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Ask HN: How did the Erlang articles disappear on HN yesterday?

6 points by socratees ↗ HN
Were we censored or did we flag the articles by ourselves, or did the admin remove all the Erlang entries from appearing on the front page? How did we get rid of the Erlang articles? I'm just curious about it.

11 comments

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jacquesm
I guess enough people flagged it to take it away.

There is a lower limit where stuff will get auto killed if enough people flagged it.

What bothers me most about these silly flooding tactics is that you've potentially burned a lot of good content about Erlang from ever appearing on HN.

Erlang is a neat concept, and I think that those that flooded the 'new' page with Erlang stuff have done more damage than good.

What you could have simply done is to flag the articles you thought had no place on HN instead of trying to monopolize the discussion by flooding.

daleharvey
I think its pretty certain the articles were manually removed, they all went at the same time along with every new submission almost immediately.

I dont disagree with having them deaded though, although my site was one of the ones that someone submitted, and I actually think it was submitted because it was useful.

socratees
That's what I noticed. At almost the same time, all erlang links were gone. Did the admins remove it?
ErrantX
I know a few people (myself included) were busy flagging stuff about that time - so it is quite possible a lot of it died from flags.
mbrubeck
No, articles with over 10 points are no longer auto-removed by flagging, after some complaints a month or two ago. It was pretty clearly a moderator action.
jacquesm
Imagine a series of counters as attributes to the articles submitted. If enough people decide 'enough Erlang, let's flag that stuff down' then you can imagine a flurry of activity by a limited number of users (say 10 or 15 or so) that would remove all the articles within a minute or so, which is when the last person to be able to do so clicks 'flag' for the relevant articles.

Don't attribute to 'divine' intervention what you could easily achieve with the tools at hand.

mbrubeck
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686303

pg: "If a story has enough flags, that alone will kill it, without moderator intervention. I just added a point threshold to prevent this happening to stories that have received a significant number of votes."

On the other hand this change doesn't seem to be in the latest news.arc from arc3.tar, whether it was removed, not included in that distribution yet, or I'm just looking in the wrong place.

jacquesm
What's distributed is not necessarily what is running on the site. I think there may be some secret sauce, if only to make it a bit harder to game the system.
daleharvey
new submissions were being deaded before being on the page long enough to be flagged, that and the lack of any entropy at all (they really did all disappear at the same time) and that some of them had ~10 comments suggests that it was manual.

Im not complaining about it if they were manually removed, I agree that they were out of hand.

jacquesm
Until somebody owes up to doing it by hand my money is on algorithms, caching and flagging. I could easily be wrong though.

I've seen exactly one intervention in all my time here on HN and it was well warranted ('Arrington'), other than that nothing that I could point my finger at.

mbrubeck
I know that the moderators do "intervene" because sometimes pg talks about it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=709370

"There are days when HN seems determined to jump the shark, and the only reason it doesn't is that the editors heave it back."