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Ask HN: Why the “So long, Reddit” Post Removal? Just Curious

25 points by meeper16 ↗ HN
It seems to have made a few good points on monetizing a community driven site along with caveats and all the other things that come with it including ethics associated to what's being monetized. This is a facinating topic and it should not be squelched.

I don't think we should pretend the underbelly of the net does not exist.

I noticed the "child porn" post was not removed from HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9868352

Original "so long reddit" article http://braythwayt.com/2015/07/11/so-long-reddit.html

28 comments

[ 78.4 ms ] story [ 1180 ms ] thread
dangrossman
If I had to take a guess, there's more than a few people that are tired of reading about reddit's staff shuffling this week, especially on sites that aren't reddit. It only takes a few people flagging a submission to kill it.
nkurz
I don't think these were removed by a moderator. Rather, they are [flagkilled] because enough individual users flagged the article to pass some threshold. While it's possible that Dan has reviewed and approved this, I think it's more likely that he is off duty for a bit, and that original post will be reinstated when he's back. But we'll see.

In the meantime, could those who flagged either of these posts please explain their reasons?

ams6110
I didn't flag these, but I do tend to flag posts that are just more coverage of already well-trodden ground on topics that tend to promote a lot of ideological debate, just for example pretty much anything promoting "basic income" and most Tesla advocacy.
noobermin
I've been on the site for almost two years and I haven't seen something quite like this[0]. Do you think Darn or another admin (are there other admins) would reply to this question so we could know for sure?

[0] I don't say it with the connotation that I'm surprised given my experience, but the opposite: I haven't been around long enough to witness the response of the community during the heyday of such a controversial topic and want to know if the admins would actually respond

meeper16
I also noticed that this very post here was on the front page a few mins ago and now it's nowhere to be found on the first, second, third or fourth page. This is strange and begs some answers.
thaumaturgy
That's what happens when people flag posts, and it's especially common on posts asking why other posts were flagged -- it keeps too much meta discussion from taking over.

I didn't flag either of the other two submissions -- mostly because I've got pretty strict personal guidelines for flagging, and also because most such content doesn't have a long shelf-life on HN anyway -- but it would be easy to justify flagging them.

@raganwald is a great guy. I'm really grateful for his participation on HN. He's articulate and tends to carefully consider his positions. But, I don't think this particular article from him is going to lead to very valuable discussion. With all due respect to his experiences, it's a somewhat shallow, low-effort article. It doesn't say anything new about the balance between hateful speech and free speech, which really is the conversation that needs to happen. It doesn't acknowledge that Reddit is often the largest online community for any subject, including hateful ones. And, if it inspires any conversation at all, it's likely just going to be a lot of drama between the "anti-hate-speech" crowd and the "anti-censorship" crowd.

braythwayt
I agree with everything you’re saying. There is a thing that applies to scientific theories, a question of whether they are fecund, do they provoke more insights and thoughts and productive debate?

Some things I write might be very true, or very heartfelt, or very emotionally powerful, but not fecund. And fecundity is an important criterion for a site that uses posts as a catalyst for productive discussion.

cma
This was one of the top-rated posts for a while, I'd imagine it spurred enough people to flag it that it got flagged:

>Karunamon 1 hour ago

    >The practical reality is that Reddit seems to have overtaken Stormfront as the world’s largest White Supremacy community.
>Are you kidding me? Flagged. And shame on whoever thought it was a good idea to bring this insulting garbage to #1 in the first place.
meeper16
That was certinaly not the import of the write-up and I think most would agree. The meat of the article addressed an underlying management and ethical issue with any community driven site.
nness
Perhaps I'm being hyperbolic, but I generally found that most of the recent Reddit related submissions have served no real purpose other than give people another channel to complain about Reddit, the closure of the subreddits, Pao's actions, etc.

Any counter-opinions or questioning of the behaviour of the community, particularly those comments and actions which are now being identified as bigoted, receives downvotes or flags.

This might not be the time, or HN the place, to have a constructive discussion about Reddit's future.

orionblastar
Anything that talks about sexism or racism in the tech industry or website usually gets flagkilled here.

That is because it is more political than technical. This is Hacker News not Political News.

I made a comment in that thread and then saw it was flagkilled so I deleted my comment least it get downvoted. What I basically talked about is that racism exists and we should teach people to be tolerant and empathetic towards other races. That is Reddit or 4Chan banned their racist areas, they'd just go someplace else. That some subreddits have guidelines or rules that say no racism or whatever and enforce it.

braythwayt
Author here. One of the things that brought me back to HN has been that it has felt less dramatic than in times past. Whether that’s flagging, or moderation, or the community changing its tastes, I don’t know, but I value it.

I stand by my post as worthy of being written, but that doesn’t mean it belongs on HN today. It could be that it does not address an issue that the HN community finds valuable, especially in a startup context.

It could be that it is a good post, but hey, it’s the seventeenth similar post today. That happens, I recall some talk years ago about bundling posts so that there could be one discussion, but Hn doesn’t, and there isn’t room for seventeen posts on the same subject in one day.

It could be that it’s a little heavy on my personal feelings and light on objective information. That’s fine, a blog ought to contain subjective experiences, but a site like HN ought to weight towards information on the whole.

It could be that it reads like an SJW having a hissy-fit and rage-quitting, and we don’t need that ‘round here.

Either way, I just want everyone to know that I appreciate that some HNers value its existence, but I am not dismayed that it isn’t going to be on HN. Regardless of what is happening to this specific post, on the whole I value the arc (heh heh) of HN’s growth.

muglug
And hey, thanks for writing it. I don't agree with all of it, but appreciate your position, the eloquence with which you voiced it, and the dignity you've shown here.
meeper16
I like the way it was written but I was especially intrigued by what we, as a community of startups, allow ourselves to monetize. I remember reading that porn and sex trade is what drove 14% of craiglist traffic at one point and I'm not sure how Craig Newmark handled that. Child porn is another driver of image sites. This all a matter of ethics on so many different levels, racism included.

If our companies and engineering teams are sanctuaries for this kind of stuff, it really calls into question the how far we go at the sacrifice of society to make a dollar.

If we don't address these things as a community of startups and engineers then we could get bit in unforeseen ways.

I'm at least glad we've had a bit of discussion here on it.

stickfigure
I'm late to this and wouldn't have flagged your post even if I wasn't, but since I went through the trouble to find and read it, I'll give you feedback: "Reads like a SJW having a hissy-fit and rage-quitting" is reasonably accurate. Maybe a little more bland: You are shocked to discover yucky things in on the internet? Yawn.

Personally I think taking money from racists and asshats is a high calling. I never understand why politicians in the US return donations from nasty sources when they come to light. That's effectively giving money to bigots. Keep their money and do something good with it.

meeper16
Would you draw the line at selling drugs to some junkies?
stickfigure
I genuinely don't understand the question. Are you suggesting there is some relationship between bigots and substance abusers?
task_queue
Profiting from either group is morally bankrupt.

You know substance abusers have a problem and are giving you money to further it.

You know bigots have an agenda and are giving you money to further it.

stickfigure
This is a weird and tortured comparison.
task_queue
It seems blindingly obvious what the grandparent's intent was in this context.

What is weird and tortured in this comparison?

nkurz
What did you mean by your statement "The practical reality is that Reddit seems to have overtaken Stormfront as the world’s largest White Supremacy community."

I took it as a probable statement of fact: more White Supremacists use Reddit than use any other single forum on the web. That is, while the percentage of total Reddit users that are White Supremecists is likely low (although much higher you desire), the total number is larger than any other single site because even a small percentage of a gigantic userbase means there are an awful lot of racist Reddit users.

Others seem to be taking it as an indictment of the entire Reddit community, and assume you are claiming that everyone who uses Reddit is racist.

What did you intend by the comparison?

Anecdotally, when I went through recently subscribing to specific subreddits, I don't recall hitting any overtly racist groups in the dozen or so pages of offerings I clicked through. I was surprised though by the amount of porn that was offered to me. It seems likely that by some metrics Reddit must be one of the largest pornography sites in the world.

braythwayt
I’d love to discuss this further, but I have a feeling that it’s playing “dirty pool” to use a discussion about why the post was moderated as a side-channel for discussing the post itself :-)
nkurz
Likely a good intuition, although I think it would depend on whether "moderated" means that after deliberation the moderators decided that HN was not the right forum to discuss your post, or whether a small minority of individual users decided that the discussion should be removed from the site.

I was hoping to see an official clarification, but haven't yet seen one, even though several hours have passed. Maybe this is the one weekend a year that Dan's briefly allowed out of the dark and damp HN dungeon where he is kept permanently chained in front the glowing green VT100 that is his only contact with the outside world? At least that's how I've always pictured him.

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dang
Users flagged them. User flags cause a post to rank lower; also, when enough users flag a post, the software kills it. We review those and usually unkill the ones that have an ongoing discussion (so discussion can continue), but don't usually override the rank penalty. That's what we've done with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872149.

Please don't make posts to HN about HN post rankings. It's off topic, and the HN guidelines ask you not to do it, but rather to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We can't always answer right away, but we do answer, and if something needs to happen we'll usually take care of it sooner. For example, we got an email about the same post last night and although I haven't had time yet to answer the email, I did unkill the post right away. User flags ended up killing it again (I made a mistake and didn't turn that off), but that's atypical.