Thanks for that link. FTL: Hacker News is operated by a company, Y Combinator, which has a significant financial incentive to censor or promote the links and discussion posted on the site that relate to Y Combinator-funded startups (or competitors of them).
Haven't seen much discussion about this HN flaw. Interesting...
It is brought up constantly but it is not the kind of discussion which seems to be much approved of. (In the interest of disclosure, I don't even care)
You don't think it is brought up or you do think that it is approved of? (edit: I never indicated any level of agreement with YC using HN to unfairly promote YC companies, so if you are responding to that then maybe you meant to respond to my parent)
No, because everything along these lines that appears on the front page gets killed. It's one of the major flaws of HN imo - a huge lack of transparency.
I don't believe YC messes with the algorithm or moderation to benefit YC companies. My YC startup got attacked on HN (2 years ago!), and I've seen many hostile articles and comments about other YC companies.
People can still check out what's happening there. It's nice to hear about a new site (I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise). Also, I'm not sure what the title (used) to be so I can't comment on that.
"Yehuda Katz launches Lobste.rs" where he is only a user and not involved behind the site at all. As noted elsewhere, it is run by someone who was banned by HN because they were banned from HN, so, to me, a presumption of bad faith is warranted.
I got the same treatment he did -- and have on accounts I have made since -- and we exchanged emails during development. We both went through each others' posts and couldn't find any rational reason for the treatment (slow banning and hell banning, in both of our cases).
Lack of transparency is a pretty big deal on this forum, and once you've crossed Paul -- without knowing how -- it's scorched earth on any account you make. That's why Josh developed Lobsters, and why I'm user #2, and why I'm glad to see it's gaining traction as a community.
This site is more threatening to opinion and discourse than any on the public Internet, and that isn't hyperbole. The irony is that this is a hacker community, and most hackers would be appalled at slamming the door and creating a curated garden of ideas. I've posted as jsprink_banned and jsprinkles on the topic, if you're interested; won't spam this thread with it.
To what end? Paul doesn't want me around and has made that passive aggressively clear, so I'm not sure what good contacting him would do. I discussed on jsprink_banned how not spending immeasurable amounts of time in HN threads has had a positive impact on my life anyway.
My first account was hellbanned for no obvious reason. I had a bunch of karma, hadn't been downvoted, hadn't trolled. I asked pg for an explanation/reconsideration...nope!
One of the dirty secrets of hackernews is that you can be hellbanned at any moment without rhyme or reason, and you'll likely never know why. I assume it serves some purpose OTHER than driving away helpful contributors, but I'm not sure what that might be.
I think it's fair to say that hellbanning is done to improve the site, rather than for the nefarious purposes you're trying to ascribe for it. Clearly, there are problems with it's application and transparency, but that's not the same as suggesting there's some plot here.
No, it's not fair to say that hellbanning - as implemented on HN - is done to improve the site. It's arbitrary, capricious, and hugely non-transparent.
No, I'm not suggesting a plot, but there's no natural law that says tech news sites must have a hairtrigger hellban (nor, as far as I'm aware, does any other site have anything remotely like HN's policy). Concious or not, it's a policy that HN has adopted, and it's a terrible policy.
What I'm saying is, dont confuse the motivation and the implementation. Yes, its the wrong implementation, but that doesn't mean that they apply it maliciously.
Wouldn't it have been easier to just register a new account on hn, or just treat it r/o and don't bother registering?
Unless, of course, PG has written some software that identifies your browser across accounts (which isn't terribly hard,) but as you say there's no transparency here, but then it is his forum so I don't expect any kind of transparency. He can do what he likes and ban whomever he feels like.
I commend the effort, so far the content looks like it is a clone of hn pretty much, I recognized many of the titles, but I think it's great you've created your own version.
Graham allows the dumbest people on the Internet to come onto this site to berate startups he all but begged people to create, but hellbanned a guy who pooped out a better version of HN in his spare time, for nothing. For fuck's sake.
His post is mistaken. His account isn't banned. I banned it temporarily while waiting for a reply to my email, then unbanned it. (I often do this when I ask people to stop doing something, because I've found that some people keep resubmitting otherwise.) I don't remember exactly how much later that was, but usually it's less than a day; if it were longer I'd forget. If he'd replied to my email I would have unbanned him immediately.
I told him this when I came across that blog post a while ago, but he seems to prefer his more colorful version of the story.
I think the problem here is that the only type of banning you have is hellbanning and slowbanning. It would have been clearer if you had just “normal-banned” jcs, so he got a message saying “you have been banned and can’t post anything”. That would have avoided the misunderstanding to some extent.
Hellbanning should be reserved for users you want to prevent from noticing that they’re banned, so they won’t create a new account. That would be users who you think hold no hope of salvation, not those who you are just giving a warning to.
Even better in this particular case would be yet another type of ban that informs the user “you have been temporarily suspended from posting; check your email for the reason”. That would let the user know that the ban is temporary so they don’t get upset that they were apparently permanently banned for one mistake.
Yes, it would be nice feature to have two kinds of banning. But there are so many other things on my todo list, and though this particular glitch attracted lots of attention, it happens vanishingly rarely and doesn't affect the site much. So there is a lot more payoff for users if I focus on e.g. ways to improve comment threads.
As an aside, you should consider disabling the automatic IP banning, which is clearly overzealous. The places I read HN from, including the office and my home LAN, have static IPs, and approximately every 14 days I find that my IP is suddenly banned, and I have to resort to a proxy server to use HN.
When this happens I end up shooting you a personal email, to which you have replied, dismissively, only once. Either you are reading my emails or there is some kind of expiry on the bans, because I find I am usually unbanned within a few days to a week.
Oh, and there is nothing malicious happening on my LAN that warrants this kind of banning. I'm a casual HN reader/poster.
That about article should be linked from the top nav on the site. Or at least in a footer. It would go a long way to explaining the origins and intentions of the site.
Honestly Prismatic is so very good at content curation -- at least for me and my friends -- that a "tech/startup/general geekery news" content aggregator is superfluous. I come to HN now to see the comments on the articles I read on Prismatic.
More than giving why you're downvoting, I wish HN didn't ban/banish-to-purgatory people for low karma, but for upheld flagged posts. Someone can be horribly wrong, often, and still learn, and become worthwhile to the group. At least in theory.
How about allowing automated signup for read-only accounts? I don't want to post comments on lobste.rs, but it would be nice to have access to other features (e.g. tag-based filtering.)
that's not entirely true, the amount of time any of us spends online looking at tech news is finite, therefore as the pie gets bigger some of the online communities shrink their viewership, have less participation and less engagement. So the idea of competition is actually quite valid. It's like saying there's room for Facebook and Google+, while that's true there definitely are winners and losers because user engagement in a community is a function of its health and status.
I applied for lobste.rs, sending an 8 paragraph email about myself, the admin didn't even take the time to reply to me, which I find extremely rude, if I am too lowly for his application, then letting me know how to improve would really have been polite.
As it is, because of how I was treat by them, I have an extreme aversion to this website. I don't see it as competition for HN, I was merely curious about the community there and it's comparison to the one here.
When did you send it? I don't know about the recipient of your email, but it's not uncommon for me to have a multi-week backlog of email. Long emails tend to get a long reply, so those take even longer.
Yeah, it's invite only too, so the idea is, you lower yourself and apply or you get invited by a friend because they like you.
So the end result is either it's full of really friendly, intelligent, hand picked people, or it becomes a clique full of friends who are less than intelligent.
I do think there is a risk of 'intellectual ghettoization'. The quantity in a community might not be that important after a while. But the quality, in terms of diversity of ideas, is very important.
I've been a contributor on HN for around 5 years and over the period of time I've seen a constant decline in the quality of comments, community support (read some of the 'Show HN' posts) and to an extent even the quality of the stories submitted.
A new improved hacker/startup community can be a serious contender for replacing HN (in its current state), just like Reddit is/was to Digg and others.
I'm relatively new to HN (<1year) and the one thing I notice on here is a HEAVY amount of cynicism. Perhaps the tech industry needs that to keep itself in check, but I feel like a lot of argumentative comments can sometimes be REALLY nasty.
I understand that in a competitive, fast paced and big money industry there will be massive egos, but I could sure do without some of the jerks
Isn't that true of every geek-oriented news site with comments? In every community that reaches a certain size people start complaining that everything was better in the early year(s). There's always a lot of cynicism because that's just geek humor (actually I think HN is far better in that regard than many other sites - I don't know any other major site where you can get so much useful and positive feedback). And on sites with lots of comments you will always find lots of negative comments. That's just the way it is.
Well a real problem is the fact that it takes no effort to by cynical. It doesn't take intelligence or facts to be cynical, only doubt under the cover of pragmatism.
While this account is only approaching its 2 year anniversary, I was a lurker for a while before that. I do agree there has been some decline, but my biggest complaint about the comments these days are the complaints about the decline of HN. They are all over the place and to me are a bigger annoyance than anything that the actual comments are complaining about (except for the community support comment - that needs improving).
Not meant to single you out - just my opinion on the overall sentiment on HN these days.
This account is 4+ years old and I was a lurker as well for a while before creating an account. I too have noticed a distinct decline in the quality of commentary over the years. It's not downvotes that are messing up the community; it's upvotes. The things that get upvoted more lately seem to be short quips or similar scoped posts. Maybe pg needs to experiment with removing the upvote feature from new accounts until they reach a threshold of x karma. If it wasn't for the 10 or 20 prolific posters here this community would be full of people with nothing to say but saying it loudly. I don't know if the removal of points from comments changed the environment for the better but I can only hope that it staved off the decline in community for a bit longer than inaction would have.
Edit: I think it's funny that the title of this post was changed to lobsters from its original title.
I'd like to cite the Nader Principle: Groups of people with similar ideas should look for ways to compromise instead of splitting their effort.
There has always been value in collecting very different people with similar goals in one place. Greater diversity of perspective, backgrounds and points of view. I'm always a little sad to see a group of people split over a minor dispute or philosophical difference. It's taking what could be a great combined effort and diluting it.
I agree with you in principle, but in practice it is hard to even have that discussion on HN, where metadiscussions are frowned upon, there is zero transparency into how moderation is conducted, and you can be hellbanned without explanation or recourse.
Personally, I'm always glad to see a new blog/forum/collector/thingy like this start up.
Since the days of /. and before, all the 'new social online scene' collectives have been a blast. I can't conceive of a new such effort as being anything but a positive thing ..
lobste.rs for sure has/will have his public but what I like in HN is that is not only technical but also features interesting stuff for smart people allowing curious people from other fields to join and enrich the community (even if lots of people claim the opposite). For example I'm an architect (buildings not IT) and HN is my favourite community. You can say that for me there is reddit but it is full of BS where people too many times comment without having nothing to say.
My favorite forum feature is 'the blender'. I first saw it on nuclearphynance.com(and not since). Once a critical number of people blend a thread it gets deleted so as not to pollute the list of threads.
In practice it worked very well. The overwhelming majority of blended threads were from new users who were still getting a hang of the quality standards for posting in the forum.
- Joshua Stein developed Lobsters by himself. Yahuda Katz was, to my knowledge, uninvolved.
- The site is invite only because, and I'm speaking for Josh here and mostly guessing (he'd be a better person to ask), it's still trying to identify itself. Communities are grown organically and I gather Josh is letting Lobsters grow slowly, intentionally. I don't think he has "launched" it, per se.
- I emailed Josh to support him when he was hellbanned (as my HN story parallels his), and a couple months after that exchange he invited me to the site. I don't participate much at all -- heads down on a product -- but I think it has potential.
- I have 5:1 odds the headline will not be fixed, even though there are three factual errors in that tiny bit of text (Katz, HN Competitor, Launched).
Slashdot also had upvotes with reasons, and I personally think that is just as important if you agree with downvotes with reasons: it lets you differentiate between things that added new information, made good arguments, or was simply funny.
That said, the problem with downvotes with reasons is that it now feels much more harsh. I'm downvoting something that is clearly an insulting comment that should not have been made on the site, and yet I'm wondering "do I really want to use the term 'troll'? that seems harsh".
227 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadedit: Apparently, the site was launched by Joshua Stein (after getting hellbanned from HN), not Yehuda Katz. https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
Update: The site is also open source: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters
Last shameless update: Would love an invite. Email in my profile.
Haven't seen much discussion about this HN flaw. Interesting...
[Edit: fixed ambiguous antecedent]
You don't think it true that HN has significant financial incentive to censor or promote the links of YC companies?
or you think there has been a lot of discussion about the HN conflict-of-interest? (perhaps I don't read regularly enough.)
I suppose you could mean both.
-jp
This isn't linked anywhere obvious on the site itself.
EDIT - also found https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters which explains some features
Lack of transparency is a pretty big deal on this forum, and once you've crossed Paul -- without knowing how -- it's scorched earth on any account you make. That's why Josh developed Lobsters, and why I'm user #2, and why I'm glad to see it's gaining traction as a community.
This site is more threatening to opinion and discourse than any on the public Internet, and that isn't hyperbole. The irony is that this is a hacker community, and most hackers would be appalled at slamming the door and creating a curated garden of ideas. I've posted as jsprink_banned and jsprinkles on the topic, if you're interested; won't spam this thread with it.
One of the dirty secrets of hackernews is that you can be hellbanned at any moment without rhyme or reason, and you'll likely never know why. I assume it serves some purpose OTHER than driving away helpful contributors, but I'm not sure what that might be.
No, I'm not suggesting a plot, but there's no natural law that says tech news sites must have a hairtrigger hellban (nor, as far as I'm aware, does any other site have anything remotely like HN's policy). Concious or not, it's a policy that HN has adopted, and it's a terrible policy.
I commend the effort, so far the content looks like it is a clone of hn pretty much, I recognized many of the titles, but I think it's great you've created your own version.
I'm leaning toward disagreement.
Sometimes it is difficult to pickup on sarcasm in the written word. This post is not being sarcastic. Neither was my one above.
https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...
I told him this when I came across that blog post a while ago, but he seems to prefer his more colorful version of the story.
Hellbanning should be reserved for users you want to prevent from noticing that they’re banned, so they won’t create a new account. That would be users who you think hold no hope of salvation, not those who you are just giving a warning to.
Even better in this particular case would be yet another type of ban that informs the user “you have been temporarily suspended from posting; check your email for the reason”. That would let the user know that the ban is temporary so they don’t get upset that they were apparently permanently banned for one mistake.
When this happens I end up shooting you a personal email, to which you have replied, dismissively, only once. Either you are reading my emails or there is some kind of expiry on the bans, because I find I am usually unbanned within a few days to a week.
Oh, and there is nothing malicious happening on my LAN that warrants this kind of banning. I'm a casual HN reader/poster.
More than giving why you're downvoting, I wish HN didn't ban/banish-to-purgatory people for low karma, but for upheld flagged posts. Someone can be horribly wrong, often, and still learn, and become worthwhile to the group. At least in theory.
(Good luck to lobste.rs, but I'll probably be staying right here on hn.)
As it is, because of how I was treat by them, I have an extreme aversion to this website. I don't see it as competition for HN, I was merely curious about the community there and it's comparison to the one here.
I guess I got my answer...
So the end result is either it's full of really friendly, intelligent, hand picked people, or it becomes a clique full of friends who are less than intelligent.
I've been a contributor on HN for around 5 years and over the period of time I've seen a constant decline in the quality of comments, community support (read some of the 'Show HN' posts) and to an extent even the quality of the stories submitted.
A new improved hacker/startup community can be a serious contender for replacing HN (in its current state), just like Reddit is/was to Digg and others.
I understand that in a competitive, fast paced and big money industry there will be massive egos, but I could sure do without some of the jerks
Not meant to single you out - just my opinion on the overall sentiment on HN these days.
Edit: I think it's funny that the title of this post was changed to lobsters from its original title.
There has always been value in collecting very different people with similar goals in one place. Greater diversity of perspective, backgrounds and points of view. I'm always a little sad to see a group of people split over a minor dispute or philosophical difference. It's taking what could be a great combined effort and diluting it.
Since the days of /. and before, all the 'new social online scene' collectives have been a blast. I can't conceive of a new such effort as being anything but a positive thing ..
In practice it worked very well. The overwhelming majority of blended threads were from new users who were still getting a hang of the quality standards for posting in the forum.
- Joshua Stein developed Lobsters by himself. Yahuda Katz was, to my knowledge, uninvolved.
- The site is invite only because, and I'm speaking for Josh here and mostly guessing (he'd be a better person to ask), it's still trying to identify itself. Communities are grown organically and I gather Josh is letting Lobsters grow slowly, intentionally. I don't think he has "launched" it, per se.
- I emailed Josh to support him when he was hellbanned (as my HN story parallels his), and a couple months after that exchange he invited me to the site. I don't participate much at all -- heads down on a product -- but I think it has potential.
- I have 5:1 odds the headline will not be fixed, even though there are three factual errors in that tiny bit of text (Katz, HN Competitor, Launched).
That said, the problem with downvotes with reasons is that it now feels much more harsh. I'm downvoting something that is clearly an insulting comment that should not have been made on the site, and yet I'm wondering "do I really want to use the term 'troll'? that seems harsh".