In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesting, sometimes exciting news, posts, articles and "Show HN"s.
As for comment moderation, I think that HN is a community with the least amount of moderation i've seen. Which makes me really happy.
I have submitted only three or four things here, so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.
I've found moderation on HN to be a bit heavy handed recently. Specifically when it comes to the issue of sexism in SV. No matter the opinion, posts on this seem to get removed shortly after reaching the front page.
Question for the mods: Why? It doesn't appear to be a bias towards either side. Is the perception just that people are tied of hearing about it? Why not let the users decide that?
I don't believe this is going on. I believe most sexism posts get flagged by users, not downmodded by moderators.
I strongly suspect that many users flag based on the title, without reading further. Most of the sexism focused pieces are pretty bad. I'm a woman and I tend to hate most of them.
Once or twice, I emailed the mods when I felt a post on the subject was poorly titled, but had worthwhile content. On at least one occasion, they changed the title and, I think, turned off flags for the piece so it could be seen.
I am careful to have a light hand. I seem to be the most prominent female member here and I can get accused of having an agenda for saying anything at all on the topic of sexism. *
I have tried to write more evenhanded pieces on one of my blogs. Some of those have gone okay, but they never really get all that much traffic or response on HN. But, as I see it, some of the problems with this topic include:
1) It has a long track record of ugliness on both sides, so some people kneejerk flag anything that sounds like it touches on the topic because they are tired of these toxic, pointless discussions.
2) Most pieces are pretty man-bashing. The audience here is predominantly male. They get tired of being hated on for having been born male. (I am also tired of the misandry, so I don't think that is unreasonable.)
3) Most pieces on the topic aren't really all that good. They are typically histrionic and blamey.
4) If you don't use the usual catch phrases in the title, people won't recognize that it is pertinent to a topic they are interested in. If you do, you can't sidestep all the baggage it involves. So trying to do something better faces a huge uphill battle in terms of even being recognized as both relevant and not guilty of the usual issues.
Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. If you want your forum to have some nutritional value than you can't let the candy topics run rampant no matter how much people seem to want them.
It should be noted that this is an explicit strategy by proponents of the status quo, to make any discussion of the topic so toxic that the topic itself becomes banned.
It's possible to moderate a discussion forum to avoid this, but it requires a high level of involvement from the moderators and a willingness to aggressively recognize and prune divisive commentary regardless of the specific tone or content.
I think that makes sense. But how much is too much? Say you have a very high post volume on one side of an issue, so you start moderating more heavily. Do you allow posts through representing the other side? Is that "fair"?
The issue isn't really the one-sided-ness of the comments, or the volume of the comments. The issue is the quality of the comments.
Even on a hot-button topic, there are quality comments made, by both sides. Those are worth reading, no matter which side you take on the issue. And then there are the "You're so stupid, how could you think something so idiotic, I hope you die in a fire" comments. Those comments don't add much except noise. If you want the quality comments to be visible among the noise, you need to weed out the noise comments. You need this more on hot-button topics, because they attract more noise comments.
For the most part, the topic gathers posts from both sides regardless of the content of the linked article. So simply flagging the entire topic away is fair.
Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy.
Sez you. The unspoken premise is that nothing is so important that it's worth stopping to have an argument over. Perhaps I'm misreading your views, but when they're tossed out as an aphorism they come off as smug rather than substantive.
There is a difference between an argument and having a knock down drag out fight.
For example when parents have a disagreement about how to deal with catching their child sneaking in drunk after a party.
This can go many ways but for the purpose of highlighting the difference take Chris and Pat.
(argument)
Chris: Pat, I can understand how you'd feel that way, but considering the family history of alcoholism, maybe we should take a more conservative approach with this.
vs
(flame war)
Chris: Well, Pat... Maybe if your mother had cared half as much about you and your brother growing up as I'm trying to care about our kids and cracked down on you guys a little bit, maybe your brother would have stopped at that red light, and maybe your kids would have an Uncle.
Unpleasant as the flame war version is, it does cut to the heart of the matter rather than tiptoeing around it, which can perpetuate a problem. Both approaches have their place.
The users are deciding. We are flagging these stories because we don't see the value in endless flamewars over the same subject. If you can't get enough of debates about sexism in SV there are lots of other places on the internet for that.
I understand how that is the right policy for HN. But I'm wondering if you consider it possible that you're in a position where you have a responsibility to sometimes surface these topics on HN?
After all, for some of these topics it's exactly the people that won't go looking for them at other places on the internet where they may still make a difference.
To use an example that's slightly less controversial: I think it's important for people working with lots of other people's data to have some fundamental sense of privacy rights. And HN is probably one of the best places to reach those actually in the trenches that are in the position to say 'no' when, for example, the CEO of Yahoo tells them to allow the NSA full access to their users' emails.
Yet that's a topic that quickly turns to politics, so you'd probably have good reasons to wish those discussions happened elsewhere.
Just to be clear: I think the mix of topics overall is mostly fine right now. But just like Facebook or Twitter, I think HN may be in a position where your "editorial responsibility" should be somewhere on your radar. Not because HN is the size of those, but because it caters to a readership that has certain powers far outstripping its size.
I think that's about right. That's why we turn off user flags on articles that are particularly substantive or contain significant new information. It's mostly the copycat and follow-up articles (of which there are many more) that lead to the repetitive flamewars, arguably because they're so repetitive themselves.
I disagree. Most of the flagged topics are already being shoved in tech peoples' faces through Reddit, mainstream/tech news, their workplace and their social network (that is most likely liberal). Hacker News is a sort of safe space away from those topics. They are fully aware of the topics and choose to not participate in them.
edit: not sure why this is getting downvotes when it's a direct counterargument/response to the parent
I agree. I don't generally touch stories about new and important events on that topic, but when it's just a random gender-related submission that's bound to induce a flamewar in comments, I just flag it.
I flag almost every single one of those stories, because they stopped covering new ground after about the first day or two. I can't be the only one, maybe the users are deciding?
Outside of flagging, behavior within the post itself (lots of comments?) probably penalize them. Really, really good stuff makes the frontpage, though. The issues at Uber, for example, were widely discussed.
What I mean is if you read the comments on an article about James Damore the day it broke and read the comments were the article to be posted today, they haven't really evolved. It's the same canards over and over. Damore being an example of a story that users were indignant about getting knocked off the frontpage.
It's obviously of interest and obviously not limited to SV. The issue isn't whether it's off-topic for HN (it isn't), it's can we stick to substantive discussion about real things and avoid flamewar and repetition.
Besides the oft-quoted HN submission guidelines, another answer to your question is that women are usually the ones affected by sexism, and women read HN (no, really).
It's another example of women being sidelined. Most HN readers are male, and selfishly flag/downvote articles/comments about sexism because they want to read about the latest JavaScript framework instead.
That's not a helpful ingredient to pour into the well. You're basically just repeating a mental mock-up you have, not backed by data, only snark. Anyone who looks sincerely and closely will see how much more complex the situation is.
Moreover, there's evidence that repeating such generalizations—even though you intend them critically—makes the environment less welcoming and poisons it further for the equality you'd presumably like to see.
When you do this, you (i.e. we—we nearly all do it) are valuing the rush of morally posturing above our peers more than the cause we care about. If we're going to actually make HN be the welcoming place we want it to be, we'll have to do something about this.
How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective?
I have my doubts about how welcoming HN is for different demographics, and while the grandparent poster is handwaving things with a mental mockup as you say, absent transparency on moderation policies many people inevitably feel the same way about the moderation.
I mean, at present you have a bunch of secret rules to make everything run better. That works OK as a practical strategy, but it also reduces buy-in - which is why I get heavily downvoted any time I suggest that government intelligence services are inevitably going to adopt utility-maximizing strategies at the expense of liberty, no matter how many times I qualify this by saying I'm trying to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.
> How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective?
This makes an excellent point, and the same could be said of the junior moderation team - the HN readers who up/downvote comments.
A practical solution: The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities for some honest, frank perceptive and feedback. Stop guessing and trying, and get some real knowledge. Look at particular threads (on sexism, etc.) and talk about how welcoming HN is to them and why. IME, there is no substitute for a lifetime of personal experience with these issues; most people without that experience - including myself - are surprised when they hear the realities and details.
You can identify who is underrepresented and who might feel unwelcome by what groups are referred to as "they". For example, in discussions of sexism women are often discussed in the third person - a good sign of who is the excluded group. If you think about it, those discussions should be led by the people who have experience with the issue, just like Java devs (hopefully) lead the Java discussion. This discussion, right here and right now, should have those voices - it's right in front of our eyes.
I'll add that religious prejudice against Muslims is particularly overlooked. If I were Muslim, I would not feel welcome here at all. As a practical test, substitute in 'Jews/Jewish/Judiasm' for 'Muslims/Islamic/Islam' (to pick a religious minority against which prejudice is rejected, as it should be for all) and evaluate the statement. I've seen many that unambiguously fail.
Oops! A very fair point and I actually meant to include that myself, because I don't know and didn't want to presume.
Gimme a break; I'm writing Internet comments not dissertations. Some things slip through the cracks. :)
EDIT: Also, re-reading my comment, I see it's all pretty critical. HN is the best forum on the Internet, IMHO, in large part thanks to the guidelines and moderation; but at the same time the competition is pretty bad and I think HN can be even better. My hope is that by developing and demonstrating effective practices, and then by sharing them, HN could improve discourse throughout the web. It sounds fantastical, but why not - the practices cost nothing, websites and online services everywhere are starving for a solution, and HN is in a very visible position and has a technically sophisticated team, a backing organization that loves innovation (YC), and an audience that can appreciate it.
For what it's worth, I largely cosign this critique of how HN is moderated.
I think there's merit to the suggestion that snarking about how unwelcoming HN is to industry minorities is counterproductive. But I don't think HN's institutional commitment to being more welcoming to industry minorities is exactly pellucid.
Personally, I don't feel any need to know how many women are on the moderating staff. That question has not ever crossed my mind as an issue for me, personally, as a woman posting here.
Like 'anigbrowl, I simply think it's worth considering the extent to which the moderating staff do or do not personally experience the hostility this place can exhibit to industry minorities.
Paul Graham is originally from the UK. I believe Dan Gackle is Canadian in origin. Patio11 is a white American male living in Japan. Jacquesm is Dutch. Tokenadult has an Asian wife and has lived in Asia.
My impression is that the forum is fairly multicultural. It is not a monolith of white American males/white American male culture.
I am much more concerned with feeling heard than with whether or not they have firsthand experiences like mine. I once wrote the mods and made my case for why something should be deleted as I felt it was actively putting a young woman in real danger. They didn't initially see it, but they did listen and ultimately redacted the information that concerned me.
I think if I have a real problem, they will listen. This is better in my mind than having been born with the same bits between their legs that I happen to have been born with.
I don't pretend to speak for all minorities. But my understanding is that both you and anigbrowl are white males. So I thought I would chime in just so the topic isn't being addressed solely by the demographic that you two express concerns about dominating the mod staff.
I don't think this is a super productive debate to have here, but I do want to clarify that I'm not calling for more diversity on the mod staff, as much as just an awareness of what the mod staff is.
I wasn't seeking debate. But I do find it ironic that you and angibrowl, both white men, expect to be listened to when you critique the moderating staff wrt to diversity, but you (in specific, because anigbrowl has not weighed in here) are quick to essentially dismiss my statement that as a prominent woman here, I do not have those concerns.
This is an insidious pattern that I see a lot. White men virtue signal about their concerns about sexism, racism, etc, then fail to give real weight to the voices of the very people they claim to be concerned about. The concerns of white males matter and should be heard. The voices of oppressed minorities still are irrelevant, even when the topic is the concern of fair treatment for them.
>>Anyone who looks sincerely and closely will see how much more complex the situation is.
The situation is definitely complex, which is why it must be discussed at every opportunity and in every venue, especially by intelligent people who deal with complexity as a living (HN's core demographic). Downvoting and flagging stuff just because you personally don't want to talk about it is selfish. It is in fact the very definition of selfishness.
If someone does not want to discuss a particular topic, they can refrain from upvoting it and posting comments on its discussion thread. FLAGGING however prevents others from being exposed to it as well because it pushes the submission off the front page (where it rightfully belongs, based on votes) and sometimes even kills it if enough selfish people pile on. That only makes the issue worse because it is akin to mopping it under the carpet.
You may feel that discussions on certain topics don't add anything original. Did it ever occur to you that that's simply your perspective, shared perhaps only (or mostly) by other old-timers? Many people, especially those new to the industry, are unaware of these issues and they should be exposed to them within the relatively civil and intelligent medium of HN.
HN's readership is a bit less progressive than what you'd expect from the age/education demographics–or at least than what I'd expect.
See, for example, this very article calling out the moderation of a submission on anti-white racism in the restaurant industry, while there are probably dozens of stories buried each week exploring racism or sexism on the tech sector. Yes, some of those do make it to the front page. But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem> you need about a thousand female Uber employees invited to a strip club for every alt-right Googler that gets fired for writing the wrong memo.
It's also interesting to watch the insistence on "engaging with others' arguments" when it comes to literal mobs with torches calling for the next holocaust, yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.
> But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem>
We can't use such a metric. The magnitude of those problems is so large that there would be nothing else on the front page if we did.
HN is trying to be a specific kind of site—one that gratifies intellectual curiosity:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I think it's ok for such a place to exist on the web, don't you? If so, many things follow. The site can't primarily be about litigating disputes or fighting for causes, even (especially) good causes. In fact it can't 'primarily' be about anything, because curiosity shrivels under repetition. Therefore HN's system (community + mods + software) is organized not to have too much, i.e. very much, of anything on the front page.
The issue isn't that HN suppresses discussion of e.g. sexism/gender in tech; it doesn't—there have been tons of threads, often large, often on the front page. The issue is that <front page time>/<how much I care about X> is always, for any X, less than you would like. For most casual observers, "less than I would like" feels like "censored completely". Meanwhile the readers who don't like X have the mirror-image view and say "HN is overrun with X". It's all an undergraduate psych experiment basically.
> But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem you need about a thousand female Uber employees invited to a strip club for every alt-right Googler that gets fired for writing the wrong memo.
I just think that's breaking-expectations-bias: "Man bites dog" stories get more attention than "Dog bites man", because the community expects the latter and doesn't see it as newsworthy.
> yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.
No, its not. (Its true that it contains content that is to the right of what you'd usually see in the WSJ, but it also contains content very far to the left of what you'd find in the WSJ; on balance, it is very much not to the right of the WSJ, though it might well be to the libertarian side of the WSJ.)
For an article a about work and unrelated to sexism, gender or racism, a commenter wrote out of the blue that all white men live privileged and easy lives. A second person replied and disagreed, arguing that some men don't have everything perfect and easy from the point of birth to death. The reply got moderated for causing a flame war, with third-party people asking dang why he targeted the dissenting view and not the original comment.
Wouldn't it be better to supply a link? Then people could make up their own minds.
Even if you're right, I'm not sure what evidence it's supposed to count as; everybody knows we make bad calls, and I know it better than anyone. But I searched for your incident and could only find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530877, which is close to what you describe and (I think) would strike most HN readers as pretty defensible.
The point is that if there is a bias, it would be that moderation seems to target those that disagree when people bring up sexism and racism in unrelated article discussions. It seems very safe, even profitable in terms of votes to bring up sexism and racism, which would be contrary to the views of matt4077.
I predict that if moderation was a bit more consistent in keeping out discussion about sexism and racism in unrelated articles (unless exceptional new insight), we would actually see less reader fatigue and lower amount of flagging for explicit articles about sexism and racism.
(Just to be extra clear, I don't disagree with the moderation itself on the two above examples if they had been the ones bringing in the topic of sexism into those threads).
I took a look at that along with the reply we detached, which was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15086980, and it seems to me a fair place to draw the line. The original comment was predominantly thoughtful while the detached comment was predominantly flamey.
These calls are somewhat arbitrary because when a thread degenerates, you can always trace the root of the degeneration further upthread. But moderation is more like pruning a tree than excising a tumor. The goal isn't to get rid of all malignancy—that would be too draconian and is impossible anyway. It's to detach the bulk of unwanted growth.
People can reasonably differ about individual cases, but the principle here ought to be pretty solid for anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and wants to use the site as intended.
Luckily the community largely self-moderates and comments are generally very high value. At the moment we don't appear to have a significant troll problem.
Reddit was like this almost 10 years ago. This is the bliss of obscurity. We should hold a wake for Reddit 2010.
Supposedly if you find the right subreddits it gets better, but since I have HN I haven't bothered. Nothing lasts forever - I wonder how long before HN goes the way of slashdot and reddit.
Some people mentioned this place in a few threads during the whole Slashdot 2.0 thing and that lead me here. I presume if this place ever does go south similar things will happen.
Let's work to keep this place what it is and make it better.
I was under the impression this site grew by word of mouth and that advertising it to any and everyone was a bit antithetical to then purpose of the site.
As the author of this article, I agree with you. I applaud the HN moderation for their work, and I think the result is a really great place for news and discussion. I'm just calling for greater transparency - and pointing out that the users are abusing the flagging feature.
> I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit.
The Reddit mods and admins are notoriously censorious. If you want minimal moderation, you would need to go to the anonymous imageboards. The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.
> The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.
Could you provide some examples of how the content is better there? I'd be interested, but any time I've ever tried to investigate, I can't get past all the unfettered crap
At least on 4chan, the content is all time-limited, so finding persistent examples isn't really doable. However, the more niche boards are full of quality content for their particular niches, and depending on the culture of the particular board people can be very helpful.
I personally appreciate 4chan for generally weighing the value of a particular post on its own merits rather than any sort of user history or whatever - it's a good counter-balance to places like HN or Reddit where comments can get buried or removed if they go against the hive mind and there's no post history to dig through. I definitely get how the trade-off of inflammatory posts being more common isn't as palatable to some people, though, so it's kind of a mixed bag on if you'll get anything out of it or not. Opinions, etc.
The inflammatory nature of the chans is in and of itself a filter - people that partake in imageboard discussions tend to be more thick-skinned as a result.
Really, the users police themselves for the most part. People aren't as obnoxious as many Reddit users tend to be. That being said, the front page changes a good amount during the day so nothing really sits at the top for awhile unless it is a really popular post. The last one Drew submitted dropped down pretty quick if I remember correctly.
> Really, the users police themselves for the most part.
This is a very double edged sword, especially when advice is being given. Being able to anonymously down-vote BS rather than explaining one's objection creates a positive feedback loop.
Someone will ask about something, subjects that are not mainstream enough for many people to know but are still common enough for many people to have exposure to are particularly dangerous. Reddit's design amplifies even the slightest majority opinion to where it looks like a near unanimously held opinion. If the first ten people on the scene are laymen who just up-vote whatever the relevant old wives tail or urban legend is then an actual SME who comes along saying "but you're wrong, it doesn't actually work like that" they often get down-voted to oblivion.
People tend to Google it when they see conflicting opinions so what the first page of Google says is highly relevant. Now, for a semi-mainstream topic information on the general case is far more accessible than the specific case. The result is a lot of advice that is terrible for the specific situation but good in general gets tossed around like it's gospel.
Reddit doesn't self police. The appearance of consensus where there isn't one creates the illusion of everyone stepping in line because any non-majority (majority local to the sub) opinion is negative-weighted.
Edit: realized you were talking about HN users, my comment about Reddit still stands.
Reddit is a whole different story. Especially with the brigading that happens quite often in some sub-reddits but yes, HN users tend to be better at self moderation and the mod team has also done a pretty good job at running the site. Transparency will only benefit the users and allows us to see why some decisions were made and how we can fix them moving forward if we need to.
> so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.
I submit a lot (although not nearly as much as some others) and I have no idea of what submission will be good or not.
Some things I think are good don't take off, and get put in the second chance queue. Other things I think are good don't get put in that queue, and I don't know why.
I've personally found HN to be a lot more censorious than the subreddits I frequent. I really don't like the diverse fuckery the HN board software uses as "anti-spam" measures, like account creation IP bans ("Account creation temporarily disabled"), slowbans, hellbans and defacto bans that discard the content of your post and pretend to be temporary ("Too fast").
The voting ring detector is in need of a serious upgrade. There are so many cases of vote solicitation by people with meaningful social media following and their posts even make the front page. It's mostly the Product Hunt style "Hey we launched on HN, check us out" which is code for "upvote my post". People have stopped directly linking to the post submission for fear of tripping the voting ring detector, but they either just say "We launched on HN" or link to /newest. Seeing such posts make the front page makes me question the effectiveness of the voting ring detector beyond catching the obvious ones.
A shoutout to `minimaxir for being one of the only people constantly calling out others for such bs. As you can imagine, people get offended for being called out and I remember at least 2 instances of him being treated rudely for doing so on twitter.
If anyone comes across such submissions, please report them to the mods by sending them an email. I'll admit I have not been doing what I suggested, but going forward I will.
> many cases of vote solicitation [...] and their posts even make the front page
That last bit is the critical one. Vote solicitation that doesn't go anywhere is an annoyance, but fake upvotes getting otherwise lame content on the front page is a threat. If you (or anyone) see cases of this, I wish you would send them to hn@ycombinator.com. We investigate, and can usually figure something out one way or the other.
From my perspective—but of course we don't see everything—HN's anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good enough. It's not uncommon for there to be a high-quality project that someone has put months or years into, and then naively tries to promote on HN (edit: I mean by asking friends to upvote). Often people think that's what they're supposed to do. (If you think the opposite should be obvious, try communicating anything to a large-enough audience. The vast majority never get the message.) If we didn't override the voting ring detector in such cases, some really good work would be lost to the audience here, which wouldn't benefit HN. Of course this is rare enough; most ring-voted submissions aren't very good. But years of working on this problem have taught me that the best voting ring detector would not be one that penalizes submissions; it would just turn all ring-votes into no-ops.
Wait, are you suggesting that people shouldn’t post their own stuff to HN? Or by “promote on HN”, do you mean posting on Twitter and telling people to go upvote?
Definitely not suggesting that! Sorry for the ambiguity. Of course it's fine for people to share their own work here (assuming it's on topic—but anything intellectually interesting is on topic).
By 'naively tries to promote on HN' I mean things like asking friends to upvote and passing links around on Twitter. Those tactics don't work (or at least as far as I know they don't) and usually hurt the submission rather than help it. Does that make sense?
One of the reasons I call out voting manipulation is that people do it on HN unintentionally, mostly due to Product Hunt normalizing it. (atleast people aren’t taking out Twitter ads advertising HN submissions)
There are no paid submissions to HN, nor is there an elaborate conspiracy between HN and "certain media orgs" to get paywalled links onto the front page.
This is the sort of nonsense tangent crud that the mods would normally zap to the bottom of the thread as "off topic". But they probably won't here, because it concerns their own moderation, and they're generally loathe to intervene --- even to clean up the threads --- when the optics of doing so are complicated.
So, if you're interested in helping them keep threads clear of conspiracies between HN and the NYT, it's helpful to know that the "flag" button for comments is revealed when you click the timestamp on the comment.
More likely just the fact that I can't recall an active HN conversation which tptacek didn't post in. It's kinda easier to rack up a high karma when you have a LOT of comments to upvote. His account is also about to hit it's tenth anniversary of it's creation in about a week and a half. He actually only picks up about 78 karma a day average.
I mean, thanks, and I do try really hard not to write crap. But there are people that follow my comments here --- I know because I'll sometimes reply to an old stale comment and see my reply +1'd within minutes --- and nothing I write stays negative for long. I think I do a decent job of writing here (unfortunately, it's really the only place I write anymore), but the "reward" I get for it is clearly compounded somehow.
My apologies. I had merely been attempting to explain why said user having a massive karma score isn't suspicious or surprising. It ended up launching more conversation which wasn't really intended. It shan't happen again.
I don't mean to derail your point (because it's valid) but I don't believe this statement is true. YC companies can pay[0] to get recruitment posts on the frontpage of HN.
[0]Note - I'm almost certain YC companies pay for this in some form (wether by cash or some other form) and would be happy for a YC company to confirm/deny.
I think that posting jobs directly to HN is another perk of being a YC company. As noted in the article, the mods can provide a definitive answer.
For what it is worth:
+ I suspect the value of one good hire for one YC company is potentially orders of magnitude more money to YC than whatever it would charge companies multiplied by all the possible times all the YC companies might pay it.
+ The revenue model of YC does not appear to include charging 'incubation' fees to the companies in its portfolio. To the degree this is true it differentiates YC from many other companies in the business of funding startups in batches and providing early stage support and advice. Again, I suspect this is because YC expects the return value of its investment to correlate with the length of runway a startup has and taking fees shortens the runway.
This. To my knowledge it's been a perq of being YC since the beginning- or at least close enough to the beginning that the physics was just becoming stable.
Job posts are a perk for YC companies. They do not pay for it.
IIRC YC companies can submit job postings to a queue and a limited number of them are published per day. Their position slowly decreases over a period of time until they're off the front page.
>How else can you ensure the front page placement for links that you are getting paid (or have an interest in) to promote.
You're not supposed to be able to ensure front page placement. Your content is supposed to rise and fall based solely on its merit, as determined by (unpaid and unaffiliated) users and the moderators.
Maybe it isn't, but it should be. And it shouldn't matter. Appearing on the front page of a web forum shouldn't be make or break, especially for a YC company.
Paid submissions are already disclosed by the inability to vote or leave comments. They also tend to be by one of a few companies looking for developers.
My comment is prompted by the realization that recently (for the past year or so) a lot of general interest NYTimes articles shoot straight up to HN front page.
There are two explanations: either the HN crowd is turning into a general interest one or YC/HN has a deal with NYTimes to help the later increase their memberships.
Based on how the (down)votes go, I would give it a fair chance to the HN crowd turning into a "general interest" one.
You will notice that I did not comment on the quality of NYTimes' articles. And it was a convenient example as it is an easy one to spot (at this moment there are 2 articles from NYTimes on HN front page).
The question stands: should cross promotion deals be disclosed?
Above you posit the behavior you observe is due to a change in HN membership taste or some kind of deal between HN and NYT. I think the former is the easier to support: people often comment on changes on site membership. You appear to be giving more credence to the latter without evidence, which amounts to accusations of shillage. If you've got something firm, by all means, present it. If not, please abide by the guidelines which ask us not to engage in unsubstantiated accusations: generally this is applied with respect to other organizations, but I think HN should be given the benefit of the doubt here as well.
> My comment is prompted by the realization that recently (for the past year or so) a lot of general interest NYTimes articles shoot straight up to HN front page.
I've noticed that for a lot longer, and for a lot more than just the New York Times.
> either the HN crowd is turning into a general interest one
The thing about "general interests" is that they are often shared even among members of a community centered around more specific special interests.
I have zero problem with someone announcing on social media that they launched on HN. If they have a following it's because they have (or had) something interesting to say there. If that's the case and they have launched something, then there's a >0 chance that it is also interesting. If nothing else, it's interesting solely for the purpose of being more plugged in to what the masses think is or should be popular, even if I disagree.
At the risk of being hypocritical, I do have a problem with the opposite: coded messages to followers to flag en masse a post for basically any reason. The effects of flagging en masse vs. voting en masse are exaggerated as the data in the article illustrates. An optional email to moderators expressing the concern plus one personal flag is the appropriate response there, imo.
Then, to be straightforward about it, you have zero problem with people who have large Twitter followings controlling the front page of the site, because that's what you'd get if Twitter canvassing wasn't heavily penalized.
No, but I'd rather have sophisticated vote ring detection instead of mods having to police the verbiage used in a social media post on another platform. Or having to worry myself about being too excited about my product's launch.
The policing of verbiage is so hard. If I posted the exact same thing to my followers that some paid influencer did, the effect would me markedly different. I would likely get 0-2 votes from my post, because I have real world friends as followers few of whom have accounts here. My point is that the same words used by different people can have very different implied meaning and outcomes.
It just doesn't make sense to me to judge a post on the words used(1) instead of looking at the voting patterns. For example, what if someone not involved with the project just loves it and spontaneously posts about it? Should the project creators be punished for that independent act? I'd say, yes, but only if it looks like a vote ring.
(1) You could make an exception for blatant vote begging, but even that would be caught by a good vote ring algorithm.
Part of the problem is the mindset that you're being "punished" when a story about your project is kept off the front page.
In any case, you have to look at the whole thing as a system. If you allow people to point to their HN submissions on Twitter, the site will be unduly influenced by Twitter, rather than by the community that actually uses and contributes to the site. It's not a matter of intention --- I'm annoyed too that I can't casually link to things from Twitter! --- but of empirical fact.
I disagree with this interpretation because there is zero reason to draw attention to an HN submission as it is being posted unless you have an ulterior motive. Especially with people who try to advertise using the /newest trick (which doesn’t work) and remove plausible deniability in the process.
If it hits #1 on the front page after a bit of time, sure, humblebrag away on Twitter.
Another HN tool moderators use that isn't mentioned in the post is the second-chance pool, where moderators will rescue a post which did not receive many upvotes and give it placement on the front page for a bit of time.
> We thought you might like to know that we put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14522178
in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page sometime in the next 24 hours.
> This is part of an experiment in giving good HN submissions multiple chances at the front page. If you're curious, you can read about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and other links there. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Tell us and we won't do it again.
Where is this documented? Not trying to be snippy - I have no idea what powers the moderators have in this realm. Maybe HN could benefit from some lobste.rs-esque moderation transparency.
Even though HN is a community, the front page is essentially the mods' personal judgment. They are the editors, and HN is a newspaper.
I like it this way. They have excellent taste. The community has repeatedly proven it cannot be trusted to upvote intellectually gratifying content. pg's original HN code contained a flag for "rally", meaning the story is a rallying cry, and is therefore penalized because it's so easy to mindlessly upvote it.
The results speak for themselves: HN is now almost a top-1000 site by traffic.
They had to be phenomenal. I don't think many people appreciate just how difficult this was to pull off, or how much they work their asses off every single day. If they ignored HN for even a week, it would deteriorate noticeably.
Yet technology is at least as important. The fact that our upvotes do matter makes the situation unique -- although the mods can determine the relative weights of stories, we can still push a story upwards if enough of us are interested, and the story fits the site's original goal of gratifying intellectual curiosity.
There is no company anywhere in the world like this. At this point, HN practically defines our culture. When news stories say things like "so-and-so story about <technology> has been making the rounds on social media," at least some of them are talking about HN now. And your coworkers probably hear about the tech they use at least partly from HN.
The sole reason they're in this position is because they deserve to be. I hope they stay selective. As to being secretive, we should let them choose. If they want to reveal, fine. If not, fine. They've earned it. Even still, they've been remarkably transparent.
HN's cool but it's just one forum among a million others. The moderation is good though sometimes arbitrary. That's a lot easier for users to accept when they know why they are getting positively/negatively moderated, which is a good reason for more openness. But at the end of the day it's a forum, the moderators have the final say, that's the contract you agree to in using it.
If Dan and Scott were kings, they would be fucking epic. Best monarchs ever. It's hard to think of anyone who cares more about fairness, but clever enough to decide for themselves. And they're usually right. I think I can count on one hand the number of mistakes they've made that even remotely mattered. And from a strategic standpoint, that number is effectively zero.
There are probably a bunch of people behind the scenes, and they deserve lots of credit too. But there is something incredible about being able to post a dozen moderation comments every day for years without ever being so mistaken as to provoke community backlash. It would be really easy for them to offer an offhand opinion, or just make a bad call, and suddenly have people up in arms about it.
They're also some of the most humble people. Both of them have done some really amazing work and have cool hobbies. But I've sort of had to pry that info out of them over years.
https://github.com/sctb/lumen - Scott's project. A self-hosted Lisp that compiles and runs in both JS and Lua. The whole codebase recompiles in about one second flat when using LuaJIT.
But like, that's maybe 5% of the cool stuff they've done. There's just no outward sign -- they don't bother with blog posts or any kind of self-promotion.
I'd rate Dan and Scott highly as rulers, and I've been banned before.
I have some qualms about some systematic things, but it's a broad philosophical dispute and not the running of HN. In governance - there is no way to 'win' anyway.
I wish every leader had to be a forum moderator of very different groups of people, but we seem to select for whatever the opposite of that is no matter the political predilection.
If you don't like the way this site is edited, stand up an m1.large, hook Rails up to an sqlite database, and build your own. You'll be two generations of technology ahead of HN.
The freedom to take other people's private belongings and repurpose them to your own ends is no real kind of freedom at all. But that's ultimately what you're yearning for when you allude to the Empire of Napoleon.
Lamernews seems like just another HN clone, but back when it was launched it was a serious attempt at being a competitor. They probably came closest to pulling away a significant chunk of HN. I started to use it.
Then I ran into missing features. Little quality of life stuff. I forget what they were, but the whole site felt noticeably harder to use. So I stopped using it.
It's so tempting to think "HN is so simple. Just throw Rails at the problem and you can wipe the floor with them." But Lamernews was 2,964 lines of Ruby, and only managed to contain about 60% of the features. news.arc is 2,616 lines. And I don't care what anybody says: if you sat down and forced yourself to read that code for a week straight, you'd find it is actually quite readable. It's terse because it's for getting shit done.
I'm not saying you'll be as successful as HN. Lobste.rs, which is run carefully by thoughtful people using software which is probably better than HN's, is much less successful. But that's the point.
You said you'd be two generations of tech ahead of HN. I know it was tongue in cheek, and I'm not calling you out. I'm nerding out about how much functionality pg managed to pack into so few lines of code.
And it all worked! No data loss, no massive security problem, and the last time HN was down for >24h was because pg manually edited the database and accidentally created a circular comment chain.
One way to look at the situation is that pg's original vision for arc failed. Arc was supposed to be what Clojure turned out to be. But even though HN alone is the one significant Arc project, what a project! The world was made materially better thanks to it. And I don't think they could've pulled off HN in some other language. There was too much work for one person to do to be distracted by the thousands of details a modern webdev needs to stay on top of.
I think it's possible to do the same thing for modern webdev. Arc's goal was to be a reliable foundation for building webapps. It comes with a user+admin system out of the box, for example. Every Arc app does.
I've been playing around with hooking up AngularJS to it, because unlike React or Angular, AngularJS can operate purely in HTML. You normally never want to do that -- usually you want to set up controllers and such. But when you control the language, you end up being able to give it the Babel treatment: the output looks complex, but you get all the features of a modern frontend site. Initial experiments were quite promising.
And from there, it's easy to just emit JSX instead. React? Angular? Sure, whatever. It's treated as compiler output.
(Indirect sourcemaps are funny... JSX compiles to minified JS, whose sourcemap points back to the JSX. But if Arc spits out JSX, you'll want a sourcemap from JSX -> Arc as well. It's sourcemaps all the way down.)
You can call me out any time you'd like. I think an actual database backend for this site is only a couple years old. Or do we actually have one yet? I know the API has one, but HN doesn't run the API. It's possible this thing is still relying on flat files.
Direct answer: no, probably no database. HN forwards info to Firebase which provides an API. But assuming Arc is still running on Racket, there aren't a lot of options for database bindings (https://docs.racket-lang.org/continue/) and flat files work well enough.
EDIT: Actually, you may be right. They already forward data to Firebase, which means they could just store the data in Firebase directly. Firebase is pretty great, so it's possible they did this.
One bit of supporting evidence: there seems to be no startup time. Loading GBs of data from disk takes a little while, so restarting HN would be painful. We'd notice it as ~30 seconds of downtime. Especially now that HN has grown so large. I haven't noticed this in a couple years (but I'm not omnipresent).
So it could go either way, and there are a lot of advantages to the Firebase approach.
I guess I take back everything I said. But only because a lightweight alternative exists, not because flat files are inherently bad.
Flat files FTW. Proof that a simple solution can scale. And not just in a "Why the fuck would you subject yourself to this torture?" kind of way, but in a "This actually simplifies everything" way. It's why Arc was so fucking fast: remember how impactful memcached was? Arc had that from day one.
Here's how it works. Everything is loaded into memory at startup. You can think of it like a bigass JSON tree. Anytime you change the tree, write the whole thing out to disk. Since all the data is loaded from file "foo", and you write out to "foo.tmp" followed by `mv foo.tmp foo`, there is no risk of data loss, ever.
So what about sharding? Well, yeah, that's a problem. But it's not a problem that HN had to deal with. You can see how effective it was to throw a single 64GB RAM monster at the problem rather than a cluster of servers. The moment they hooked up Cloudflare to HN, they got all the same benefits a big cluster would provide anyway.
People can be prejudiced against this simplicity all they want, but it's hard to argue with results. You don't even need to know SQL to start using it.
"But migrations --" well, Arc makes it super easy to define a "template", which is just a set of fields, and each field is whatever you want them to be.
(deftem item
id nil
type nil
by nil
ip nil
time (seconds)
url nil
title nil
text nil
votes nil ; elts each (time ip user type score)
score 0
sockvotes 0
flags nil
dead nil
deleted nil
parts nil
parent nil
kids nil
keys nil)
So yes, theoretically if you wanted to rename "kids" to "children", you're gonna have to process all the old data. But 1. then don't do that, and 2. even still, it's not hard to do that anyway.
It's sort of similar to mongoose record definitions.
But look, HN is proof positive that this system can work and can scale to a top-1000 website. 99% of webapps won't even come close to those performance requirements. And when you do approach them, you can find ways to make it scale.
My main focus has been updating Arc to run on JS, and to add keyword arguments. That way you'll be able to use the whole JS ecosystem too.
>"But migrations --" well, Arc makes it super easy to define a "template", which is just a set of fields, and each field is whatever you want them to be.
That's... just a struct or a map in any other language. Convenient but not necessarily a point in Arc's favor per se.
>So yes, theoretically if you wanted to rename "kids" to "children", you're gonna have to process all the old data. But 1. then don't do that, and 2. even still, it's not hard to do that anyway.
It's still an argument against using flat-files. Updating a site with a proper database isn't typically tied to disk read/write speeds - at best renaming "kids" to "children" means changing a field in a model and maybe a template - and that's a fixed amount of work regardless of the number of records you have.
>My main focus has been updating Arc to run on JS, and to add keyword arguments. That way you'll be able to use the whole JS ecosystem too.
You mean Node/NPM on the backend? That might be interesting. I'm not familiar enough with Arc to know (I've only played with Anarki a bit, but I have too many random projects on my plate as it is) but does it even have dependency management?
When you get the design right, there's no need to change it. :)
Jokes aside, I refuse to let Arc die. There were genuinely good ideas embedded in it, amidst the rough edges. People just never forced themselves to use it. It's like if Vim was invented but had no documentation, so no one ever realized it's powerful if you embrace it.
But yeah, I imagine my version will have a different name and a shiny website. Being a decade out of date does matter, especially for hiring purposes.
Ah, yeah. (It's odd that Arc went closed-source but kept improving. It's maybe one of the most important custom languages in the industry, relative to HN's impact on the world.)
>I think it's possible to do the same thing for modern webdev. Arc's goal was to be a reliable foundation for building webapps. It comes with a user+admin system out of the box, for example. Every Arc app does.
Forums written in other languages do as well - and any decent framework can just include user management as a dependency. To me it doesn't seem like an unqualified good idea for Arc to bake all of that into the language or the default app.
Bam, you get CRUD for free, you get special superpowers if you're logged in as an admin, and you can put in access controls so that other people can log in as other types of users and see a subset of the data. I dunno, it's pretty great. You even get a REPL at /repl in case you need to hop on and run some code on production. (If something seems amiss, rather than bother with grepping logfiles, you'd head to /repl and start asking questions about the current state of the app. This tends to be a lot faster.)
Depends on what you consider successful. If the metric is raw numbers and impressions, HN is definitely the winner. If the metric is signal-to-noise for technical content, Lobsters is probably ahead. If the metric is user count, HN wins. If the metric is moderation transparency, Lobsters wins.
I spent some time on Lobsters and found the signal/noise content for technical stuff only marginally better than that of HN, and many of the same pathologies were evident, just at a lower volume (because the site sees overall a much lower volume of comments). Moreover, while the variance on technical badness on Lobsters is marginally lower, so is the variance on technical excellence. That, too, is a straightforward consequence of lower volume: the original authors of important software packages are more likely to comment on HN than on Lobsters.
I like Lobsters a lot, and I like a lot about what they do differently than HN, but we shouldn't pretend that it's something it isn't.
I'm not complaining. HN is about the best of what we've got. My Napoleon reference was the slobbering nature of the comment, which is so pro-moderation as to lose objectivity.
Something I find frustrating in discussions like this is a tendency for expressions of gratitude or appreciation to often be dismissed as uncritical, as if the only meaningful act of criticism is that of finding faults or flaws. In such an environment it can be very difficult to express reasons why someone likes something or finds benefit in a way that others read as something other than fawning: particularly when you know that's how it's going to be read.
There are reasons people continue to frequent HN as a news aggregator and comment on the site: it has some uses and benefits to them. 'sillysaurus3 does list a number of reasons supporting their position. If they're expressing a bit more joy and appreciation for your taste, dismissing that as "slobbering" seems quite harsh and unnecessary. Phrasing it as "pro-moderation" in an arguably pejorative manner likewise derails. A quality site, one I find personally valuable, requires moderation. If I'm in favor of a particular site and value its moderation efforts, I'm going to be "pro-moderation". If I actually find it valuable, enjoyable, and a benefit, I'm going to be appreciative, and maybe at times effusive. Have I lost objectivity in such a case? I'd like to think we're more human than that.
I think HN is factoring in that transparency can also be a weakness too.
When google released its page-rank algorithm it became a target for manipulation and entire forums got wrecked (until nofollow) with the wave of consequences it created.
I think the threat of user manipulation will always outweigh that of mod manipulation. Worth considering.
There are layers to HN's transparency. Some policy is in the guidelines. Some policy is described in moderator comments, so if you want to keep up with it, you have to follow 'dang and 'sctb. Some policy is "public" but you'll only learn about it if you mail hn@yc and ask. Some policy won't be made public.
There's no master plan behind it all, but each of these ways of handling policy has a purpose. Describing evolving policy in comments allows the moderators to be responsive and flexible without overrunning the site with metadiscussion like they would if every new decision they made was accompanied by a formal change in the guidelines. Relating policy in email discussion gives them a chance to explain it in context and to take feedback from the people most impacted or interested in that policy --- we all know votes on this site wouldn't generate that set of users.
The stuff they don't make public is generally stuff we don't want made public. We forget that there are just a couple (I think literally) people running this site, and they're up against waves of people trying to create schemes to sell front page rank to spammers. They've got a sort of equilibrium that gives them a chance --- something Reddit seems to be failing at despite a much large team --- while still having the time to type out individualized contextualized explanations for all their routine moderating actions on threads (seriously, mods, figure out TextExpander or build something like it into your moderating tools).
I assumed they didn't want transparency as, eg, showing the stories HN self-promotes would be deleterious to that promotion.
It strikes me it's always worth holding that this is a subdomain of YCombinator and presumably is used to further that corporation, its controllers ideals, and its associates interests over others who might seek influence here.
The mods mentioned it a few times when they started doing it ("In case you wonder why this suddenly has a different timestamp/was resubmitted, ..."). AFAIR there have been variants, e. g. asking people to resubmit vs resetting the timestamp on an existing submission. It seems intentional that individual moderation tools are explained occasionally, but there is no up-to-date list of all of them.
It feels like they should have some kind of place where they lay out all of their powers, no? Mentioning it in a few threads or comments scattered across the site isn't exactly a useful way to disseminate this sort of information.
Maybe? I'm honestly not convinced it would change much. In the end a list of things mods could do will always be close to "we can adjust everything and ban everyone, trust us that we'll use it responsibly".
There are things (e.g. changed titles) were I wish their specific action would be visible to avoid confusion (they often leave comments, but not always and they are easy to miss). That'd be more useful than a list entry somewhere "mods can change submission titles".
People often don't seem to know about flags and vouch, these tools for users could be better explained somewhere. (Not that it will stop those crying "moderators censoring $thing!" every time a controversial topic is flagged)
I never gave thought to the moderator position till this analysis.
I wonder if it is a full time job. Do other sites have full time moderators?
Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past.
To compare and contrast, if you are a construction worker making residential housing, you and see its effect on people and humanity. Year after year and perhaps decade after decade you can drive by and know your work helped a family. Yet the effort of a moderator goes away within hours and is hard (for me) to see the long lasting value.
This write up helped me think about a topic i never thought of before. Thanks
(HN moderators: i know u make this site a good read. Thanks)
Moderators are needed, of course and im glad i am not one. But i can only imagine how much of a burn out job with little satisfaction it must be. Like data entry jobs in the past.
I'm one of the moderators over on reddit.com/r/AskEngineers.
It is work... that I don't get paid for. Or any kind of reward, really.
But I'm doing it because I want to promote high-quality discussion on various engineering topics. I'm glad when we can help each other out by answering questions.
To be a moderator, ideally you're in it for the long term, by trying to guide your community in a good direction, educate people, uphold standards of good and civil discussion.
There's only 65K subscribers, so it isn't a huge sub compared to others. And /r/AskEngineers is a pretty well-behaved bunch for the most part, so it isn't too hard.
I'm usually checking the new queue and moderation queue a couple times per day.
It's good to have multiple active moderators, who are in different timezones to provide better 24/7 coverage.
I was actually going to build a tool that scrapes HN every couple minutes and looks for stories that were hot (on the front page) and then drops by 20+ slots. I've happened to be involved in a couple threads where this inexplicably happened, and I was unhappy to see the discussion being muted (people previously involved continued commenting, but no new people saw/joined the thread). I was going to show the buried posts on a site called toohotforhn.com, so that people could go to find the discussions that they might have otherwise missed. These days, much of it is around silicon valley and the treatment of women/minorities, but it could also include stories that are negative on YC companies that get buried (inadvertently, perhaps) as well.
Others have pointed out that if you want more discussion on X, you can go find it elsewhere. The point is that I want to see what HNers think about X — which is why I think a tool like this would be useful.
Btw since you brought up the point, we moderate stories less, not more, when they're about YC or YC-funded companies. That's literally the first rule of HN moderation:
That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all, since the internet would drive a truck through a cheap ploy like that. But we do err on that side, since keeping the good faith of the community is more important than any particular story.
Checking /active makes sense, but once the rank for a story plummets, there's essentially a cap on comment activity. New people don't get brought in, and over time the existing commenters dwindle. So I'm not sure that would quite accomplish what I'm looking for.
Regarding YC companies, I totally understand and trust that you and other moderators are not killing negative stories on YC companies. But I've noticed that sometimes these stories just disappear, and I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact that YC founders likely have high karma and are likely friends with other users with high karma. This is why I used the word "inadvertently" in my description of this — I truly think it may just be an artifact of how the algorithms interact and the fact that YC founders may end up having more clout than the average commenter. Basically, I don't know what powers are unlocked at different levels (I know new users can't downvote comments, for example), and I wonder if high-karma users have powers that I (~2700) do not have. And even if they don't have explicit powers, does their downvoting or flagging have a much bigger impact on whether comments or stories are killed?
Thanks for weighing in. You and the other folks who handle hn@ emails have always been prompt when I emailed with questions.
Higher karma doesn't unlock any powers after the downvote threshold (500).
If you have concerns about any specific stories I'd be happy to take a look. It's best to email hn@ycombinator.com because we don't see most comments that get posted here.
Is there an index of these different views? Today I learned about two more of these seemingly-undocumented URLs. Another being Favorites (which are apparently public): https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=dang
I'm going to reach out to the OP and see if he'd like to collaborate on it, to basically just put a good front-end on the analytics he's already pulling. Fingers crossed — hope to have a Show HN for y'all sometime soon!
The harsh and angry negativity of some comments in this thread is difficult to understand. As others have pointed out, and as should go without saying, this is a private site with whichever ruleset its owners choose to impose, take it or leave it.
And besides, the mods are making a tremendous job of it. I wildly disagree with lots of their decisions, and probably with great part of their general outlook on life, but I really can't fault their taste or professionalism, so thank you, guys.
The one cowardly thing going on here is the doing of users, not of moderators: The sad and unworthy tendency of some to downvote comments to oblivion purely for opinions expressed. Now that is a kind of grassroots censorship which we could do without.
>"The harsh and angry negativity of some comments in this thread is difficult to understand. As others have pointed out, and as should go without saying, this is a private site with whichever ruleset its owners choose to impose, take it or leave it."
I find this comment difficult to understand. The success and value of a site like HN largely depends on a community who submits stories and engages in discussion about those stories.
Stating "This is a private site" and "take it or leave it" is not only unnecessarily dismissive but its a false dichotomy. Liking something and wanting to see it improve are not mutually exclusive.
You might disagree with them, but were they violating the guidelines? Rules should not be selectively enforced, and made-up rules should definitely not be enforced.
The website that publishes my stats (https://hn.0x2237.club) is getting smashed. This is largely because collecting stats is expensive and I devote most of the CPU time to that. Rest assured, stats are still being gathered, and you should be able to browse them when it cools down a bit. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Interpersonal drama gets flagged off the site routinely. You see the same thing happen when a "story" is really an extrapolation of one person's tweet. I remember flagging that post myself.
Article doesn’t mention what I believe is one mod tool: shadow banning accounts based on IP. I had a bunch of accounts get shadowbanned for no evident reason and after a while I deduced it was based on using the account from a particular cafe’s WiFi. I just created this account and if I go use it from that place I will be banned again by some automated process.
I spend enough time slacking off with just one account. I can't imagine getting anything done at all with two or three.
Perhaps that is done to avoid the rate limiter?
I can usually only make five posts in one 8-hour span, and then the sixth attempt says, "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. Also, don't count the number of posts tptacek can make in one thread in one hour and compare it to your total for the entire week, or it might raise your blood pressure."
I am barred from having more than half a conversation in one day, while it seems that [some] others can post as often as they can hit "[reply]". So yes, I do feel censored on HN. The article didn't even mention the post-rate limits.
I've seen threads where he and his possey made up 50% of the comments, controlling the narrative and rallying their forces to down vote flag those who had the tenacity to disagree with them.
Also since you mentioned a particular user your comment will be removed. Funny how that works.
I'm glad to see parent comment back from [dead], because I have also noticed it. That's why I mentioned that particular account in the first place. You can search in this very thread to see (as of now) 27 posts by that account, one admitting to robot-assisted vigilantism against certain types of users--namely racists, misogynists, and homophobes. One of the other matches mentions that he can occasionally be quite mean.
I can recall at least one instance where he replied to me directly, and I wanted to engage, but couldn't, because I was "posting too fast".
It's the network neutrality issue writ small. Some people have fast lanes on this site, and others have slow lanes. I don't like it here, and it annoys me when I notice it. If it becomes the status quo for the whole network, you can be sure that I will be engaging in "shovel vigilantism" in the dark of some nights. Freedoms of speech and publication are no longer supportive of liberty and equality when certain favored people are allocated 10000 times as much speech as most other people are usually allowed, and drown out all other voices with their sheer volume rather than the merit of their claims.
Well only one at a time. Then as each gets banned I make another one. Note that they get banned if I just visit HN from the IP in question no posting required.
You’re not really comprehending what I am saying. If I create an account, never post or comment, and just browse HN from the IP in question, that account will be banned. It has nothing to do with behavior.
If you're concerned about a specific IP, and haven't been abusing HN, it should be easy to clear up by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. And even if you have been abusing HN, we're always happy to unban people (and/or their IPs) if they give us reason to believe that they've taken https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to heart and will follow the rules in the future.
This is not accurate based on my testing. If I browse to HN while logged in to my account from the affected network, that account can never post properly again.
At this point, three people, including a mod, have suggested you contact the mods via email to investigate further and get to the bottom of your particular situation. Have you done so? If not, that does seem to be the most constructive way forward.
The article is about bringing transparency to HN operations. To allow what I believe to be a factually inaccurate statement by one of the operators just stand as the last word is against the spirit of the discussion.
Okay. For the sake of discussion, what would satisfy you in terms of transparency? Perhaps I'm misreading you, and please do correct me if I am, but it seems you've arrived at a conclusion of bad faith on the part of mods. What would move the conversation productively forward?
Edit to add: Without more details from you, I can imagine the mods being hamstrung with respect to figuring out or explaining what's going with what you're observing. Likewise, there's nothing preventing you from continuing your comments here while also emailing them. Particularly as it seems you'd like to continue to participate on HN. I can imagine you'd prefer to do so without the hassle you're currently experiencing.
Another shadowbanned user here. Used to be an occasional poster, made posts if I had something meaningful to add.
At some point I noticed that I never got replies, but didn't think much of it, continued posting. Then, one day I looked at my profile while I was logged out, and surprise - the the posts for the last few months are no longer there.
Like OP, I went through a few accounts. They worked for a bit, and then responses dropped off. Eventually, I realized that apparently, my new apartment's IP is toxic.
Not sure who a shadow ban is supposed to punish since any spam bot can check just as trivially of they're banned. On the other hand, legitimate users have no idea keep wasting their time submitting their comments to /dev/null.
By now I have given up on trying to comment on HN. I can use my time on better things.
Ironic that a the site like HN can't get a proper quoting markup, can't fix the pre-block scroll, took forever to add support for mobile and comment collapsing, and used blanket IP bans...
I mention it because the article says shadowbanning is rare. It’s not that rare if they’ve got some kind of stored procedure that just goes around doing it.
It would make no sense to ban an IP for only a single session. Shadowbanning can still be rare (for whatever value of rare) when an IP ban is persistent.
If you want to ban some IP, just serve 403 to that IP. Deleting all of the accounts of people who like to order toast and eggs in the morning at the same place is what makes no sense.
> Deleting all of the accounts of people who like to order toast and eggs in the morning at the same place is what makes no sense.
Shadowbans are reversible by users and can be appealed to the mods, assuming you notice it (which, by design, you're not supposed to.) This is supposed to ensure that only accounts which should be banned remained banned.
It's not perfect, but it does make sense - the only real options for banning are by IP and by account, so if you want to prevent a banned user from just making a new account, you have to ban the IP as well. Maybe someone was a troll and got that IP banned, maybe it appears on a blacklist (assuming HN checks that,) who knows? It's not random and arbitrary, though.
He said he registered them from Public Wifi. So anyone registering first account on HN from said cafee will be banned?
Why are you so surprised he might have multiple accounts? You really have one email account? How about work-related email? Company-facing related email? If anything, its actually good he has multiple accounts and stuff related to / from his company account he is posting from company, and private is private.
Actually I didn’t say that. The phenomenon in question has nothing to do with where the account was registered. The accounts get banned if I just browse to HN from that cafe. The first account that got banned that way was years old and had 5000+ karma. It took me a while to figure out that it was banned because you can still post and you can see your posts and vote and whatnot but nobody else can see your posts at all. It’s pretty evil.
No, I have 5, but I only have one HN account. Why would I need more?
I was thinking more that he might have been identified as being the same person posting from multiple accounts, and activating some kind of spam/abuse protection.
I have multiple email address for different purposes. I don't need multiple HN accounts for different purposes.
Others might but I can't think why off the top of my head. The only time I've seen an obvious alternate account is the throw-away accounts opened just to troll/spam the site.
One example would be is that you might work for a company and have their point of view expressed on HN all the time; meanwhile you want to have your own account personal one that regardless if you continue working for said company or not, you still continue to use. Sort of like TV anchors have their own private twitter hints and then they have their work ones too.
Each news outlet serves some purpose, that's why people bother to maintain it; so it has some degree of editorial policy (determined by the collective action of the editors).
I for one think that I am spending too much time here (relative to the stuff that I learn). (Lets see how long I can keep off site, after all this is adictive ;-)
I would appreciate it if someone would come up with a filter, HN on tech subjects only, and no politics and business stories - a mere title line is not enough to figure out the context (but they do that on purpose, to involve more people that way, don't they :-) actually I guess that would be easy to do with NLP tagging...
One thing that I dislike with both HN and reddit style moderation system is that the subject of the editorial action has no idea that he/she has been edited out. I think that actually gives the pleasant feeling of being in an insane asylum. Anybody can relate ti this sentiment?
A larger wordview beyond a group think bubble of SV is needed to represent the tech industry. A lack of transparency always ends up empowering people behind the scenes who then have to make casual judgements of entire swaths of people and opinion. This is bad both for moderators and discussion.
Fortunately its relatively easy to launch a site like HN. A problem is a solution waiting to happen. If there is competition and it affects HN they are not going to sit back, there will be more transparency. However good something is competition is essential to keep people on their toes, so there is a largish lacuna here for the health of the industry.
Having said that any popular site will have the exact same issues HN does, so if the point is merely to change decision makers by those jockeying for influence then its a pointless exercise of exaggerating issues to gain influence, ironically how most new products are launched on HN these days.
I've noticed that a lot of submissions have had their titles changed recently (past month or two). I wasn't aware that users were allowed to change their own titles - I was chalking this up to moderators "curating" articles.
How often do users change the titles of their submissions? There's no way to tell.
This a great analysis. I would love to see a public page displaying title changes so that I could click "request explanation" and the mods could offer an explanation for those every day based on reader interest.
Whatever is going on to achieve it, HN is a great online community, and so maybe that is due to the moderation. Sometimes I wonder if it might be in spite of the moderation, but who knows :)
the precipitous drop that happens to stories after their titles have been changed shows a very strong editorial bias going on. I think there is a general strategy of keeping highly controversial political topics off of HN.
The question is, when does this sort of censorship constitute an ideological crackdown in its own right.
What I personally dislike is the "spam filter". I sometimes hit it when participating in multiple threads and it says "You're submitting too fast, please slow down" - and it does not reset itself after sometimes over 8 hours.
That's a sign that your account is rate-limited. We rate limit accounts when they repeatedly get involved in flamewars or regularly break the site guidelines or post lots of low-quality (for HN) comments. It's a crude tool but one of the few we have to prevent such things from overrunning the site.
I took a quick look at your recent history and it seems fine, so I'll take the rate limit off. But to prevent it from kicking in again, please stick to civil, substantive comments that scrupulously follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I recall that we had to ask you many times in the past not to violate that, but hopefully it's all in the past now and things will be nice and guideliney going forward.
I always felt like there was something weird about rankings when it came to HN.
I recall submitting something that got around 7 upvotes in 30 minutes but it got dead and buried and never presented itself on the front page. The content wasn't edgy and it wasn't clickbait.
But a few days later I saw an unrelated post with 2 upvotes after 1 full hour and it was magically on the front page.
If a post with 2 upvotes after 1 hour can be on the front page but a post with 7 upvotes in 30 minutes is not, then surely there needs to be some type of manual intervention happening. Glad to see there's data showing this now and I'm not going crazy.
Interesting to see the ability to take away downvoting is not mentioned. After downvoting one person (who made multiple offensive contributions) in a single thread, I noticed later I could no longer downvote comments (but the downvote button still appeared). Ultimately, I think the secretive and subjective approach to moderation at Hacker News has resulted in a positive outcome, but it's still surprising to run into the limits on occasion.
I've had accounts banned for no apparent reason, or for laughable reasons that are not even in the poorly written guidelines.
Moderators also have been repeatedly caught about heavy handed moderation. They control the platform, they control the message, they do not allow meta discussion, why believe anything they say?
In my opinion, far more than moderation, HN is effected by who votes for the new articles. If you look at the "new" page then most stories never even get one upvote. Those who do go over there and upvote stories have far more power than those who only ever look at the front page. Sadly, it seems that there are too many stories on "new" for a person to sit there, read each one, and upvote, so the only real way to get a story on the front page is to get lucky or gang up with your friends.
And as mentioned, people will definitely use the flag feature to get rid of controversial articles they don't like. Anything about sexism will get flagged into oblivion, for example.
Plenty of people who are deeply concerned about sexism in this industry also flag those stories, because it only takes 2-3 misogynist trolls to create a 300-comment shitshow out of them. There are still kinds of threads that this site simply can't do well, and it's better we not pretend we can until the guidelines and mod tools evolve to actually make them work here.
If we're killing off stories because of the behavior of trolls who don't like them, that seems like a victory for the trolls. Maybe it's the trolls who are the problem, rather than the targets of their misbehavior.
A basic problem in liberal (as in laissez-faire) politics is conflict aversion; victims of bullying are frequently treated worse than their antagonists, because it's less work. That creates perverse incentives, to put it mildly.
It is in a sense a victory for the trolls (or, if you want to put it as charitably as you possibly can, a strategic retreat). With the moderation system we have now, it's the best outcome we're going to get.
What I won't sign onto is an endless series of septic threads maintained just to illustrate how inadequate the moderating response to this problem is.
And, to underline, we have a lot more than 2-3 misogynist trolls in these parts. Reflexive rich-white-dude defensiveness is perhaps HN's greatest challenge.
Hopefully they are just trolls, trolls just post comments that are inflammatory to get people riled up, not because they actually mean what they post. If they actually are misogynistic and think they their contributions are reasonable and welcome, that's a different problem.
I think that dang was simply reacting to "Any user name with the word Kek in it is a troll." Kek is a word used almost solely by extreme right, sexist, racist trolls (in that order, more likely to be extremely sexist than racist).
Gotcha. For the record, "kek" is a term that has been appropriated by trolls, but is not in and of itself a troll term. In the future, you should think twice about banning someone on that merit. The links you gave are better evidence, though, thanks!
The links are a little snarky, not terribly helpful, but not especially out there. If you're banning that then banning those making racist remarks like up-thread seems right.
dang, there is no way to tell who the mods are. So those "requests" to change behavior aren't exactly clear that they are from the mods. And non-mods have certainly asked me to change my behavior in the past, and sometimes I have taken their advice and sometimes I have decided not to.
It's true, yet I don't feel we should change that, e.g. by putting "mod" beside our names. There's a downside to that sort of thing too, and for HN, I think it's the greater downside.
I'd rather trust the community to figure things out, which it does extraordinarily well.
> white men are all racist and sexist and are priveleged
We are; living in a racist and sexist society leaves its imprint and even the best-intentioned of us have racist and sexist baggage that we need to consciously and continually fight against. I'm sorry that that upsets you so. It exists, and it is real, and it is true, and that it upsets you does not change that it exists, and that it is real, and that it is true.
But for real: it's not that white men "can't comment." It's that white men have a listening problem in aggregate and that perhaps people who are not white men have perspectives that are deserving of being heard. Even if it means that you--and I--should give up our precious, precious megaphones for a sec.
Accepting and working on being mindful and decent does require effort. And it does mean that the "Kek de MAGA"s (how very subtle) of the world won't cheer you on. Somehow, though, those of us who give it an honest try seem to do alright without them.
No, it doesn't. I've been doing it for something close to a decade now --- and, in fact, now have it pretty close to automated. I programmatically follow the people who write the worst racist and misogynistic and homophobic crap on this site. This is a problem I've studied, and one I think you know I've spent real, measurable, expensive time on here. I don't think you can dismiss what I'm saying so easily.
Individual flagging does not work to recover toxic threads. Flags are too slow and too invisible. By the time the worst stuff gets knocked down, its authors --- almost all of whom have no meaningful reputation on this site --- have reached the win condition of having guided the thread into hellish nerd litigation in which even the reasonable people grappling with the issues are made to write comments that serve trollish ends.
Flagging is what we have, and I'll continue to do it just like you will. But it does not work. It is inadequate to the task. This problem requires sitewide intervention, and until that happens, it is a rational, reasonable, moral choice to flag this stuff off the site as a harm mitigation mechanism.
Well, I was thinking of different moderation policies rather than user-driven flagging of the kind you describe, so in that sense we agree.
My basic disagreement is that 'just ignore it' and 'don't do things that attract their attention' are not viable strategies for target populations, and it's unjust to systematically shift the burden of responsibility from persistent antagonists to their victims.
I'm interested in your programmatic approach, but let's talk about that offsite.
I would be interested in hearing about this, too, if you feel like cutting me in. I have a similar thing going as to 'tptacek, but I'm gonna bet that his is more refined.
I'd rather just follow other users. See HN as you see it. Piggyback off your good taste, curation.
A la the multireddit feature, if I could combine the page views & upvotes, and filter out the flags & downvotes, of you and everyone you recommend in your profile, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't see the trolls, flamewars.
I used to moderate forums. Major chore. The notion of just following people you like, trust would remove a lot of the moderator's make work.
> ... until the guidelines and mod tools evolve to actually make them work here.
I think the "until" is "until all readers of this site share a single sociological view on controversial issues and/or lose all interest in having their view heard." Asking your moderation tools to solve societal problems or prevent a discussion forum from reflecting a raging societal debate is trying to hide from the problem.
> it only takes 2-3 misogynist trolls to create a 300-comment shitshow
I get what you mean, but would argue that, "it only takes 2-3 trolls plus 300 people who respond to them to create a 300-comment shitshow". An ignored troll is a powerless troll. They get their power to disrupt from the responses, not their words.
> I get what you mean, but would argue that, "it only takes 2-3 trolls plus 300 people who respond to them to create a 300-comment shitshow". An ignored troll is a powerless troll. They get their power to disrupt from the responses, not their words.
I like this idea, but I don't think it's possible to get the shared agreement you discuss. I've never seen an online community where the hands-off, community-ignore method worked. Have you seen one?
I flag stories whose thrust that I agree with but that are leading to toxic conversation. To me, HN value is the stories that are posted as well as the discussion. When the discussion gets out of hand, that is a detriment to the site.
There’s a difference between a state actor controlling the whole of the public arena and a private individual controlling their own privately-sponsored forum; the latter allows you to crack open a blog and flog whatever opinion you want, and the former does not. I admit there’s some gray area for something like google, which by virtue of its size and role as intermediary has censorship abilities approaching governmental levels.
Freedom of Speech is a restriction on the government, not a duty on the part of private individuals to let you come in and piss on their living room carpet.
This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship. The law doesn't protect this kind of speech, which means they are legally permitted to participate in censorship, but it is censorship all the same. Yours is a common and poor argument for justifying this behavior. There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral. I would prefer to participate in a transparently moderated community where the rules are clearly defined and aren't selectively enforced. This makes for a better community.
They don't have a legal obligation to behave this way, but that needs to stop being used as an excuse to shut down discussions on how to make the community better.
This ends up being a debate about word choice, and I normally hate that. But there is good reason to distinguish the two carefully, and the easiest way to do that is word choice.
I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
>I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I would argue that this is definitely censorship. Just because you can go somewhere else doesn't mean you aren't being censored - you are being denied access to the HN audience. Somewhere else isn't going to have the same audience. And that audience isn't making the decision - a small number of moderators are. But you're right that this is just down to pedantic word choice, feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further.
>I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
I'm not here touting free speech like it's a legal right I have as a submitter and an obligation HN has as a publisher. Instead I'm touting it as a damn good idea that makes for a better medium for discussion and suggeting HN embraces it anyway.
> feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further
Think you're right. You completely ignored my point, so this is pointless. But the root issue is not different than, either through ignorance or deceptive calculation, claiming that copyright infringement is theft. It is a category error that negatively effects people's understanding of what's going on, so it matters.
> This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship
It's not about justifications, it's about prerogatives.
> There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral.
Despite what you seem to be implying, the operators of a privately run forum have no moral obligation to let anyone speak, regardless of how that might impact the quality of discussion in the community. It is totally fair for participants to criticize the moderation efforts, but just because the site is high profile doesn't mean that the moderators are any more morally obligated to permit comment than you are morally obligated to amend your fine article with my commentary.
You seem to believe that it is a moral obligation of anyone with an audience/platform to provide that platform to anyone that wants to use it...? Specifically, you described “depriving (someone of an) audience” as the immoral act.
Just to recontextualize that: if I have a blog, am I immoral for not allowing comments? Am I immoral for not allowing guest bloggers? Do I have a moral obligation to allow advertisement?
This is odd. A moral obligation to use one’s private resources to provide an audience to all comers isn’t free speech; it’s not even a free marketplace of ideas. It’s appropriating someone else’s communications infrastructure.
I think a blog is a different enough medium that it renders the comparison meaningless. Hacker News is a website that posts user submissions. I wouldn't make this argument about your blog, but I might make it about Medium.
But they’re not a site that posts user submissions. They’re a site that posts certain types of submissions: that’s what distinguishes them from reddit, 4chan, voat, etc.
A failure to maintain that identity would fundamentally change their offering and lose them their audience. You make it sound like a trivial expenditure of Nothing more than a little bandwidth.
And you haven’t meaningfully distinguished it from a blog. Blogs host comments; they host guest posts, and multiple authors. The degree to which they’re one voice or many depends on their individual structure - and none of that contradicts your core moral statement about the immoral act being not letting people have a free-for-all on your private platform. You make a distinction without rationale for why some private platforms are allowed to curate their offerings, and why others are /immoral/ for doing skz
>But they’re not a site that posts user submissions. They’re a site that posts certain types of submissions: that’s what distinguishes them from reddit, 4chan, voat, etc.
>A failure to maintain that identity would fundamentally change their offering and lose them their audience. You make it sound like a trivial expenditure of Nothing more than a little bandwidth.
They have rules and guidelines, and they set the overall topic by calling it Hacker News. Users do the rest by voting up stuff that they find relevant or interesting. This doesn't work everywhere, but it works here. I've seen it first hand by browsing my stats, posts that are off-topic don't make it far.
>And you haven’t meaningfully distinguished it from a blog. Blogs host comments; they host guest posts, and multiple authors.
Your blog is still curated. I can't make an account on your blog and post an article to it without being invited by you and presumably having you read and approve it. On HN, on the other hand, every submission is like this. If you make a "blog" where every article is submitted by users, then I'm going to give you the same speech.
All arguments are subjective so I'm not sure what that statement is supposed to convey except maybe "I am not concerned with the persuasiveness of my argument".
No, I would argue that it's different. CNN has a limited amount of time to fill and doesn't accept user submissions. HN has neither constraint, and gives users voting rights over some of the success of each post.
I think it's entirely valid for me to present my case and submit it for the consideration of the community and the moderators. I don't understand what you're getting at here, you're not making a very compelling argument for anything in particular.
In arguing that CNN's decision not to air your opinions in prime time is legitimate while HN's decision to be selective about what they'll provide a venue for isn't, you've accepted unquestioningly CNN's constraints while dismissing HN's.
In both cases, you're applying an enormous amount of subjectivity. But you'd prefer not to acknowledge that, and so have instead attempted to reframe the discussion as if your conclusions about CNN and HN are self-evidently objective. They are not.
I didn't think you had a point, it looked like you were asking contrived questions so you could antagonize him with his answers and "win" the argument, instead of just making your comment about subjectivity in the first place.
For what it’s worth: to the extent that you keep answering “but you refuse to apply your own logic to (any other medium, without reason as to why)”, I think a lot of people in this thread believe that -you’re- not debating in good faith. You can only handwave an argument away with “but different medium” so many times without explaining how a change in medium changes the relevant logic.
I think it's clear to everyone how the mediums are different. What's not clear is how subjective decisions CNN makes about what to air are acceptable, but subjective decisions HN makes about what to allow on the front page aren't.
What's especially weird about this argument is that the US media market is in fact in the middle of a giant debate about how acceptable CNN and Fox News's editorial decisions are. It's not like it's a reach to get from moderation to CNN's editorial decisions; it's a pretty obvious comparison.
Thank you, I understand where you're coming from now. Let me clarify.
The difference is because CNN makes a subjective editorial decision about what to air. Their content is curated and prepared by paid staff. The success of CNN is entirely built on the talent and hard work of these people. There's a whole side discussion about the ethical responsibilities of CNN we can have, but let's set that aside and just distinguish them from HN.
HN's success is built on its community. The overwhelming majority of submissions are user contributions - far less than 1 in 1000 HN posts are written by the mods, and they're generally meta posts. HN owes the success of its content to the community, and such I feel that they're morally obligated to treat that community with a certain level of respect. Part of that is everything I've argued for today - well-defined rules that are enforced equally and transparent moderation.
I'm not invested in CNN. I haven't participated in the formation or success of their "community", if you could even call it that. But I, and many others, have participated in the success of Hacker News by submitting articles, Show HNs, etc - and participating in discussions on the site. HN would be nothing without the community that participates in it, and frankly I think YCombinator's core business itself would be measurably worse off without HN.
Since the HN community is responsible for HN's success, I say we can call for transparent moderation.
I don't question your ability to call for it, but I don't think it's realistic to expect it. HN is built on a whole lot of user participation, but YC has also spent millions of actual dollars keeping it running, maintained, and moderated. It belongs to them, not to us.
Your recourse, if you don't like how they're managing it, is to start your own site, or to move to a different site. Indeed, if value on HN primarily comes from its users, as you say, it's hard to imagine a more powerful recourse to have.
Tangentially, I think HN's value to YC is hugely overblown. YC has been privately telling batch companies not to participate here for almost the whole time the site has existed. The fundamental key to YC's success is being first to fully commit to a market for small investments in marginal startups. It was an extremely good investment thesis, and it compounds dramatically every year as the value of the alumni network increases.
YC could kill off HN tomorrow and it is unlikely it would harm their returns at all. If you're not close to SFBA tech company investing it's easy to miss the extent to which YC is currently running the table on small startup investing, and none of that has anything to do with how HN is moderated.
> A lawsuit challenging the doctrine on First Amendment grounds, Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission , reached the Supreme Court in 1969. The Court ruled unanimously that while broadcasters have First Amendment speech rights, the fact that the spectrum is owned by the government and merely leased to broadcasters gives the FCC the right to regulate news content.
So are you suggesting that if I (the grandchild of Holocaust survivors) ran a link aggregator site, I would have a moral obligation to let self-declared Nazis who want to exterminate people of my ethnicity use it as a platform to speak about their hatred of people like me?
Or that a rape survivor has an obligation to allow someone to post on their site that there's no such thing as rape and every woman is "asking for it"?
No, and that's not what I'm asking of HN. I like communities that:
- Have well defined rules
- Enforce them equally
- Moderate transaprently
That's it. I'm not asking for an unfettered platform for free speech. If one of your rules is "no hateful posts targetting specific people or people groups", then it's a well justified decision to remove that post.
OK.... so if I enforce "no hateful posts targetting specific people or people groups", I have to ban the person who posts "the KKK are awful people and I think we should jail them" as I do someone who posts "people with dark skin are awful people and I think we should burn them"?
I'm somewhere between you and the parent. So much of the public square, figuratively speaking, is owned by private companies today. It's good to understand what the parameters are so you can know to what extent free expression and the free flow of ideas is occurring in a particular venue. Personally, I'm wary of just about any form of censorship, but I recognize it's a continuum, and not even I have my settings at 0.
I think this is a silly comparison. The HN curation isn't done to further some sort of agenda (at least, not at its surface or in some obvious fashion). It's to make sure we have higher quality content, not to sway the users' perspective in favor of some hidden cabal.
It isn't silly, it's an exact comparison to Newspeak, which is what the OP was doing. I mean, it's clear as day: the OP didn't even attempt to argue that censorship isn't happening. They just wanted to change the word describing it to make it feel less like oppression and more like helpfulness.
Don't get caught up in the comparison to a fascist regime. Plenty of left-wing socially conscious movements use this same tactic. I think everyone does this, usually unconsciously.
Is this definiton of censorship from Wikipedia incorrect then?
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions"
No. But a thing being "censorship" does not imply that it is bad, unless further context is considered. However, when censorship is a good thing, we usually give it a different name because "censorship" bears a negative connotation.
As a basic example, parents frequently censor their children, but we call that "childrearing". Managers censor their workers, but some of that is necessary to run a company.
That's not the point. They just don't want to think censorship is an accepted part of their daily lives because censorship often implies oppression. But censorship is part and parcel of almost every forum. The social values of the people who own the forum, as well as incentives behind their operating it, determine what kind of censorship is applied.
For example, on YouTube, hate speech [which I know isn't actually a thing] is commonplace - they don't feel the need (or perhaps don't have the resources) to censor comments which certain people find detestable. But they have created complex systems to analyze videos so that they can identify certain ones and remove them automatically. The end result is that censorship isn't applied uniformly. In one example, a YouTube account that was documenting videos of attacks on the people of Raqqa was flagged for spreading terrorist propaganda. You could make the argument that while the hate speech didn't impact their bottom line, the videos could, so they accept a certain amount of unequal and unintentional censorship in order to maintain their business position, defend their corporate values, and of course, retain their user base.
Moderation is a more nuanced and human approach to censorship. By giving people second chances, answering emails, giving the occasional explanation, etc they build social capital and prevent emotional backlash that could threaten the status of the forum. By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves, they can't be accused of unfair treatment. But they are indeed imposing specific social and political values on their users, to the point of hiding or removing the post or user when it doesn't align with their values. This shapes not only the quality of the dialogue, but its content. This is the essence of censorship.
To severely paraphrase 1984: "To control speech you control language, as controlling language controls thought."
"By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves"
Could you elaborate a bit more on this part? I find your post quite insightful and well thought out as a whole (though my sarcasm detectors may be a bit off especially when it comes to the above sentence), but in any case, I'm not sure why you wrote "that's not the point" when everything you say seems to support exactly that point.
If you think of moderation as a tool to shape the flow of discussion in a certain pre-approved way (without, say "malicious" intent, though that can always become debatable from someone's point of view), when does moderation become censorship, or more specifically - at which point are the users allowed to think that the moderation actually became censorship? I mean, who sets the criteria? The moderator?
I was trying to convey that they weren't disagreeing with you about it being censorship, they were disagreeing of whether it was wrong or not depending on context. My reply was probably a bit disjointed.
A moderator is supposed to be an arbitrator or mediator. Moderation becomes censorship when they start enforcing policies to get users to align with their values rather than simply bringing people to an accord. Users are allowed to think it's censorship once they lose their value or become a liability.
> Users are allowed to think it's censorship once they lose their value or become a liability.
To someone who happened to live under a de facto Soviet occupation (not de jure, after all it was just a "requested friendly intervention with the noble intent of suppressing the rising nation-wide anti-people criminal elements, that just kind of somehow happened to last for a few decades"), this kind of wording (and the associated themes) sound indeed very familiar.
But it's interesting to see how many HN users don't see this as troubling at all, at least judging by the dozen (-s?) of downvotes that my original comment earned me since posting, not even mentioning how quickly other people that somehow dared to draw a parallel between censorship and the other, friendly kind of censorship got quickly downvoted into white five minutes from posting.
There's a practical difference between optimizing for content quality with honest and well-known criteria. And, optimization to prevent people to subject the party-line to criticism.
Unless you have examples where it has been the case, that's an unfair comparison.
> There's a practical difference between optimizing for content quality with honest and well-known criteria. And, optimization to prevent people to subject the party-line to criticism.
Well, yes. I really appreciate what dang & the rest of the moderators do in order to remove spam & optimise for quality — yet at the same time I really dislike a large number of the instances I've seen where they've exercised control to protect the party line from criticism (e.g. detaching subthreads or posting 'please don't argue X; we don't accept that here'). My perception (which of course is subjective, subject to confirmation bias & could be wrong) is that the vast majority of those instances I've seen have been egregiously wrong.
I've noticed fewer instances recently, perhaps because the moderators have been silently moderating or perhaps because they've actually refrained from exercising so heavy a hand.
Like I said, I approve of the good they do with respect to quality, but I actively disapprove of the censorship they have committed. Instances of the former greatly outweigh instances of the latter, but one instance of censorship is too many (it is, of course, Y Combinator's site to do with as they will).
There are two other features not listed: submission throttling for comments (which I suspect mods have some influence on) and slow banning (making the site slow for flagged users).
For a different approach to moderation, check out Lobsters.
Many of us seek to avoid controversy by hiding in technical details. These controversies are mind numbing because all answers are blatantly obvious and there is nothing to compute; merely humans being awful humans.
Moderators should in no way be able to bury posts or even nudge them downwards. This is a cowardly way to try to control discussion. If it isn't explicitly against the site rules, let the readers decide.
As user base grows, all platforms suffer from mean reversion or "Eternal September" where quality of the content reverses towards low quality issues. If you want to keep up the quality you need editorial staff. Call them curators, editors or moderators if you want.
What I would like to happen is HN editing being transparent. Show buried or nudged content differently so that those who submit can adapt.
This site doesn’t seem to have many mods, and they seem pretty desperate to me. I think a lot of the objectionable behavior on their part is desperate, not deliberate, such as throttling. They dont have the time to be editors or curators, and this is a site full of people who know how trivial it is to bypass moderation.
"Popular things go to the top" is a pretty good first approximation of the algorithm. You have things getting flagged to death for generating bad conversation/flamewars (kinda like parents telling kids to stop playing rough since people are getting hurt). There's the hiring posts. At least to me, it's always felt like moderation is happening at the margins.
Votes are a powerful signal here because they're the easiest signal to automate. That leads people to believe their HN votes are more sacred than they are. There has never been a point in the history of the site where it's ever been unclear that the site is ultimately run by the mods.
People complaining now should find someone who's been on here for a long time and ask what it was like under Paul Graham. Hint: not better.
I've given the mods here some grief and I think there's a lot of room to improve, but Thomas is one hundred percent right here. Graham's I-don't-have-time-for-this moderation was a much, much worse thing for the community.
Purpose of HN is ultimately agitprop for YC. It makes sense that curation of posts occurs--this only confuses people that buy too much into the "hacker" ethos.
I wrote a longer comment, originally, but cut it back to the single sentence when I realized that by dignifying the argument I was only lending your tossed-off slur more credibility. HN is not moderated so as to be agitprop for YC. Nobody who's talked to Dan for more than a couple minutes, or watched this site discuss the SFBA tech industry, could believe that.
The difference between the site post-Dan and pre-Dan --- you know, the "old" HN vs. today --- is that you can repeatedly write unfounded accusations like that today and not have your account shadowbanned and all your comments rank-penalized, like they were when Paul Graham ran the site. We all accepted those arbitrary moderation decisions back then, when there was no pretense of fairness or equity in moderation. Now that we have it, we attack the people who spend their time assuring it by making preposterous comparisons to the "good old days".
Rank penalization is alive and well in the dang era, I assure you. It's variously applied to my entire account, and I was penalized so heavily at one point that I appeared below every gray comment. Lately, it seems to oscillate with no rhyme or reason.
> Yes, your account has a penalty that accounts get when they post too many low-quality comments--specifically ones that are uncivil and/or unsubstantive and/or tediously argumentative.
That's how it was explained to me, by Dan. He didn't stop the practice, and I'd contend he's probably doubled down on it.
I don't know why you're using my comment as a venue to litigate penalties applied to your account. The point here isn't "people like 'jsmthrowaway get penalized". They do. The point is "moderation is far more coherent and transparent now than it was in some supposed 'good old days'", when you could be shadowbanned simply for irritating Paul Graham.
And your point is wrong. You seemed to claim that in the dang era rank penalization is a thing of the past. You seem to claim that unsubstantive comments will no longer get you penalized. You are claiming that these decisions are more transparent and less arbitrary than under pg. All three are completely false, but you're just not subjected to them. I was not informed that I had been quietly penalized in any way until I noticed something was amiss, because the fact that that facility even exists is not common knowledge. Sir_Cmpwn didn't even list it in his moderator tools.
The entire second paragraph of the comment to which I replied is wrong. Your followup (which ascribes motive to me, something I note you've gone after others for doing in this thread) is also wrong. I'm not litigating anything. I'm pointing out that you're wrong. You're also forgiven for not being aware of this, given your typical comment quality and status.
It's like you didn't read my comment and instead just decided to litigate further whether your penalties are legitimate. I'm the wrong person to have this conversation with, because --- just to be direct about this --- I do not care.
No. Again, I’m refuting your claims, which I repeated back to you, with personal experience and am attempting to do so civilly. If I misunderstood your claims, I’m not the only one; sibling points out the same point I’m making back to you. (You’re also not addressing that misunderstanding at all, if so, and are instead throwing malice around and assuming people aren’t reading even when they repeat the exact claims you seem to have made.)
I care much less than you do whether they’re “legitimate,” I assure you. You’re projecting not reading on me, to be perfectly honest. Why on earth would I litigate my account status with you, of all people? It’s amusing you think I need to be reminded that you’re the wrong person for that, because I already know that. To me, just to be direct about this, you represent among the worst of HN’s qualities as evidenced all over this thread.
You’re just wrong about HN changing. It hasn’t. Yeah, dang and sctb announce bans now. There’s more to it, and in my experience, many of those decisions are just as arbitrary as they were when pg ran this place.
Everything else is an uncivil sideshow you’re dragging me into. Endgame: you’ll remain you, I’m probably stacking up further penalization rising to it, and life will go on. How about sticking to the fact that you’re wrong instead of exploiting your status to be as uncivil as you are with no fear of the exact repercussions you claim have softened because you’re not exposed to them?
Comments are still rank-penalized and detached, so that's not exactly a thing of the past.
I am not arguing dang is doing a bad job--I'm arguing that their job is done with an eye more towards keeping a community in line with YC interests than promoting pure free-speech or hacker culture.
That includes things like killing off certain contentious posts, removing grossly off-topic material, and a lot of other frankly decent moderation.
Notice how subjective those descriptors are. It's been very clear in the past that moderator intervention is rampant for articles / posts that merely strike a raw nerve.
Yep, they are subjective. That's what I want. I want the HN mods to curate the content based on those guidelines. It's what makes this site worth coming to.
I'm willing a optimize for precision over recall here.
> "Yep, they are subjective. That's what I want. I want the HN mods to curate the content based on those guidelines. It's what makes this site worth coming to."
Agreed. If you try to make something more prescriptive then you end up with a massive increase in bureaucracy as you try to categorise every kind of content and every type of way of presenting that content. Effectively you turn moderators into lawyers and judges.
Oh, good to know. Guess we don't need any kind of logging system for that, we'll just take it at face value - I'm sure there are absolutely no other reasons that mods would downweight posts, so that's just great. /s
It's ridiculous that mods can hide my comments but I can't delete them. If a post is removed, I should have the anility to revoke my license to tue copy and have it removed. Would DMCA cover that?
>Consider appointing one or two moderators from the community, ideally people with less bias towards SV or startup culture
While I agree that this would be a great idea, it's laughable in that, as a service run by Y Combinator, it's always going to be for startup hucksters primarily and for the rest of the tech industry and Internet at large secondarily.
As for comment moderation, I think that HN is a community with the least amount of moderation i've seen. Which makes me really happy.
I have submitted only three or four things here, so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.