev.pages.dev/
* Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds: https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/
Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's overblown.
I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people because they're tired of LLM stories (as repeatedly attested in this thread).
Based on the ratio of comments to upvotes, I suspect the Open Source Builds and Ford discussions ran afoul of the overheated discussion detector. Usually when the ratio gets too lopsided the software automatically drops the post off the front page, because that's an indicator that a lot of people are arguing in the thread without actually reading or enjoying the article.
Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in successful community moderation, but you have to wonder 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost entirely at the behest of big tech.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(In many places there, obviously a lot of that is about Meta the company).
Periodic threads like this one are, I think, allowed as a sort of escape valve for pent up meta energy. Emph. on "periodic".
If you want a site that makes the opposite call here, Lobsters has a public mod log. You might like that system better!
My interest is broadly about the attitudes towards speech as they continue to be shaped by corporations who continue to privatize the public square. See Taibbi's 'Twitter Files' for ample examples.
This is definitely one of those 'if you don't like it, build (or buy) it'. It has worked out disastrously in the conservative realm so far, but perhaps you have better ideas.
If Company A makes a killer product announcement, rival Company B could simply get its employees to spam down votes on and flag that post. Company A gets less visibility, and dang won't be able to come on time to stop it.
This is an easily plausible hypothetical, which may already be happening.
Does that mean stories about LLMs or by LLMs?
Serious question.
I am one of the (few? many?) people (devs) who haven't look into LLMs or even tried out ChatGPT yet :), except to make jokes about it here once in a while.
>Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not as if the internet is lacking in places where this can be discussed freely.
[1]: As in you have to click the link to see what it is about, and to decide if it is interesting or relevant to read.
There's a reason it's a big deal in German politics and already had some fallout (and thankfully multiple dozens of counter-demonstration of ten of thousands of people all over Germany.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103328
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103483
We sometimes turn flags off on such submissions, assuming that the article is substantive enough to have a chance at supporting a thoughtful discussion; and also assuming that the topic hasn't been discussed recently. But neither of those particular submissions was likely to be such a solid foundation.
It doesn't look like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00169862231175831, the paper, has been submitted yet. That one might work, if you or someone wants to try submitting it.
Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39089599 - Jan 2024 (78 comments)
Secret Plan Against Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39092116 - Jan 2024 (5 comments)
Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39091819 - Jan 2024 (34 comments)
Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387 - Jan 2024 (68 comments)
Of those 4, the Ford one and the open-source builds one set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector); the Germany one was flagged; and the Show HN one got moderated down. Let's look at what happened in that order.
The Ford one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is easy to understand: hatred for modern car UIs is one of the most popular topics on HN these days and always gets people going (me too! but never mind)...which no doubt is one reason why the media sites keep playing it up. We wouldn't turn the penalty off in such a case. The discussion might not have been a flamewar but it was nearly entirely generic - for example the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090622. Given how over-discussed this topic already is, I'd say this is a case of HN's software working as intended.
The open-source one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is also unsurprising as open source stuff is also highly discussed and also gets people going. In this case I could make a case for turning off the penalty, but in the end would probably decide against it, because the article isn't very deep, the discussion is rather generic, HN has a surplus of such discussion already, and nothing here really clears the quality bar. But it's more of a borderline call; I can see how others could interpret it differently.
"Secret plan against Germany" was flagged by users. That's a political story with a baity title, so the default would be for it to get flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on such stories but I don't know that this one clears the bar. It's more current-events than deeply-interesting, the ideological material is inflammatory and nobody is going to approach it with curiosity. The thread was already showing clear signs of turning into a flamewar. Even then, we might still turn off the flags, but only if the story were intrinsically of great significance—the sort of thing it just wouldn't make sense not to discuss at all. I doubt this clears that bar.
The Show HN, we moderated down because "star for free trial" is not a valid thing to do in a Show HN and is something the community here would strongly oppose (see the top comment). Here's what I emailed the submitter: "We downweighted the post after getting complaints from users. 'Star repo for free trial' is way too much of a hard sales tactic for HN, and even more so for Show HN, which implies that users can try out the product (see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Asking them to star your repo first may be an ok tactic in other communities, but in the HN context it comes across as manipulative and is not in your interest at all."
---
I guess the summary here is that this list is a mix of clear calls and borde...
I have/had no objection to the moderation on these posts. In fact, if I were monarch of HN and the Internet, I'd want an order of magnitude higher standard for the quality of posts, comments, and conduct. I want to spend my time and on the actual very best intellectual content and discussion possible - it would probably be mostly the very best books and papers from journals if I had my way. (Not that I think HN should serve my personal preference, I'm just demonstrating that I am far away from criticizing the moderation.)
My GP comment and my other one that you responded to [0] were trying to recenter at least part of the discusson on a factual basis, which I find much more interesting than the (completely unintersting) conspiracy theory aspect. That is, if we explore it factually, objectively, intelligently, how does it work? how does it work out? For example, I imagine there are some interesting emergent properties which would tell us about the HN population, emergent properties of algorithms, and the interaction between them.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of people's questions.
edit: oh duh. thanks all, answer was 'right under my nose'!
Thanks _kst_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232594
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 for a longer answer; and also krapp's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232795, which makes a similar point.
Just some feedback that I've found a number of articles fall off the FP due to the flamewar detector that I've felt were good articles/discussions. In fact, I think some of the more valuable discussions tend to have a lot of back and forth discussions relative to the votes.
But I also recognize that flamewars can also look a lot like that.
So I'm wondering if it may be worth revisiting the algorithm for this, and maybe having it factor in a few other things vs. simply the vote:comment ratio (which is what I'm understanding it currently is, but correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't think it necessarily needs to be a lot more complex, maybe simply add to it some standard deviation of upvotes/downvotes (or just a simple ratio), if that's not already part of it.
But I've seen some discussions fall off that I don't remember seeing a particularly toxic discussion happening (e.g. relatively little to no downvoted comments).
Again, happy to see flamewars fall off, but just hoping to see some more interesting/helpful discussions not get caught in the crossfire.
So the highest quality 'flame wars' can remain untouched, but downranking everything else below that bar probably makes sense.
The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a go—and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd certainly like to see it. As would the entire community I'm sure!
You can probably put a big dent in the number of low-quality comments by just showing a “hey, are you really sure you want to post this?” confirmation prompt and display the site guidelines when you detect a low-quality comment. That way you can have a much more relaxed threshold and stop worrying about false positives. Sure, some people will ignore the gentle reminder, but then you can be more decisive with flags and followup behaviour because anything low quality that has been posted will by definition already have had one warning.
I don't think a confirmation prompt will help because people tune such things out after they've seen them a few times.
You get better intent assessment than with NLP/ regex/whatever.
Plus HN is entirely in English, so you never have to worry about lexical resource gaps.
There is no off the shelf solution - afaik. In addition I have no idea how expensive running costs will be.
But something serviceable can be built.
Source: mod /t&s person dealing with these things
"Ring will no longer allow police to request users' doorbell camera footage" (npr.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138423
I posted an on-topic supporting quote to explain why this item was newsworthy and got one unhelpful one-word response and my comment got inexplicably flagged (not the commenter) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138481
How did that slip past detection? How do I get the abusive flag on my comment reversed? This behavior seems to have managed to push an important story off the frontpage quickly. (yes there was a badly-worded dupe headline, but that's a separate thing)
(1) the story was downranked off the front page because the topic had already been discussed a bunch—for example in these threads, two days earlier:
Amazon's Ring to stop letting police request doorbell video from users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39119387 - Jan 2024 (141 comments)
Ring steps back from sharing video with police – mostly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39120892 - Jan 2024 (15 comments)
Culling repetition from the front page is one of the most important things HN's systems need to do. Actually, it's probably the single most important thing. Certainly it's best if we can link to the previous discussions so people can know where to find them—but we can only do that some of the time. Users help out a ton by posting links to earlier threads. Ultimately we need better software support for dealing with this, but that's not done yet.
(2) Your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138481 was flagged by users. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I'm pretty sure I know why: comments that do nothing but quote from the article, or post a summary of it, are considered too formulaic by readers here. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but please do it in your own words and share your own thinking. To simply paste a quote from the article is too superficial. On HN the convention is to assume that readers are smart enough to evaluate an article for themselves.
Edit: I'm going to copy the above paragraph into a reply below, so I can link to it in the future when this comes up, without the rest of the post.
(3) The reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138536, which only said "and?", was definitely an unsubstantive comment that deserved to be flagged (and killed) even more than yours did. The reason it escaped detection was simple, albeit unsatisfying: pure randomness. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here—there's far too much. I've flagged it now.
(I copied this from the parent comment so I can link to it when this comes up in the future).
To me, "flag" means "this is a serious violation that requires moderator attention". Something I'd want you to see and deal with because it's bigoted, illegal, spam, etc. I wouldn't flag something simply because I didn't think HN was the right audience, or because I personally dislike the topic. You seem to be encouraging me to use it simply as a downvote.
I'm not going to start flagging things, nor do I feel that strongly about the lack of a downvote, but if flags are effectively downvotes behind the scenes, and if that's how users are treating flags (which they obviously are, from other comments on this thread), I think the UI should have a downvote button.
I assume there's been discussion about this before and I'm curious about the thought process behind the decision. I don't find the FAQ to be informative about this.
He must have been thinking something though, because Reddit was originally his conception and he was an influence on the earliest development of Reddit as well (edit: and Reddit does have story downvoting - forgot to mention that bit).
I never flag anything because it's recorded on my profile, and I don't want stuff recorded on my profile that isn't useful to me. I only upvote submissions and comments that I intend to refer back to in the future. Upvotes are simply bookmarks to me, so my only tool for voting on the quality of conversation is downvotes. Which, apparently, I can't do for articles without spamming up my profile.
Actually I just checked my profile and saw several flags that must have appeared on a mis-click, just like how sometimes upvotes appear on a mis-click. Fortunately, unlike mis-clicked upvotes, you can still remove these.
Thank you for your tireless work. HN is a breath of fresh air compared with the rest of the internet thanks to it.
The one exception is if some group organizes to upvote something that fits their agenda / business plan. But in this case it's generally something worth flagging and it gets flagged?
Here's how I look at it: if trust is present, then we don't need to publish a full log, as long as we answer questions when people ask them. That degree of transparency has been available here for many years. If, on the other hand, trust isn't present, a moderation log won't create it. It will just generate more data for distrust to work with—and distrust always finds something.
Thus our focus is on building trust with the community and maintaining it. That happens through lots of individual and group interactions, answering questions whenever we get them, in the threads or by email. That's what I spend most of my time doing.
We're never going to take the community's trust for granted because it's what gives HN the only real value it has, and it would be all too easy to lose. But I would tentatively say that this approach has proven to work well for most of the community. If people learn they can always get a question answered, that's a powerful trust-building factor.
Equally clear is that it does not work for everybody; but that's always going to be the case no matter what we do. I don't mean that we dismiss such users' concerns—quite the contrary, I make extra efforts to answer them. I'm just not under any illusion that we can satisfy everybody. It's satisfying enough if a few people can occasionally be won over in this way—which does happen sometimes!
I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change (unless forced), but just wanted to point out that your argument against transparency is a cop-out and that you're on the wrong side of history here.
It could be fun to look into it together, but the fun stops at "I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change". Why dance if someone wants to kick you in the shins?
It's one thing for private communities to set their own rules, but it's quite another to publicly tout these restrictions as universally fair when they're essentially projections of biased viewpoints coming from human-beings in positions of power. Actual transparency permits genuine openness and dialogue, rather than masking personal ideologies as righteous principles.
In the first set, the stakes are far higher, which is why the collection of objective data is legally mandated in the first place.
In the second set, you have only the subjective opinions of people who have an explicit goal to cultivate a specific variety of community. As members of that community, we select into the cultivation regime under which we participate. Not everyone will share the same preferences, and that's OK.
Hence my interest in debating @dang's straw-man response....and nowadays, using throwaway accounts is often the only way others even see opposing viewpoints on topics like this.
But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war detection.
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 - Jan 2024 (62 comments)
I can make an argument either way there. The argument in favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this much-discussed topic; its title was flamebait and arguably misleading as well since the article seems more about async in general; and generally it was more of a drama submission on a classic flamewar topic than an interesting technical piece. I'm not saying all that is fair but it's easy to imagine good-faith users flagging for such reasons.
I checked the flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases where a user had previously flagged a different article about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4] below. A few of those might be borderline calls but I don't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags are legit if the story has had a large amount of discussion recently. Otherwise HN would consist of the same few discussions over and over, and we have enough of that as it is!
> Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
There are some software protections in place against that, but like all such protections, they don't catch all the bad cases and they have false positives as well.
We review the flags and turn flags off sometimes. I would not say it's perfect because although we try to look over all the flagged stories, it has to be done hastily (or one wouldn't get much else done). That makes it easy to miss things. However, users often email us at hn@ycombinator.com when they think a story has been unfairly flagged, and in those cases we always take a closer look. I don't know what percentage of the time we turn flags off in such cases, but it's not a low number. So if we include "users sending emails" as part of "the system", then yes, there's a system for monitoring flag abuse.
Last point: this is a pretty typical case. I'd say it's borderline but in the end I probably agree with the flaggers. If the topic of Rust (and async Rust in particular) weren't already so thoroughly covered, and/or if the flamewar aspect hadn't been there, then I'd probably disagree with the flaggers.
---
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061839 - the word 'async' appears over 200 times in that thread!
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] You Don't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 - Feb 2024 (21 comments)
Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 - Jan 2024 (151 comments)
New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire w...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39203106
a tame story that got some discussion, but was marked as a dupe. But I didn't see any other posts linked in the comments as expected. I search for other submissions and see two other posts... with 0 comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190710
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39186297
I don't really have a critique or solution here, I imagine false negatives are an inevitability. Just sharing.
In this case, you can see from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... that there had been a lot of submissions, and from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... the ones that got comments.
Of those, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165981 had been just a few days earlier. And it turns out that there actually was a link to it in the later thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39204186, but this comment was flagkilled, probably because of the personal swipe in it. (You can still see it but only if you turn on 'showdead' in your profile.)
I could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
> could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
Yeah, i imagine if I went down every tiny rabbit hole it'd be a full time job. I'll leave that to the professionals haha.
https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-500-million...
In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738, it just set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. We sometimes turn that penalty off, but in a case like this we wouldn't do that because "$Celebrity says $thing about $common-subject" is almost never a substantial story. It's essential to HN to clear such stories off the front page in order to make room for more interesting, less sensational things. If we didn't, the front page would consist of little else.
Really? A NASA report, on the official .gov site? Maybe the comments were horrible but that seems right in the middle of what HN is interested in.
NASA System Predicts Impact of a Small Asteroid over Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39126705 - Jan 2024 (18 comments)
It was downweighted because it was a dupe (or quasidupe) of this:
Scientists discover near-Earth asteroid hours before it exploded over Berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103412 - Jan 2024 (46 comments)
That's the system functioning as intended. We work hard to try to prevent repetition from taking over the site, because repetition is the enemy of curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
One thing I've learned today, after 11 hours of posting in this thread, is that it's easy to look at an article in isolation and say "Really? That got moderated?" - when in fact if you know the larger context there's nearly always a straightforward explanation.
One can certainly argue that 86 points and 46 comments is too low a threshold to treat the repost as a dupe, but that's a different question, no?
The effort is appreciated by some if not most.
When I get tired I start to complain. It's a bad habit.
I posted detailed explanations in those other threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39224560
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210947
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045
If you (or anyone) read those explanations and still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is. These practices have been in place for many years and haven't changed.
One questions I do have–I would guess posts critical of HN/YC are going to get a log of flags and have not the best discussion. This has a side affect of biasing the home page to not have posts critical of HN/YC. Do you see this as a problem?
And it creates a very visible feedback loop, as users start to think that this is what HN is supposed to be. They're probably the biggest quality problem of HN.
You can take this with a grain of salt as I'm obviously not the most neutral observer, but from everything I've seen (which at least is a lot!), yes they get a lot of flags, but they get even more upvotes. It's hard to say which side wins out in the tug-of-war. The tendency towards negativity that jsnell's comment describes is very real, and it's on the upvote side in these cases.
Most probably the tug of war goes one way some of the time and the other way the rest of the time. The funny thing is that as mods, we have to have a regulating influence either way. What I mean is that if a rage story hits the top of the front page, we'll downweight it (though not necessarily all the way off the front page); but if a rage story about YC gets too many flags, we'll reduce those or remove them altogether. The recent shitfest is a good example; let me dig up some links for you... Edit: oh wait, I already mentioned those links in the GP. Sorry, I'm getting a bit tired here!
Did I answer your question?
@dang You did–thank you. I hope my question didn't come across as accusatory. This is a hard problem and, unfortunately for you, many of us enjoy discussion of difficult problems. What many of us may not see is you having to have the _same_ conversation over and over. Thanks again for your work. I don't envy your position.
It's pretty clear to me that any online forum needs good moderation to be healthy long term. HN has been good about this with a strong community providing upvotes/downvotes and a moderation team that seems pretty light handed but not afraid to say no when necessary. Please keep doing what you're doing.
However, I do see a few decent posts in this list that probably warrant a second chance.
plural ?
That told me all I needed to know about the moderation of this site.
Thankfully someone captured a screenshot: https://merveilles.town/@cancel/111834048502040552
huppeldepup's comment in the screenshot is collapsed on p2 of the comments (after it was no longer relevant) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39157010&p=2, and is also accessible as the parent of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39170137.
I mean yeah it probably was just a mistake but what do you expect somebody to say?
I'm sure there's a model in which lying some of the time but not too often has marginally higher expected value, but it's also going to have significantly higher risk and that's not worth it, plus you have to be disciplined enough to actually apply such a strategy. One slip and you're dead! I'm too lazy for that.
Btw the more accurate reason why we don't do things like that is that we don't want to because it would feel bad. It's not who we want to be. However, the actual reason doesn't always have much persuasive power and when I'm sensing that's the case, I use the cynical argument ("not in our interests", basically), because it's also true. But as the cynical argument isn't persuading you, maybe I should switch back!
This site is a marketing campaign for a VC company. If you see it the same way, I’d be shocked.
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
In that case you drew a general conclusion from a freak accident so rare that I doubt it had happened in the 17 years this site has been around. (Edit: 17 years this month in fact! https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...)
If what you require from an internet forum is that the moderators under no circumstances will ever commit a copy/paste error, HN is definitely below your standards.
Edit: the mods would like to share that they weren't drunk when they made that mistake, just rushed and watching a rather gripping tennis final.
That prompted me to check other dates in the archive: apparently the "Startup News" title lasted for around six months before changing to "Hacker News". I was pretty sure the change was before I made my account, but I didn't realize the "Startup News" period had been so short.
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
Edit: here's the last copy of Startup News that archive.org has—from 2007-07-13:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070713212949/http://news.ycomb...
and here's the first copy of Hacker News they have, from 2007-08-30:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070830111558/http://news.ycomb...
I guess they missed 6 weeks there, but bless them for having anything at all—who among us preserves our own history?
Another way to look at this is that the mods have the same biases you do. Depending on how you’re feeling on a given day, you could call that an echo chamber.
source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045
The flagging system is a great utility, but certain things (e.g. anything pro-Musk) get mass flagged for emotional reasons.
Unfortunately those stories often turn into flamewars. That's probably why people are flagging them.
I don't think it's wise to draw so many inferences about why people vote the way they do. Frequently I see comments where someone makes a reasonable point, but also drops a bunch of flamebait, and when they're inevitably flagged they edit their comment to claim that the flags prove their point and that the problem who disagree with them are overly sensitive and censorious. But in reality a lot of the people flagging them probably agree with them, but don't want them to start a flamewars. I flag a lot of comments like that, even when I am agree with their overall point. (I actually did that with a comment just now.)
It's a form of self fulfilling prophecy and further entrenches you into your position, which is antithetical to curious discussion.
Lots of Musk stuff, including positive stuff, on the front page. Yesterday there was a story about petabytes of data on the Starlink laser network, based only on Starlink PR afaict.
I consider myself very optimistic and often naive, but even I would not be surprised by this kind of HN user reaction :D
He could have phrased it a little better but the people calling for his removal from YC are just plain silly.
I am, so you can believe it. But: I don't flag things that I'm tired of.
Crypto was mostly scams or pie in the sky ideas that will never work. It will stick around for money laundering & buying drugs but that's about it.
The people who made coins and tokens bad for society are doing the same thing with GenAI...
Both are useful and both come with huge problems. Neither one is some panacea or a sustainable get-rich-quick scheme (obviously, both people in "crypto" and in "GenAI" are getting rich, but neither are going to lead to some sort of great societal good).
But that's not the sense under discussion. "Crypto"=cryptography lost the language war and was completely supplanted by "crypto"=cryptocurrency. I really wish the word could regain its original and useful meaning, but it's too late now.
Ironically, "I work in crypto" went from meaning something useful to society to meaning being a parasite on society, and you'd best not accidentally use the phrase expecting people to understand it to mean the original thing (cryptography).
(Yes, not all uses of cryptocurrency are a parasitic detriment. But if you happen to be working on actually useful stuff and we meet socially, then please be very quick about saying that you work at doing something with cryptocurrency or blockchain that is intended to provide actual benefit. If you just say "I work in crypto", I will excuse myself at the first opportunity.)
On the timescale of the past 4-5 years, you are correct about the popular usage.
However, if cryptocurrency continues to recede from the public eye, then in another 4-5 years I think "crypto" will no longer mean "cryptocurrency".
Understanding both the current lexicon and the "archaic" and "recently archaic" uses of the term I hold is both useful and pertinent to being able to communicate effectively. Which is why I immediately clarified, I'm talking about the 40+ year definition of the term, not the current whimsical linguistic fad.
At least it made it easy to figure out who I didn't need to talk to.
It's also why I don't like the "free speech at all costs" meme that gets thrown around when $corporation bans $person_i_like. Every community needs moderation and it's often a thankless job that feels like nothing is being done at all when it's being done right.
For sure many are. This happens with every Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) and LLMs are way beyond a MOT [1]. The hivemind tires of repetition extremely quickly [2]. The trick is to try to separate wheat from chaff, where 'wheat' means the stories that bring Significant New Information (SNI) [3] and 'chaff' means the follow-up and copycat stories, which are legion [4].
It's important to understand are that there's a wide spectrum of opinion about this stuff. If you imagine a slider with "allow zero posts about $TOPIC" at one end, and "allow all posts about $TOPIC" at the other end, pretty much every user would slide it to a different position. This is true for every $TOPIC and especially for the biggest ones.
Frontpage space is the scarcest resource HN has [5] and every reader has a different 'signature' of preferences that they would like to see (or not see) there. This means not only that it's impossible to satisfy everybody, but that it's impossible to fully satisfy anybody—because nobody's 'signature' is perfectly matched on the front page, and (lest any of you be thinking of this quick riposte) certainly not the mods'!
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You seem to have developed these concepts pretty extensively. Seeing you break down this terminology whets my appetite to hear from you in long form.
I think I've only ever flagged one or two instances of spam personally.
And also pretty much any article about inflation.
I am the biggest local ML advocate you will find. My 3090 is either running Yi 34B queries or other experiments all day, my job is with local LLMS... But I am totally OK with heavy handed AI-related moderation. I dont want the sea of AI grifters to have a single second on the HN front page.
Maybe this is a consequence of Hacker News not having a way to downvote stories?
I only flag stories that are blatant violation of HN's guidelines: SPAM, politics, racist... Otherwise, if I don't like a story I don't do anything.
Maybe I'll start flagging stories that I don't like?
If as many people thoughtfully vouched as maliciously flagged it may be less of an issue.
For dead stories in the "new" queue, I see a "vouch" option already without going to the story's own page.
I also pretty regularly vouch.
looks like you didn't feel free.
If you believe that HN is a hive mind and all users must believe in the exact same things, then yes, this is probably hard to believe.
I however, am tired of LLM news, but I just simply ignore them as I'm well aware that many people here are very much interested in them. So at least an anecdotal response of one that some HN users are tired of LLM related news.
You might also be surprised that not all HN users like social media while some do. Some are very privacy conscious while others will freely post all of their everythings to anywhere. You might find it hard to believe that some lean left while others lean right with some even landing straight in the middle. Why you would think anything is hard to believe in this day and age is very strange to me.
And then you get those of us who are simultaneously left-of-left and right-of-right...
It would be ultra-cool to have rough topic filters here, so I could just go to settings and hit a checkbox to ignore all the LLM-this and AI-that articles. Easier said than done, I'm sure.
Replace "HN users" with "most HN users" (it's common to use general language when one's intention is to point out a trend in a population) and, as another person tired of AI/LLM news, I would also be surprised given how much popularity (upvotes, comments) HN users tended to give to those stories.
Surprise! Yes, We are!
What are you talking about lol.
I'm tutoring a friend's homeschool kids (who live in the US, I'm in Central America) in Spanish and the mom couldn't set up Payoneer so yesterday she asked if I'd accept bitcoin.
I'm an Urbiter and everyone in that scene is all about crypto.
It's still big but you're right, it's more confined to specific niches, instead of MSNBC talking about NFTs
All of them have asked me if I could pay them in crypto (USDC on AVAX Chain).
There's tons of people who use it for day to day. You're just in a bubble.
Your people are dodging tax, probably because no one has got around to regulating crypto in their jurisdiction yet. Not that I blame them.
In other places where it's regulated and you get taxed anyway, there's no point in losing money on exchanges.
> Your people are dodging tax
I said I'm using USDC. That makes 0 sense.
No, the reason we're using crypto is because the transaction fees are literally 0 and it's instant.
PayPal takes super high transfer fees. Wise is a cheaper alternative but it's still much more expensive than crypto.
> there's no point in losing money on exchanges.
Once again, I'm using USDC
It's a stable coin tethered to the US dollar.
It's really strange how HN users are so confident on things they know nothing about.
The SEC enforces regulation (or it’s supposed to at least) around securities passed by congress.
The real question here is if you don’t even know a basic finance term like ETF, why are you trying to talk down to my statement and crypto when you clearly have no knowledge of the sector? It’s just ignorant
Also I’m not American so it’s not reasonable to expect me to know what the SEC is, and I don’t have a 401k. We have an entirely different retirement system in my country.
Doesn't mean I want 50% of HN to be about AI.
I don't know why this has happened with both AI and cryptocurrency that people feel personally attacked when others just don't want to be bombarded with it 24/7.
Like someone above pointed out, a rule of moderation on HN literally is, that stories about HN or ycombinator companies itself are moderated less [0].
[0] - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219568 was just a dupe. Maybe that's the case for some of the more technical stories that are removed.
There’s a wealth of great blogposts that show up there which don’t always make it to the front page (understandable; we only have so much attention to give).
What I will say is that there is a ton of cruft that spams the board. Thinking of spammed blog posts from one or more accounts, sensationalist news, etc which wouldn’t provide much value here.
Flagging really helps on /new IME. It’s worth spending time there if you haven’t tried HN other than via the front page
I am. Completely sick of it! Thanks dang for your diligent moderation.
just trying to see what makes the moderation good :)
If there are specific examples I haven't addressed yet, post links and I'll take a look!
Edit: I’m not asking a rhetorical question. There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page. Can anyone attest to this?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
You're right that user flags do more than mods do, just because the numbers work that way: there are many orders of magnitude more users flagging things than there are mods.
Edit: 5 orders of magnitude more, in fact!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
> We didn't flag the post; users did. When it comes to submissions, that's nearly always the case - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169622
Example 1: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39142094
Example 2: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39130652
Example 3: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39214844
Does this crowd think it's cool and normal that all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed, based on the opinion of a dedicated minority?
US tech giants are heavily implicated in this, so no one can seriously argue the topic isn't relevant. A World War could come from these "plausibly genocidal" actions, which are enabled in various ways by US tech giants.
Exactly. Big tech has been staggeringly complicit in these oh-so documented war crimes. For example, AI is being used to 'target' people, even in refugee camps and residential areas; even when hundreds of civilian casualties are predicted. This has been admitted - even boasted about.
As tech people, we can't just stick our heads in the sand and expect this not to come back on us. We're enabling this destruction in myriad ways, from funding to coercion to suppression of discussion [cough].
Genocide isn't just politics. We are legally bound as a nation, and morally obligated as humans, to prevent it. Instead, the US and many its tech companies are complicit.
If we can't even discuss the ICJ ruling that this may well be in fact a genocide, even when people are behaving and upvoting without breaking guidelines, then imo something very important has been broken.
"We" ain't all americans. There are people here coming from opposing sides in various wars. And there are more wars and slaughtering going on, than in the middle east. And "we" are just tech people. Not better or worse by principle, which shows off very easily as there can be religious flame wars about software already. So it would be good, if we could debate all this in a nice way. But apparently we cannot. This is why many people want NO politics here at all. As there is usually nothing coming out of it, except more of the usual - and not interesting discussions.
The vast majority of English speaking countries signed the Genocide Convention, if not all [0]
> This is why many people want NO politics here at all.
They're not a majority, far from it. And the rules don't say "NO politics"; that would be absurd. Tech and politics overlap often - as they do here.
0 - https://www.statista.com/chart/22194/countries-that-havent-r...
I'd call the flaggers colluding to spike stories with lively and non toxic discussions the 'activists'.
> Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options. Suppressing anything with a whiff of controversy doesn't result in positive outcomes.
Besides; freedom of speech, and free exchange of ideas, are both decidedly in the "good hacker" wheelhouse.
Have you seen one discussion about Gaza free of that? I haven't. (My main account is rate limited, because of a recent Gaza debate btw. Because I like heated discussions from time to time. But I can respect that it is not wanted here)
"So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options."
So one of those options are, you start your own forum, where you can have all that, instead of demanding that other people and places change to your liking. Just a suggestion.
I have. I linked them as examples above.
> demanding that other people and places change to your liking
I haven't made any demands. I've said what I'd like to see improved.
On the whole I like this community, and I try to contribute to it positively. Making suggestions on how it could be run with less censorship and suppression is not an unreasonable thing to do, and it's odd you think it is tbh.
In my opinion they were not free of that.
"ICJ orders Israel to stop genocide in Gaza"
And this one is really bad, as the ICJ did not do such a thing. The ICJ has not made any ruling, whether what happens in Gaza is genocide or not, so what good can come out of such a manipulative headline?
The initial invasion was allowed due to the international significance, but to discuss subsequent events head to Reddit.
This is in the FAQ linked in the footer.
Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar will be on topic.
From the submission guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
People here were clearly finding those stories interesting, as measured by upvotes and comments.
> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
US mainstream TV mostly declined to air South Africa's side of the case, as well as the actual verdict; opting instead to only air Israel's defense.
> Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar will be on topic.
"Something with drones" = on topic, but a plausible genocide verdict from the ICJ is not of "international significance" and therefore off topic... This isn't computing for me, sorry.
The verdict had a thread with over fifteen hundred comments and was on the front page most of the day. Others were presumably down ranked as they were dupes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043
Also, it was removed within a minute of hitting the front page (if I'm reading the graphs right). Doesn't quite line up with your presumption.
Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?
Besides - the point is this: Not all the stories that are in OP's list are spam, or unsuitable. Some topics hit a third rail.
They are easily removed by a small group of users, and then Daniel can come by months later and say, well, users flagged it [ie, 0]. It even happens to PG [1]. This isn't ideal, and pretending it isn't happening is uncool.
I'm not saying Dang doesn't do a great job. But there are some topics that are verboten, despite their impact/relevance on the tech community and our general interest. And this particular topic is too important to allow for such narrative control by a tiny group of flaggers.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311933
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144931
Presumably users flagged both posts almost immediately, and by the time mods decided that the topic was worth discussion the second thread had more engagement. The first thread was still a dupe despite being posted earlier.
>Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?
While the verdict was a major event like you said, The Guardian's story was not. Users flagged it, like all posts on the topic, and the mods decided it was not different enough from previous discussions to justify a new flame war.
The ongoing wars are topics worthy of discussions, and they get discussed here. They don't need daily discussions. If you want daily discussions, there are plenty of places you can go to do that.
I think I read this from a comment from dang.
We don't ban these sites, because all of them occasionally produce solid original articles. But we downrank them because if we didn't, the frontpage would consist of little else—and many readers still feel they're over-represented, even with the downranking.
Per the guidelines:
>What to Submit
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The latter two stories are not new phenomenon (the war has been ongoing), and the former, literally being a decision by a political body, falls squarely under "politics", and is highly likely to lead to nonproductive flamewars.
(1) These stories feel incredibly important to me now!
-and-
(2) Complete strangers, all over the internet, and with no official duties or obligations regarding the subjects of these stories, should be required to pay attention to them!
The first one is fine. The second one suggests a somewhat immature worldview, or limited social skills.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Part of this is because I’m European, and the whole “red vs blue” team sort or politics a lot of Americans seem to do these days is just silly, and often hateful. But part of it is also that we’re a bunch of people who know tech and business, but not international politics. I guess I could just ignore them, but I’d frankly rather they were kept to other places on the internet.
HN had an enormous thread about the ICJ decision:
ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043 - Jan 2024 (1397 comments)
The question here isn't whether the topic has been suppressed; it's how much of it HN can handle. This site is not designed for frequent repetition, especially of flamewar topics—it's designed for precisely the opposite. That makes the question of how to handle a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) a tricky one. HN has a reasonably well-defined approach to this, which has been stable for many years:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Which is the point - a small crowd of partisans can flag third rail topics here, no matter how much interest or how much positive discussion is happening.
I remember, in particular, the time all the posts about a lead torturer from Abu Ghraib were suppressed. Although she destroyed Congressional evidence, she was promoted to a top position at at a top tech hirer. We should be able to talk about things like that.
Your response then was the same as now; to deflect responsibility to 'users'. I don't buy it. The same happened with Annie Altman's claims about her brother. The same has happened with quite a few Zionism related threads, recently and historically. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37953737, which clearly is squarely in our domain.
There is room for improvement here. A minority of strongly biased participants, on any issue, shouldn't be able to completely disappear whole sides of the story, as has been happening.
But there are other ways besides flags for stories to fall suddenly off the front page: software penalties (e.g. the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector, various abuse detection systems, etc.) and moderation downweights. Users don't do either of those.
These points are covered in the FAQ although necessarily tersely. See "How are stories ranked?" and "What does [flagged] mean?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.
Yes, there is dang, the single admin who posts publicly, and I guess it's possible/probable there are other HN admins who assist him. But 99.9% of the time when I hear people complaining about "the mods" or "power tripping mods" or "censorship", it's basically that other users saw what you had to say, and we just don't want to see it here.
It's also weird that occasionally people think there is some sort of "rule" about what can be flagged. There are obviously guidelines, but as this power is held by any normal user, it's basically whatever they want it to mean. For example, I frequently flag stories where I think the topic and article is totally valid, but where every single time I've seen the topic debated on HN it becomes a useless flamewar or is filled with the lowest quality commentary. At least for me, flagging isn't a value judgment on the "worthiness" of an article, it's simply about stuff I don't want to see on HN.
Partially, but I think these are all symptoms for a more fundamental root cause: HN is just comprised of too many emotional, passionate users with fundamentally differing beliefs.
The usual song and dance with flagging goes something like the following with cryptocurrency:
1. User posts cryptocurrency article
2. People who passionately hate cryptocurrency start adding in emotional comments about how they hate it.
3. People who want to fight this passionate hate respond in kind.
4. The thread turns into a giant argument where nobody is willing to concede anything and everyone is just shouting at each other.
5. Either the flamewar detector kicks in (as it should) or everyone not in the thread tires of the shouting and flags it.
That's fine but regrettable when limited to some topics like crypto. But it's happening with social media company earnings reports, layoff posts, RTO discussions, posts about Musk, autonomous vehicles, and on and on.
dang (and the mod team?) are doing great work, but this is despite the feeling I have that HN is barely being held together into a cohesive community, and I'm struggling to even use the word "community" here. I feel the temperature of discussions has gotten a lot hotter here than it used to be and some basic work I've done with sentiment classifiers on comments here mirrors my perspective.
I just don't think a single community can handle so many passionate, opposed groups. It bubbles up by proxy in these sorts of flagging wars where so many articles get bumped off the page due to the inability of the community to discuss it well. Maybe the solution is to just discuss software as some people really want, but even then you get massive flamewars over things like Rust async. Even with interesting topics like VR posts, the overall temperature of the comments here is high enough that I've stopped bothering to comment as much as I used to.
An interesting heuristic I've seen play out a few times now across different communities (and that HN is starting to suffer from now on more contentious topics) is that too many comments on a post means that it's low quality. A handful of comments on an old post means there's not a lot to say about a topic; too many comments means that there's not a lot to change your mind about
If you can't fathom people being tired of LLM-related news, have I got an NFT for you!
i feel like yes of course there are many things i disagree with on this site. but ultimately i value the information shared and the discussion enough to keep coming back. any relationship where people always agree there is probably only one person doing the actual thinking.
i have learned so much about tech here, i have learned about many best practices and projects that i would have never heard of, i have made no bones about my thoughts on various subjects that could easily be classified as touchy, i have really enjoyed the discourse. for the time being i definitely plan and hope to continue doing so.
(so while this site is an interesting artifact, and maybe it is good that someone is taking a look and keeping a record, i personally won't bother unless/until i see a pressing need. at which point i will maybe just move on instead tbh.)
Half the comments on Reddit really do seem to be made by bots, you can easily tell when you look at their post history.