[HN Gopher] Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, upd...
___________________________________________________________________
Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real
time
Author : Robin89
Score : 488 points
Date : 2024-02-02 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| The first two links I clicked on were week old stories. I think
| you should filter the results by date posted.
| andrewsy wrote:
| i think it's just sorted in the wrong order
| a12k wrote:
| Looking at the list of removed stories makes me really happy with
| the moderators here. They're all sensationalist, advertising for
| some company, clickbait, way off topic, or some combination of
| above. In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel
| should not have been removed.
|
| Thanks, mods.
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| dang has been doing a fantastic job for years now. How big is
| his team? What kind of tools are they using? Would love to read
| a writeup sometime, but I guess there are good reasons to keep
| this secret.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-
| valley/th...
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Tldr the answer is "2". Not sure how posting a link where
| this info is buried is helpful.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Then downvote it, that's what the button is for! The
| other commenter said they were interested in a write up
| with more information than that one question. But hey,
| can't please everyone.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Tldr the answer is "2". Not sure how posting a link
| where this info is buried is helpful.
|
| The answer to OP's first question, but there was a second
| one:
|
| > How big is his team? What kind of tools are they using?
| dang wrote:
| sctb stopped working on HN in fall 2019, alas!
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Don't the vast majority of these get removed via flags from
| users?
|
| Edit: I'm not asking a rhetorical question. There are a lot of
| comments in this thread thanking "the mods" and I didn't
| realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page. Can
| anyone attest to this?
| hk__2 wrote:
| > There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking "the
| mods" and I didn't realize there was a mod team cultivating
| the front page. Can anyone attest to this?
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-
| valley/th...
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I don't get the impression from that article that Daniel
| and Scott are curating the front page in the way the thanks
| in this thread suggest. I am still of the impression that
| the front page composition is decided by upvotes,
| downvotes, and flags. Contrary to the implication in this
| repos' text.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What is that impression based on?
| next_xibalba wrote:
| The article, the HN's guidelines and FAQ, Dang's
| accumulated comments, etc.
| tptacek wrote:
| Scott hasn't been a mod for years.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| That's not what the application is measuring:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
| lolinder wrote:
| This is accurate, per dang's comment on the Gary Tan thread
| the other day:
|
| > We didn't flag the post; users did. When it comes to
| submissions, that's nearly always the case - see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169622
| mandmandam wrote:
| There are stories on this list that deserved to be seen,
| were popular, were important, and were not in fact dumpster
| fires in the comments - but a particular crowd with a
| particular bias decided to flag them.
|
| Example 1: https://news.social-
| protocols.org/stats?id=39142094
|
| Example 2: https://news.social-
| protocols.org/stats?id=39130652
|
| Example 3: https://news.social-
| protocols.org/stats?id=39214844
|
| Does this crowd think it's cool and normal that all
| discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were
| completely removed, based on the opinion of a dedicated
| minority?
|
| US tech giants are heavily implicated in this, so no one
| can seriously argue the topic isn't relevant. A World War
| could come from these "plausibly genocidal" actions, which
| are enabled in various ways by US tech giants.
| fragmede wrote:
| There's a certain element that doesn't want to discuss
| politics at all, so I imagine these ran afoul of that
| crowd. This is a tech-oriented site, and we're not going
| to come up with a Middle East peace plan in the comments.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > This is a tech-oriented site
|
| Exactly. Big tech has been staggeringly complicit in
| these oh-so documented war crimes. For example, AI is
| being used to 'target' people, even in refugee camps and
| residential areas; even when hundreds of civilian
| casualties are predicted. This has been admitted - even
| boasted about.
|
| As tech people, we can't just stick our heads in the sand
| and expect this not to come back on us. We're enabling
| this destruction in myriad ways, from funding to coercion
| to suppression of discussion [cough].
|
| Genocide isn't just politics. We are legally bound as a
| nation, and morally obligated as humans, to prevent it.
| Instead, the US and many its tech companies are
| complicit.
|
| If we can't even discuss the ICJ ruling that this may
| well be in fact a genocide, even when people are behaving
| and upvoting without breaking guidelines, then imo
| something very important has been broken.
| lukan wrote:
| "We are legally bound as a nation"
|
| "We" ain't all americans. There are people here coming
| from opposing sides in various wars. And there are more
| wars and slaughtering going on, than in the middle east.
| And "we" are just tech people. Not better or worse by
| principle, which shows off very easily as there can be
| religious flame wars about software already. So it would
| be good, if we could debate all this in a nice way. But
| apparently we cannot. This is why many people want NO
| politics here at all. As there is usually nothing coming
| out of it, except more of the usual - and not interesting
| discussions.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > "We" ain't all americans.
|
| The vast majority of English speaking countries signed
| the Genocide Convention, if not all [0]
|
| > This is why many people want NO politics here at all.
|
| They're not a majority, far from it. And the rules don't
| say "NO politics"; that would be absurd. Tech and
| politics overlap often - as they do here.
|
| 0 - https://www.statista.com/chart/22194/countries-that-
| havent-r...
| lukan wrote:
| The basic metric this site optimizes for is: "interesting
| discussion". So yes, sometimes there can be interesting
| discussion about political topics. But most of the times
| - not so much. And what you apparently want is activism,
| not discussion. Not to say your activism is bad - but
| this site is simply not made for activism of any kind.
| Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > what you apparently want is activism, not discussion
|
| I'd call the flaggers colluding to spike stories with
| lively and non toxic discussions the 'activists'.
|
| > Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
|
| So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people
| filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or
| expand your mind - there's a lot of options. Suppressing
| anything with a whiff of controversy doesn't result in
| positive outcomes.
|
| Besides; freedom of speech, and free exchange of ideas,
| are both decidedly in the "good hacker" wheelhouse.
| Symbiote wrote:
| None of the is on-topic for HN.
|
| The initial invasion was allowed due to the international
| significance, but to discuss subsequent events head to
| Reddit.
|
| This is in the FAQ linked in the footer.
|
| Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar
| will be on topic.
| mandmandam wrote:
| The ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases
| are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has
| "international significance". It's by far the most
| significant development in months.
|
| From the submission guidelines:
|
| > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
| interesting.
|
| People here were clearly finding those stories
| interesting, as measured by upvotes and comments.
|
| > If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
|
| US mainstream TV mostly declined to air South Africa's
| side of the case, as well as the actual verdict; opting
| instead to only air Israel's defense.
|
| > Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar
| will be on topic.
|
| "Something with drones" = on topic, but a plausible
| genocide verdict from the ICJ is not of "international
| significance" and therefore off topic... This isn't
| computing for me, sorry.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are
| very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has
| "international significance". It's by far the most
| significant development in months
|
| The verdict had a thread with over fifteen hundred
| comments and was on the front page most of the day.
| Others were presumably down ranked as they were dupes.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043
| mandmandam wrote:
| The linked deleted thread was 90 minutes older than the
| thread that 'survived'.
|
| Also, it was removed within a minute of hitting the front
| page (if I'm reading the graphs right). Doesn't quite
| line up with your presumption.
|
| Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of
| Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes
| and comments?
|
| Besides - the point is this: Not all the stories that are
| in OP's list are spam, or unsuitable. Some topics hit a
| third rail.
|
| They are easily removed by a small group of users, and
| then Daniel can come by months later and say, well, users
| flagged it [ie, 0]. It even happens to PG [1]. This isn't
| ideal, and pretending it isn't happening is uncool.
|
| I'm not saying Dang doesn't do a great job. But there
| _are_ some topics that are verboten, despite their impact
| /relevance on the tech community and our general
| interest. And this particular topic _is_ too important to
| allow for such narrative control by a tiny group of
| flaggers.
|
| 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311933
|
| 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144931
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >Doesn't quite line up with your presumption.
|
| Presumably users flagged both posts almost immediately,
| and by the time mods decided that the topic was worth
| discussion the second thread had more engagement. The
| first thread was still a dupe despite being posted
| earlier.
|
| >Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of
| Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes
| and comments?
|
| While the verdict was a major event like you said, The
| Guardian's story was not. Users flagged it, like all
| posts on the topic, and the mods decided it was not
| different enough from previous discussions to justify a
| new flame war.
|
| The ongoing wars are topics worthy of discussions, and
| they get discussed here. They don't need daily
| discussions. If you want daily discussions, there are
| plenty of places you can go to do that.
| fallingknife wrote:
| "The world's highest court" lol. I'd be more worried
| about pissing off a traffic court judge because unlike
| the ICJ, or anything associated with the circle jerk that
| is international law, they can actually enforce their
| judgments.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| While those stories may be important, they are all off-
| topic for Hacker News. This is not a general
| news/discussion site, and there are other places on the
| internet to discuss those things. HN is explicitly set up
| to discourage stories which would incur flame-war-like
| political arguments.
|
| Per the guidelines:
|
| >What to Submit
|
| >On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
| interesting. That includes more than hacking and
| startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
| answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
| intellectual curiosity.
|
| >Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or
| sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some
| interesting new phenomenon [...] If they'd cover it on TV
| news, it's probably off-topic.
|
| The latter two stories are not new phenomenon (the war
| has been ongoing), and the former, literally being a
| decision by a political body, falls squarely under
| "politics", and is highly likely to lead to nonproductive
| flamewars.
| bell-cot wrote:
| There are important differences between
|
| (1) These stories feel incredibly important to me now!
|
| -and-
|
| (2) Complete strangers, all over the internet, and with
| no official duties or obligations regarding the subjects
| of these stories, should be required to pay attention to
| them!
|
| The first one is fine. The second one suggests a somewhat
| immature worldview, or limited social skills.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking "the
| mods" and I didn't realize there was a mod team cultivating
| the front page.
|
| IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The
| reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if
| moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just
| wrong.
|
| Yes, there is dang, the single admin who posts publicly, and
| I guess it's possible/probable there are other HN admins who
| assist him. But 99.9% of the time when I hear people
| complaining about "the mods" or "power tripping mods" or
| "censorship", it's basically that other users saw what you
| had to say, and we just don't want to see it here.
|
| It's also weird that occasionally people think there is some
| sort of "rule" about what can be flagged. There are obviously
| guidelines, but as this power is held by any normal user,
| it's basically whatever they want it to mean. For example, I
| frequently flag stories where I think the topic and article
| is totally valid, but where _every single time_ I 've seen
| the topic debated on HN it becomes a useless flamewar or is
| filled with the lowest quality commentary. At least for me,
| flagging isn't a value judgment on the "worthiness" of an
| article, it's simply about stuff I don't want to see on HN.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The
| reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if
| moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just
| wrong.
|
| Partially, but I think these are all symptoms for a more
| fundamental root cause: HN is just comprised of too many
| emotional, passionate users with fundamentally differing
| beliefs.
|
| The usual song and dance with flagging goes something like
| the following with cryptocurrency:
|
| 1. User posts cryptocurrency article
|
| 2. People who passionately hate cryptocurrency start adding
| in emotional comments about how they hate it.
|
| 3. People who want to fight this passionate hate respond in
| kind.
|
| 4. The thread turns into a giant argument where nobody is
| willing to concede anything and everyone is just shouting
| at each other.
|
| 5. Either the flamewar detector kicks in (as it should) or
| everyone not in the thread tires of the shouting and flags
| it.
|
| That's fine but regrettable when limited to some topics
| like crypto. But it's happening with social media company
| earnings reports, layoff posts, RTO discussions, posts
| about Musk, autonomous vehicles, and on and on.
|
| dang (and the mod team?) are doing great work, but this is
| despite the feeling I have that HN is barely being held
| together into a cohesive community, and I'm struggling to
| even use the word "community" here. I feel the temperature
| of discussions has gotten a lot hotter here than it used to
| be and some basic work I've done with sentiment classifiers
| on comments here mirrors my perspective.
|
| I just don't think a single community can handle so many
| passionate, opposed groups. It bubbles up by proxy in these
| sorts of flagging wars where so many articles get bumped
| off the page due to the inability of the community to
| discuss it well. Maybe the solution is to just discuss
| software as some people really want, but even then you get
| massive flamewars over things like Rust async. Even with
| interesting topics like VR posts, the overall temperature
| of the comments here is high enough that I've stopped
| bothering to comment as much as I used to.
| tptacek wrote:
| It has always been the case and is in fact the stated
| premise of the site that it's barely held together in a
| cohesive community. The original mission statement was
| "see how long we can fend off Eternal September". So
| that's not alarming; it's how things are supposed to be.
| I suppose a perfectly stabilized cohesive community would
| be worrying, a sign that the site is staling.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I agree that a stable, cohesive community is a sign that
| the site is failing but I think we've hewed too far to
| the side of "barely holding it together" on this
| spectrum. I feel that it dissuades new, quality
| contributors from joining and instead attracts
| contrarians and arguers.
| TheCoreh wrote:
| At a quick glance, I found several that don't match that
| criteria you mention, here are a few:
|
| Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds
|
| https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/
|
| Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require
| Breakthrough Energy Source
|
| https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough
|
| Avoid Async Rust at All Cost
|
| https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html
|
| (Perhaps that last one could be renamed to be less hyperbolic,
| but the content was still an interesting opinion piece)
|
| I don't think this is being done by the mods, by the way. It's
| more likely some spam filter with false positives, report
| brigading, or an anti upvote ring mechanism.
| nottorp wrote:
| YMMV. I don't want to see Altman's fearmongering and
| hyperbolic statements.
|
| At this point he's indistinguishable from a bitcoin advocate
| or a tv preacher.
| threatofrain wrote:
| It's dubious that HN mods think that way of Altman though.
| nottorp wrote:
| s/mods/users? everyone can flag stories.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It's not flags (or not sufficient to remove the story):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
| lolinder wrote:
| Flags are sufficient. I just posted a comment on the
| comment you linked to: I have many times been the person
| who pressed "flag" on a story and then watched it
| immediately disappear.
|
| I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and
| possibly some other metrics that determines whether a
| story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.
| jjackson5324 wrote:
| > I don't want to see Altman's fearmongering and hyperbolic
| statements
|
| His statement wasn't even hyperbolic or fearmongering.....?
|
| He just extrapolated based on current amounts of compute
| and estimated a possible model size that could be
| equivalent to AGI (based on current architecture).
|
| Training a model of that size would require too much
| electricity.
|
| That was his point.
| nottorp wrote:
| Actually the statement looks designed to instill fear of
| the possibility of AGI. He indirectly stated that it can
| be done.
|
| Everyone should run to wise man Altman and he'll protect
| us from the evil AI. Please pressure governments to
| regulate the domain until only OpenAI is legally allowed
| to work with it.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Guy just says we need more power, what are you talking
| about?
| passwordoops wrote:
| The Altman story was likely a dupe (or triplicate)
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Why not redirect to the original story?
| dylan604 wrote:
| moderators are not omnipresent, and some times the users
| are faster to react than the mods.
| hk__2 wrote:
| Is that possible?
| tptacek wrote:
| Dupes generally drop off the front page, whether or not
| someone links up the previous stories in the thread. The
| whole point is not to let the duplicate story crowd out
| other stories on the front page. Redirecting would defeat
| the purpose.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Possibly dups too.
| hobofan wrote:
| The last story is so full of outdated and misinformation that
| I tried to find out whether it was written a few years ago
| (though it would have still been full of misinformation back
| then).
|
| I suspect that it has been flagged for that reason by
| multiple people.
| elpocko wrote:
| The things you see on HN are not purely decided by the
| community. Mods can and do "freeze" the vote count on
| comments and posts, and do other non-obvious things too. You
| will notice the effect after participating for a while.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Exactly, the front page is heavily moderated. Almost every
| day you'll see posts with 50+ upvotes falling of the front
| page within an hour or two when some article about LISP
| with < 10 upvotes will remain here for a whole day.
|
| It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are
| clearly other "forces" at play here.
| elpocko wrote:
| The "force" is actually one or two people. It's hard to
| prove and impossible to change. No one will believe you,
| either.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| If it works..
|
| There are a billion forums with less stringent
| moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN
| good and not so game-able like most sites
| nkurz wrote:
| Could you make your accusation more clearly? Are you
| saying it's 'dang' and 'pg'? One or two regular users
| abusing the flagging system? Or a couple dark and shadowy
| figures who have no public presence?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I'm sure the HN codebase has some secret creed to make
| lisp more popular
| Zak wrote:
| Two out of three currently aren't removed. There's no
| moderator comment on the third, but a fair number of upvotes
| and user comments; I think it was flagged by users.
|
| Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387
|
| Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require
| Breakthrough Energy Source
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738
|
| Avoid Async Rust at All Cost (flagged)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078
| flutas wrote:
| There's a difference between removed and removed from the
| front page.
|
| IIRC: Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change
| anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on the
| front page.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change
| anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on
| the front page.
|
| That's a big change?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Two out of three currently aren't removed
|
| How can you tell? Those are from a week and a half ago. The
| OP's definition of 'removed' is (if I understand correctly)
| 'dropped from the top-30 to below the top-90 in 1 minute'.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't agree with the GP at all. Most seem normal for the
| front page or the intellectual curiosity standard (I mean,
| personally I'd like a much higher standard, but I'm basing it
| on what HN already has).
|
| All from only one day:
|
| * Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android
| for one car:
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-
| scr...
|
| * Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germany
| about a far-right planning meeting):
| https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-
| plan-...
|
| * Show HN: Vx.dev - GitHub-Powered AI for effortless
| development: https://vxdev.pages.dev/
|
| * Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds:
| https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/
| lolinder wrote:
| What these are is evidence of your parent comment's point
| that this isn't direct moderator action, rather a
| combination of algorithms and user flags.
|
| Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it
| has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany
| and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's
| overblown.
|
| I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people
| because they're tired of LLM stories (as repeatedly
| attested in this thread).
|
| Based on the ratio of comments to upvotes, I suspect the
| Open Source Builds and Ford discussions ran afoul of the
| overheated discussion detector. Usually when the ratio gets
| too lopsided the software automatically drops the post off
| the front page, because that's an indicator that a lot of
| people are arguing in the thread without actually reading
| or enjoying the article.
| 23B1 wrote:
| I think you're probably generally correct, but "blaming
| the algorithm" sure smells to me like a whole lot of
| camouflage for censorship, which we ought to know by now
| has as much to do with 'quality' as it does 'shaping the
| narrative'
|
| Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in
| successful community moderation, but you have to wonder
| 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton
| window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost
| entirely at the behest of big tech.
| throwaway665544 wrote:
| The simple solution would be to display a log of all
| removed/flagged/shadowbanned posts and comments, like
| Wikipedia does.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Enable showdead in your profile if you want to see dead
| posts. You can't see deleted posts as the author deaded
| or asked HN to delete the post. See the HN FAQ [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
| tptacek wrote:
| Preventing the site from being taken over by incessant
| meta debates is one of the moderation goals of the site.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
|
| (In many places there, obviously a lot of that is about
| Meta the company).
|
| Periodic threads like this one are, I think, allowed as a
| sort of escape valve for pent up meta energy. Emph. on
| "periodic".
|
| If you want a site that makes the opposite call here,
| Lobsters has a public mod log. You might like that system
| better!
| fakedang wrote:
| There ought to be a time-based flagging limit, so that
| people don't abuse the system. I've already raised this
| earlier.
|
| If Company A makes a killer product announcement, rival
| Company B could simply get its employees to spam down
| votes on and flag that post. Company A gets less
| visibility, and dang won't be able to come on time to
| stop it.
|
| This is an easily plausible hypothetical, which may
| already be happening.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Flagging requires high HN karma. You get that by being a
| positive member of the community. Most such people, if a
| company even has one, would find it against their
| personal ethics to do that. And dang can see the karma
| ratio and unflag any actually worthwhile announcements.
| Macha wrote:
| I think as people have become more and more aware that
| flag negatively weights items for rankings, and isn't
| just a "hey have the mods look at this rule breaking
| thing", more people have started using it as a downvote
| button. It was my understanding that HN originally didn't
| have a downvote feature to avoid the kind of issues that
| the flag usage is now causing.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Even the highest karma users can lose their flagging
| privileges, temporarily or perhaps even permanently, if
| they do it enough times within a time window or if abuse
| is detected. So from what I understand that issue should
| be taken care of.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I think generally it works well- when there are actual
| major events like early COVID or Ukraine - HN managed to
| inform we way ahead of mass media with various
| interesting sources. But I'm happy to have a "news" thing
| pop up only a few times a year. You're gonna have someone
| be mad about every instance when you moderate
| fuzztester wrote:
| >LLM stories
|
| Does that mean stories about LLMs or by LLMs?
|
| Serious question.
|
| I am one of the (few? many?) people (devs) who haven't
| look into LLMs or even tried out ChatGPT yet :), except
| to make jokes about it here once in a while.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| The second one is both sensationalist clickbait[1] and
| politics. It was rightly removed:
|
| >Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or
| celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting
| new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute
| animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's
| probably off-topic.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| It's not as if the internet is lacking in places where this
| can be discussed freely.
|
| [1]: As in you have to click the link to see what it is
| about, and to decide if it is interesting or relevant to
| read.
| ttepasse wrote:
| The second story is evidence of a new phenomenon: The far
| right political movements thinking about an anti-
| constitutional policy, a new step on the ladder of
| escalation.
|
| There's a reason it's a big deal in German politics and
| already had some fallout (and thankfully multiple dozens
| of counter-demonstration of ten of thousands of people
| all over Germany.)
| z7 wrote:
| Not sure why both submissions about work preferences were
| flagged:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103328
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103483
| dang wrote:
| The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar
| detector. The last one was downranked by users. Admins didn't
| touch any of them.
|
| Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item
| link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be
| much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of
| people's questions.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| HN ID? I don't see that in the FAQ, maybe it's defined
| elsewhere?
|
| edit: oh duh. thanks all, answer was 'right under my nose'!
| arethuza wrote:
| Presumably its the id parameter in the URL?
| jdminhbg wrote:
| The url for this page is
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513 so the id
| is 39230513
| Moru wrote:
| Most likely in the URL, id=3923
| dang wrote:
| I changed my comment to say 'link' instead of 'ID' so
| everyone can follow the same links.
|
| Thanks _kst_:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232594
| throwaway665544 wrote:
| If you have nothing to hide, why not make all story and
| comment removal history publicly visible, like Wikipedia
| edits.
| skeaker wrote:
| Just enable showdead if you want to see all of that. It's
| 99% botspam.
| krapp wrote:
| That would create one more thing for people here to
| complain about. People here would just accuse the mods of
| faking the mod log to hide their "real agenda" whatever
| that is.
| paulnpace wrote:
| Wikipedia can and does vaporize edits.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I don't think revdel can actually fully delete a
| revision, there's always at least a revision entry left,
| perhaps with no user name or summary.
| dang wrote:
| That would create a bureaucratic nightmare for no
| significant gain.
|
| Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189
| for a longer answer; and also krapp's comment at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232795, which
| makes a similar point.
| jader201 wrote:
| > The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar
| detector.
|
| Just some feedback that I've found a number of articles
| fall off the FP due to the flamewar detector that I've felt
| were good articles/discussions. In fact, I think some of
| the more valuable discussions tend to have a lot of back
| and forth discussions relative to the votes.
|
| But I also recognize that flamewars can also look a lot
| like that.
|
| So I'm wondering if it may be worth revisiting the
| algorithm for this, and maybe having it factor in a few
| other things vs. simply the vote:comment ratio (which is
| what I'm understanding it currently is, but correct me if
| I'm wrong).
|
| I don't think it necessarily needs to be a lot more
| complex, maybe simply add to it some standard deviation of
| upvotes/downvotes (or just a simple ratio), if that's not
| already part of it.
|
| But I've seen some discussions fall off that I don't
| remember seeing a particularly toxic discussion happening
| (e.g. relatively little to no downvoted comments).
|
| Again, happy to see flamewars fall off, but just hoping to
| see some more interesting/helpful discussions not get
| caught in the crossfire.
| dang wrote:
| Absolutely. We review the list of stories that set off
| that software penalty and restore the ones that are
| clearly not flamewars. No doubt we miss a few, and also -
| not everyone interprets these things the same way. But if
| you (or anyone) notice a case of a good thread plummeting
| off the front page, you can always get us to take a look
| by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| There should be some way of doing language detection to
| detect the relative quality of 'flaming' going on.
|
| So the highest quality 'flame wars' can remain untouched,
| but downranking everything else below that bar probably
| makes sense.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, the carrot of automation would be so much nicer than
| the stick of manual review. I haven't seen any system
| that works well enough yet though.
|
| The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if
| someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-
| art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a
| go--and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd
| certainly like to see it. As would the entire community
| I'm sure!
| _kst_ wrote:
| Or include the URL rather than just the HN ID so readers
| can follow the links.
| dang wrote:
| yes! good point. Edit: I changed my GP comment to say
| "link" instead of "ID".
| caymanjim wrote:
| How can users downrank headlines? I only have an option to
| upvote them. While it's not too frequent, there are things
| that make it to the front page that I'd like to express my
| disapproval of.
| dang wrote:
| User flags, once they've accumulated above a certain
| threshold, have a downranking effect. Pretty sure this is
| in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I'm curious why there's no actual downvote for
| submissions. Was that ever discussed on here? I did a
| quick search for prior discussions on the topic but
| didn't find anything.
|
| To me, "flag" means "this is a serious violation that
| requires moderator attention". Something I'd want you to
| see and deal with because it's bigoted, illegal, spam,
| etc. I wouldn't flag something simply because I didn't
| think HN was the right audience, or because I personally
| dislike the topic. You seem to be encouraging me to use
| it simply as a downvote.
|
| I'm not going to start flagging things, nor do I feel
| that strongly about the lack of a downvote, but if flags
| are effectively downvotes behind the scenes, and if
| that's how users are treating flags (which they obviously
| are, from other comments on this thread), I think the UI
| should have a downvote button.
|
| I assume there's been discussion about this before and
| I'm curious about the thought process behind the
| decision. I don't find the FAQ to be informative about
| this.
| dang wrote:
| The only person who could answer that is pg because that
| design choice was part of the embryo of HN.
|
| He must have been thinking something though, because
| Reddit was originally his conception and he was an
| influence on the earliest development of Reddit as well
| (edit: and Reddit does have story downvoting - forgot to
| mention that bit).
| webappguy wrote:
| It's good that this is in this thread, as I bet a ton of
| power users (I check HN multiple times a day for years
| but likely only a time or two have glossed over the FAQ),
| did not know FLAG could be used as a downvote tool.
| Interesting choice by PG, I agree with the previous
| comment, we have all come to know FLAG as a violation
| tool on most platforms. Now we know.
| nottorp wrote:
| Tbh if you just upvote what you like and do not vote what
| you don't like it's almost the same thing.
|
| The one exception is if some group organizes to upvote
| something that fits their agenda / business plan. But in
| this case it's generally something worth flagging and it
| gets flagged?
| kosolam wrote:
| Why don't you make the system transparent? This will save
| you a lot of effort answering questions.
| eevilspock wrote:
| People will game it. We don't need a transparent
| algorithm when we have transparent results, e.g. enable
| `showdead`, or the OP's project.
| dang wrote:
| "Transparent" means different things to people, but if
| you mean a full moderation log: I think most likely it
| would produce _more_ questions and effort, for no clear
| gain. I 've written about this over the years: https://hn
| .algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| Here's how I look at it: if trust is present, then we
| don't need to publish a full log, as long as we answer
| questions when people ask them. That degree of
| transparency has been available here for many years. If,
| on the other hand, trust _isn 't_ present, a moderation
| log won't create it. It will just generate more data for
| distrust to work with--and distrust always finds
| something.
|
| Thus our focus is on building trust with the community
| and maintaining it. That happens through lots of
| individual and group interactions, answering questions
| whenever we get them, in the threads or by email. That's
| what I spend most of my time doing.
|
| We're never going to take the community's trust for
| granted because it's what gives HN the only real value it
| has, and it would be all too easy to lose. But I would
| tentatively say that this approach has proven to work
| reasonably well for the bulk of the community. If people
| learn they can always get a question answered, that's a
| powerful trust-building factor.
|
| Equally clear is that it does not work for everybody; but
| that's always going to be the case no matter what we do.
| I don't mean that we dismiss such users' concerns--quite
| the contrary, I make extra efforts to answer them. I'm
| just not under any illusion that we can satisfy
| everybody. It's satisfying enough if a few people can
| occasionally be won over in this way--which does happen
| sometimes!
| jeremyjh wrote:
| The flags on the last item don't seem to be made in good
| faith. This looks like abuse of the flag system to me. Is
| there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
| comex wrote:
| By "the last item" you're referring to "Avoid Async Rust
| at All Cost", right? Personally I don't think that's
| abuse; I would have flagged that post if I'd seen it.
| That's despite the fact that I agree with a lot of what's
| in the post. The title is just too inflammatory. And
| there are more inflammatory bits in the post, such as
| saying the feature is "objectively bad", and saying that
| a community member's post "gracefully omits" some
| information (where the word "gracefully" sounds like an
| accusation that they were being disingenuous). Totally
| unnecessary. Chop off the inflammatory bits and you'd
| have a perfectly good blog post making an interesting
| point, but as-is that post was not going to lead to a
| productive discussion.
| nottorp wrote:
| Of course, it's only inflammatory because async is a
| darling to more than half of HN :)
|
| But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war
| detection.
| dang wrote:
| [editing - bear with me...]
|
| I assume you mean this one:
|
| _Avoid Async Rust at All Cost_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 - Jan 2024
| (62 comments)
|
| I can make an argument either way there. The argument in
| favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-
| discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had
| a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a
| few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much
| in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably
| rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this
| much-discussed topic; its title was baity and arguably
| misleading as well since the article seems more about
| async in general; and generally it was more of a drama
| submission on a classic flamewar topic than an
| interesting technical piece.
|
| I'm not saying all that is right but it's easy to imagine
| good-faith users flagging for such reasons. I checked the
| flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases
| where a user had previously flagged a different article
| about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples
| of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4]
| below. A few of those flags might be borderline calls but
| I didn't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to
| remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags
| are legit if the story has had a large amount of
| discussion recently.
|
| [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=t
| rue&que...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061839 - the
| word 'async' appears over 200 times in that thread!
|
| [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=t
| rue&que...
|
| [4] _You Don 't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 - Feb 2024
| (21 comments)
|
| _Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist
| policies no longer enough?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 - Jan 2024
| (151 comments)
|
| _New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire
| wear shocks some drivers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 - Jan 2024
| (64 comments)
|
| _Google layoffs: Tech giant to cut down 30k jobs, says
| report_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791297 -
| Dec 2023 (6 comments)
|
| _Code will make me rich and famous_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336699 - Nov 2023
| (2 comments)
|
| _The NSA Invented Bitcoin?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37599194 - Sept 2023
| (61 comments)
|
| _Leaving the Web3 cult_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803267 - July 2023
| (47 comments)
|
| _How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into
| Service_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105
| - June 2023 (97 comments)
|
| _Alphabet plans to announce its new general-use LLM
| called PaLM 2 at Google I /O_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866435 - May 2023
| (5 comments)
|
| _Is your husband / boyfriend gay? LGBTQ_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 - April
| 2023 (0 comments)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't necessarily want to dissect every little story, but
| this post was a funny edge case:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39203106
|
| a tame story that got some discussion, but was marked as a
| dupe. But I didn't see any other posts linked in the
| comments as expected. I search for other submissions and
| see two other posts... with 0 comments:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190710
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39186297
|
| I don't really have a critique or solution here, I imagine
| false negatives are an inevitability. Just sharing.
| mikysco wrote:
| Sam Altman led invests in a nuclear fusion company, Helion.
| Guessing the potential conflict of interest is why the 2nd
| article drew vote controversy.
|
| https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-500-million.
| ..
| eureka-belief wrote:
| It really is impressive how HN has been such a quality
| community for so long. I can't think of any of many other
| online communities that I have been using for 10+ years. So
| definitely much gratitude to the mods from me for the work they
| do.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/nasa-system-pred...
|
| Really? A NASA report, on the official .gov site? Maybe the
| comments were horrible but that seems right in the middle of
| what HN is interested in.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Garry Tan seems to benefit from this system as well. Nothing
| sensationalist about tracking his awful behavior.
| dang wrote:
| We haven't touched those stories except reduce the penalties
| on them (user flags mostly) and moderate them less than we
| normally would (per https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&pag
| e=0&prefix=false&qu...). I put one back on the front page
| last night despite this contradicting every principle HN
| stands for--every _other_ principle, that is, than the first
| one, which is that we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or
| a YC startup is part of a story.
|
| I posted detailed explanations in those other threads:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39224560
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210947
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045
|
| If you (or anyone) read those explanations and still have a
| question that I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what
| it is. These practices have been in place for many years and
| haven't changed.
| bradly wrote:
| @dang Thank you for the info.
|
| One questions I do have-I would guess posts critical of
| HN/YC are going to get a log of flags and have not the best
| discussion. This has a side affect of biasing the home page
| to not have posts critical of HN/YC. Do you see this as a
| problem?
| pierat wrote:
| I'm sure death threats are protected CEO speech....
| hyperluz wrote:
| Are you an american oligarch?
| ggdG wrote:
| > In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel
| should not have been removed.
|
| I don't understand why this story was removed: "It turns out
| the six-feet social-distancing rule had no scientific basis",
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200511
|
| On a forum with an overwhelmingly science-minded audience, it
| bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed
| untouchable.
| wtallis wrote:
| I think reading the top comment on that post provides plenty
| of explanation why users would flag that post. Perhaps you're
| trying not to understand.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Are you asserting that, if the title had remained "Anthony
| Fauchi [sic] Fesses Up" it would have remained, unflagged?
|
| Maybe you should Submit it again with the original title,
| and see what happens.
| wtallis wrote:
| If it had been submitted with that title, it would simply
| have been harder to pretend there's wasn't plenty of
| reason for the submission to be flagged.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| What reasons would those be?
| ggdG wrote:
| > I think reading the top comment on that post provides
| plenty of explanation why users would flag that post.
|
| That top comment complains that the HN title is WSJ's
| informative subheading instead of its clickbaity headline.
| wtallis wrote:
| The top comment complains that the title submitted to HN
| is both not the original headline, _and_ not an accurate
| characterization of the content of the article.
|
| If there's no possible title to use for a submission that
| won't get it flagged, then clearly it's not a great
| article to be submitting.
|
| And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue
| is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public
| health response to Covid-19, when the submission is
| clearly flouting HN's rules. (The paywall doesn't help
| its viability as an HN submission, either.)
| ggdG wrote:
| > The top comment complains that the title submitted to
| HN is both not the original headline, and not an accurate
| characterization of the content of the article.
|
| What do you mean: "not an accurate characterization of
| the content of the article"? The title pretty accurately
| describes an admission by the former NIAID director in a
| House Select Subcommittee, according to the WSJ. That
| admission is the topic of the article.
|
| > And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue
| is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public
| health response to Covid-19, when the submission is
| clearly flouting HN's rules.
|
| From HN's rules:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is
| misleading or linkbait;
|
| I think using the clickbaity original title ("Anthony
| Fauci Fesses Up") would be flouting HN's rules.
| tptacek wrote:
| Stories about COVID controversies are almost certainly
| getting flagged off the front page by users, not touched by
| mods. People look at the titles of these stories and think
| that's all flaggers are going by, but lots of people flag
| stories based on their experience of what the threads are
| like, and the threads on COVID controversies are fucking
| dreadful. I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would
| have.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| But _why_ must they be dreadful? Genuine question, I am not
| being obtuse. We _should be able_ as a community to discuss
| conterversial subjects somehow.
|
| I also think this sort of thing invites flag brigades. Or
| better yet, a small batch of bad actor can easily start
| brigading and forcefully associate such flamewar
| expectations with any subject they don't like to drive it
| off HN.
|
| Maybe worth reconsidering how you flag? You might be
| getting played. Or not, I really don't know. No obvious
| answers.
| saagarjha wrote:
| We should, but we don't.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't know why they're dreadful, but they empirically
| are, and that's the end of the matter for me.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| I think this sort of thing taken to the limit will cut
| every which way until eventually we run out of subjects
| and the overton window shrinks into an overton dot.
| tptacek wrote:
| We've been running this system for something like a
| decade now, I think we know how it's going to converge.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| I don't. I'd like to know however! Do tell!
| tptacek wrote:
| It converges to the front page we have now, which, while
| imperfect, seems to be to the liking of the community,
| such that stories like this carry a bunch of comments
| about how happy they are about moderation here, and how
| about how few if any of the stories getting yeeted from
| the front page are things they even want to see on HN.
|
| HN does not have to be a space for conversations about
| every important story. It is enough for it to be good at
| the conversations it is good at. There's a whole wide
| internet out there for the rest of the important
| conversations to take place on. Moreover: that has
| _always_ been the premise of HN; it 's not a principle we
| just sort of slipped into accidentally.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| The risk that the quality of discourse on HN falls to
| Reddit leveles of shitposting seems a greater one to me.
| Having high volume of popular highly polarized
| discussions seems a great way to have an Eternal
| September[2] event, and there is no way to recover what
| makes a forum unique after that.
|
| HN is a single place on the internet with clear
| moderation guidelines[1]. It doesn't have to cater to
| every form of speech. In fact, actively not doing so is
| probably the reason why HN's level of discourse is
| comparatively high.
|
| People who want Reddit should go to Reddit, not drag HN
| with them through the mud.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Empirically they are not. What you mean is that you don't
| like to be faced with the reality revealed by these
| stories and the comments.
|
| But this attitude explains a lot of the abusive flagging
| that goes on here. Stories get flagged because they make
| people feel ick, and they feel ick because they
| previously took positions that were wrong. So they flag.
| And when asked, why do you flag, they say "I don't know,
| I just don't like it", forgetting that the site exists
| supposedly to help drive intellectual curiousity. You may
| not like these stories, but other people do find them
| useful and you should not interfere with them.
| tptacek wrote:
| Comments like this really make me feel viscerally what
| we're missing out on by not having COVID fights on the
| front page more often. Thanks.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and
| expecting different results."
| wtallis wrote:
| HN's guidelines have this relevant bit:
|
| > _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive,
| not less, as a topic gets more divisive._
|
| An editorial that clearly does not embody that spirit is
| a poor starting point if you want the discussion to trend
| towards sanity.
|
| Especially when the title itself violates--and ensures
| further violations of--this rule:
|
| > _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an
| article or post to complain about in the thread. Find
| something interesting to respond to instead._
| fragmede wrote:
| They're dreadful because people are coming from opposite
| places and are unwilling to be convinced otherwise, so
| the conversations are repetitive and dull, with little
| new information. We really don't need to hear for the
| 100th time how Covid was or was not a lab leak when
| there's no new real evidence one way or the other, but
| every time Covid comes up, there's gonna be some
| unresolvable argument in the comments that's just
| dreadful and not worthy of this site's time. Hence the
| flag. With a infinitely more heavy handed moderation team
| (or LLM) to judge comments before they got posted, we
| might be able to have good discussions on such topics,
| but until then, you can turn on show dead in your profile
| to see what kind of low-quality comments certain topics
| attract.
| alwa wrote:
| Whether or not we're _able_ to discuss controversial
| subjects, a topic's controversy doesn't imply importance
| or relevance.
|
| It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion
| tends to increase when it's relevant to the expertise in
| the room, and decrease when it involves people's casual
| reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague
| but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great,
| nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical
| questions, but we're much less likely to collectively
| know what we're talking about in questions of the latest
| hot-button political mudslinging.
|
| There are communities that are good for that kind of
| discussion, but that's not what we come here to do. And
| for this place to stay good at what it _does_ do, it
| can't afford to drown out the signal with the noise of
| emotive bickering.
|
| The site guidelines do, I think, an incredible job of
| articulating what sustains the tenor here.
|
| But at the end of the day, how best to capture "the
| vibes" about whether we collectively think a topic is
| tired or doesn't fit here? It seems like HN does it just
| like a good dinner party host would: Change the subject
| when your guests--that is, the people with a strong track
| record of positive contributions--indicate that they're
| weary of it. After all, we've got plenty of things to
| talk about that we _do_ agree would be fruitful.
| tptacek wrote:
| The dinner party analogy is perfect.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| Sure. Thanksgiving dinner.
| ggdG wrote:
| > It seems to me that the quality of any public
| discussion tends to increase when it's relevant to the
| expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves
| people's casual reads of complicated stuff about which
| they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN
| folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range
| of technical questions, but we're much less likely to
| collectively know what we're talking about in questions
| of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.
|
| The expertise on HN is indeed unrivaled.
|
| If I want to learn about the quirks of a variational
| autoencoder in some neural network, I read the discussion
| between experts here on HN [1].
|
| If I want to learn about protein folding, I can find
| relevant domain experts answering questions here on HN
| [2].
|
| But why do you and so many others think that there is a
| covid-shaped hole in the expertise on HN? Do you really
| believe that out of all domain experts, the covid ones
| decided to stay away from here?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39215242
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32262856
| tptacek wrote:
| There's a lot of expertise about COVID here! The problem
| is, in a variational autoencoder discussion, that's
| mostly all there is, and in COVID threads there is _lots_
| of energy from non-COVID experts.
|
| This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID
| thread and see what a shitshow it is. That's not for
| _lack_ of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise
| is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when
| they see the thread.
| ggdG wrote:
| >This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID
| thread and see what a shitshow it is.
|
| I hardly see any covid threads here. I happened to see
| the one of this week. It got 8 comments before being
| flagged into oblivion.
|
| >That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of
| that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-
| the-hedges when they see the thread.
|
| You cannot have it both ways. Either you flag covid
| threads preemptively [1] along with a bunch of other
| users [2], or you try to learn from domain experts in
| these threads.
|
| But making assumptions about what these experts would
| have thought of these threads, had they not been flagged
| down prematurely, is a weird leap of reasoning.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231535
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232084
| snowwrestler wrote:
| COVID stories are dreadful because there is a very low
| average level of applicable domain knowledge for COVID
| discussions.
|
| In plain English, not enough people actually know what
| they are talking about to create an informative and
| educational discussion. So they all just end up as a
| pointless exercise in all the worst aspects of forum
| flame wars.
|
| HN is at its best when people with lots of relevant
| experience and knowledge come into the discussion. Then
| the rest of us can learn new facts, tools, perspectives,
| etc.
|
| There's a long list of topics where that is just not
| available in the existing audience. So there are a lot of
| topics that, while interesting, are just not a good
| investment of everyone's time here.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I asked this exact question in an Ask HN post a couple of
| years ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29532676
|
| That thread actually changed my mind on the issue. You
| say "We should be able as a community to discuss
| conterversial subjects somehow." Well, guess what, we're
| not, or at least we're not without a great amount of
| care. Stories like the submitted one, which may be
| factually accurate but clearly have a political axe to
| grind are absolutely not going to lead to anything but a
| shitstorm of useless discussion.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Some things just don't scale well conversationally.
| ggdG wrote:
| > lots of people flag stories based on their experience of
| what the threads are like
|
| IMHO story submissions should be judged based upon their
| own merits. Toxic commenters can be downvoted/banned but
| the story submitter shouldn't be punished for the
| misbehavior of others.
|
| > I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
|
| You mean purely based on the _expected_ awfulness of
| imagined future comments, instead of the _actual_ comments?
| If so, with a precrime mindset like that, you 're fanning
| the flames of controversy.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's good to want things! We can just disagree.
|
| There's not enough space on the front page for all the
| good things we want to read. I'm not interested in
| expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a
| low likelihood of generating a good conversation. The
| people most invested in these kinds of stories seem to be
| almost the least invested in HN's rubric of curious
| conversation.
|
| I don't call any of the shots around here, but I think I
| speak for a bunch of different users who flag this way.
| ggdG wrote:
| > I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue
| marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a
| good conversation.
|
| I didn't ask you to expend effort in _rescuing_ stories.
| I took issue with the way you expend effort in _burying_
| stories, even _before_ the comment section turns out to
| go sideways:
|
| > I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
| tptacek wrote:
| It takes very little effort at all to flag stories that
| I'm convinced are both colorably off-topic, or
| duplicative of other marginally topical stories that have
| run within the last year, and that I'm convinced will
| create nightmare threads. That's the purpose of the
| flagging system. That system is also monitored, so that
| people who abuse it as a super-downvote for stories they
| just don't like quietly lose flagging powers. So: I plan
| to keep on doing it.
|
| Remember though: we're not having this conversation so
| you can persuade me to change how I use the site. I'm
| just one doofus here. Wha ye need tae worry about are the
| t'ousand doofuses standing behind me. ( __The Devil 's
| Own_, 1997, starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford_).
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| It doesn't get less curious that "I try to bury
| discussion before it even happens and can't even explain
| why". You should be ashamed that you spend so much time
| here yet fundamentally do not get the rules.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| (Shrug) I don't require scientific proof of the inverse-
| square law. It's self-evident to the point of being
| axiomatic. Standing 6 feet away from a virus source will
| expose you to about 44% fewer virus particles than standing 5
| feet away from one, while not imposing any real hardships in
| most public interaction scenarios. What's controversial about
| that?
|
| If you demand precise scientific rigor in all aspects of
| everyday life, public health is probably not the career field
| for you.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The same with masks:
|
| Put a water hose on mist and spray someone with it. Then
| put a cloth over the nozzle and try to spray them. It's
| self evident yet people just could not grasp it.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Are you saying that face masks are not effective?
| ggdG wrote:
| It's "self evident" yet a large Cochrane meta-analysis
| finds no benificial effect of masks whatsoever:
|
| https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858
| .CD...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| You sure?
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-
| abs...
|
| When the medical field phases out masks because they
| "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was
| useless. Also keep in the mind that the primary reason
| for studies showing masks not working is that people
| don't wear it correctly or at all.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Argh. This is exactly the kind of drastically wrong yet
| confident take that gives HN a bad name.
|
| SARS-CoV-2 is an aerosolized virus that can spread long
| distances through air ducts, and hang in rooms for long
| periods. This was known since the Diamond Princess was put
| into lockdown and COVID cases appeared randomly throughout
| the ship anyway, way back in 2020. The only possible
| explanation for this was transfer via the ship's air
| circulation system. It's as expected also because the same
| thing was observed with SARS-1 in Hong Kong.
|
| It may _also_ spread via droplets, but that doesn 't mean
| it's the dominant path or even important at all.
|
| Incorrect models of how this whole thing works are exactly
| why none of the predictions coming out of epidemiology were
| correct (or even close). If you think the dynamics of COVID
| are "self evident to the point of being axiomatic" you'll
| have to explain why nobody was able to correctly predict
| what it'd do next.
| wtallis wrote:
| Generally, after asserting that someone is drastically
| wrong, the next few paragraphs should be about backing
| that claim up with convincing evidence and explanations.
| Instead you digressed into talking about droplets vs
| aerosols and forgot to even make a connection between
| that and the "drastically wrong" take you were replying
| to.
| ggdG wrote:
| Here's some serious research, spanning one year. Note how
| the confidence increases throughout time. You can't blame
| nvm0n2 for taking for granted what is already well-
| established since three years.
|
| --> May 2020: "How Coronavirus Spreads through the Air:
| What We Know So Far"
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-
| coronavirus-s...
|
| >For months, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
| Prevention and the World Health Organization have
| maintained that the novel coronavirus is primarily spread
| by droplets from someone who is coughing, sneezing or
| even talking within a few feet away. But anecdotal
| reports hint that it could be transmissible through
| particles suspended in the air (so-called "aerosol
| transmission"). And the WHO recently reversed its
| guidance to say that such transmission, particularly in
| "indoor locations where there are crowded and
| inadequately ventilated spaces where infected persons
| spend long periods of time with others, cannot be ruled
| out."
|
| >Even if aerosols do not travel farther than most
| droplets, the oft-touted "six-foot rule" for social
| distancing may depend on the circumstances, Cowling says.
| If there is a fan or air conditioner, infectious aerosols
| (or even droplets, as was suspected in the case of that
| restaurant in China) could potentially sicken someone
| farther away who is downwind.
|
| --> October 2020: "Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2"
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf0521
|
| >Viruses in droplets (larger than 100 um) typically fall
| to the ground in seconds within 2 m of the source and can
| be sprayed like tiny cannonballs onto nearby individuals.
| Because of their limited travel range, physical
| distancing reduces exposure to these droplets. Viruses in
| aerosols (smaller than 100 um) can remain suspended in
| the air for many seconds to hours, like smoke, and be
| inhaled. They are highly concentrated near an infected
| person, so they can infect people most easily in close
| proximity. But aerosols containing infectious virus (2)
| can also travel more than 2 m and accumulate in poorly
| ventilated indoor air, leading to superspreading events
| (3).
|
| >Individuals with COVID-19, many of whom have no
| symptoms, release thousands of virus-laden aerosols and
| far fewer droplets when breathing and talking (4-6).
| Thus, one is far more likely to inhale aerosols than be
| sprayed by a droplet (7), and so the balance of attention
| must be shifted to protecting against airborne
| transmission. In addition to existing mandates of mask-
| wearing, social distancing, and hygiene efforts, we urge
| public health officials to add clear guidance about the
| importance of moving activities outdoors, improving
| indoor air using ventilation and filtration, and
| improving protection for high-risk workers (8).
|
| --> May, 2021: "Ten scientific reasons in support of
| airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2"
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00869-2/f
| ull...
|
| > First, superspreading events account for substantial
| SARS-CoV-2 transmission; indeed, such events may be the
| pandemic's primary drivers. [...]
|
| > Second, long-range transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between
| people in adjacent rooms but never in each other's
| presence has been documented in quarantine hotels. [...]
|
| > Third, asymptomatic or presymptomatic transmission of
| SARS-CoV-2 from people who are not coughing or sneezing
| is likely to account for at least a third, and perhaps up
| to 59%, of all transmission globally and is a key way
| SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world [...]
|
| > Fourth, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is higher indoors
| than outdoors and is substantially reduced by indoor
| ventilation.5 Both observations support a predominantly
| airborne route of transmission.
|
| > Fifth, nosocomial infections have been documented in
| health-care organisations, where there have been strict
| contact-and-droplet precautions and use of personal
| protective equipment (PPE) designed to protect against
| droplet but not aerosol exposure.
|
| > Sixth, viable SARS-CoV-2 has been detected in the air.
| In laboratory experiments, SARS-CoV-2 stayed infectious
| in the air for up to 3 h with a half-life of 1*1 h. [...]
|
| > Seventh, SARS-CoV-2 has been identified in air filters
| and building ducts in hospitals with COVID-19 patients;
| such locations could be reached only by aerosols.
|
| > Eighth, studies involving infected caged animals that
| were connected to separately caged uninfected animals via
| an air duct have shown transmission of SARS-CoV-2 that
| can be adequately explained only by aerosols.
|
| > Ninth, no study to our knowledge has provided strong or
| consistent evidence to refute the hypothesis of airborne
| SARS-CoV-2 transmission. [...]
|
| > Tenth, there is limited evidence to support other
| dominant routes of transmission--ie, respiratory droplet
| or fomite. [...]
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Thank you to sibling ggdG for presenting even more
| evidence.
|
| But I don't get your reply at all, wtallis. _" the next
| few paragraphs should be about backing that claim up with
| convincing evidence and explanations"_ - which is what
| the stuff about the Diamond Princess, SARS-1 and Hong
| Kong was about? Evidence and explanations for why the
| droplet model was wrong. Do you see that? The connection
| is that the claim exposure as simple as inverse square
| law on distance assumes no aerosol transmission, which is
| incorrect.
|
| It's hard not to feel that if people didn't keep flagging
| these kinds of discussions off the front pages, the wider
| HN community would be aware of all these basic facts
| which as the sibling post points out, is actually not
| controversial and hasn't been for years. HN is supposed
| to be about intellectual curiousity but the aggressive
| flagging behavior talked about by others in this thread
| means that too many posters here are stuck in a timewarp
| where it's still Jan 2020.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Personally, I thought it was already pretty well established
| that the six-foot rule was based on poor science. I remember
| hearing about that years ago.
| felixgallo wrote:
| The thing is, you're not even wrong. The six foot rule was
| based on what the best understanding of the experts was at
| the time, and probably saved thousands of lives. Just like
| forced masking up probably saved tens of thousands of
| lives. Both were great examples of science, which readily
| admits to tuning when new evidence comes into play.
|
| However, because there's a right wing cult around Donald
| Trump, whose fortunes were hurt by the pandemic, the six
| foot rule and masking and vaccines are set up as straw men
| and attacked by a gigantic and well funded and organized
| horde of proxies, including the #1 media network in the US.
| It goes something like this: because a particular
| individual got COVID, that's proof that vaccines are not
| 100% effective and so They Lied To Us For Nefarious
| Purposes. Or because this particular individual stood 6
| feet away and still got COVID, that's evidence that Fauci
| Is In A Conspiracy With The Chinese. Or because this
| particular individual survived COVID, it's just a cold. Or
| because masks are not 100% effective when not worn
| securely, they are not effective. And on and on.
|
| So it's not unreasonable or unlikely that you heard a thing
| about bad science and six feet of social distance or
| whatever. But hearing a thing, and the thing being true
| from foundational motivations of actual science, are very
| different right now.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| omg, even talking about the flagging is going to trigger
| the flamewar :)
| ggdG wrote:
| >The six foot rule was based on what the best
| understanding of the experts was at the time, and
| probably saved thousands of lives.
|
| You can't just make up the beneficial effects of
| something as you go. Can you cite some randomized
| controlled trials that support your claim?
|
| >Just like forced masking up probably saved tens of
| thousands of lives.
|
| One year ago, a huge Cochrane meta-analysis of the
| available RCTs regarding masking has put that idea to
| bed: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/146
| 51858.CD...
| felixgallo wrote:
| literally quoting from that meta-analysis, which does not
| include many clinical trials that have demonstrated an
| impact:
|
| "Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or
| N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of
| respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
|
| Example very large study published in a reputable
| journal: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9
| 069?cookieSe...
| ggdG wrote:
| >literally quoting from that meta-analysis, which does
| not include many clinical trials that have demonstrated
| an impact:
|
| Yes. To their credit, they only looked at randomized
| controlled trials.
|
| >"Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or
| N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of
| respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
|
| In other words: the RCTs don't show an effect to a
| significant degree.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I flagged that article, so I'll clearly explain why:
|
| 1. I think for anyone that has been on HN throughout pandemic
| knows it is _extremely_ unlikely for topics like this to
| produce any sort of valuable discussion. I almost _never_ see
| any sort of humility on the topic (to be clear, from many
| /all sides) that admits that people (individuals, experts,
| literally everyone) were doing what they thought best with
| the information they had available at the time. It always
| devolves into portraying the other side as evil. I'm tired of
| it, I don't want to see it on HN, there are literally pages
| and pages and pages of place on the Internet where you can
| have that debate if you're so inclined.
|
| 2. Are you honestly purporting _that specific_ article is
| well tailored to "an overwhelmingly science-minded
| audience", as opposed to just having a particular political
| axe to grind, given the title is "Anthony Fauci Fesses Up"?
| Honestly, if the article was written with an intent to
| encourage an _actual_ understanding about where the 6-foot
| rule came from, and about whether the evidence for it was
| lacking, I probably wouldn 't have flagged it.
|
| > it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed
| untouchable.
|
| I think the mistake you are making there is thinking because
| a particular article is flagged by a lot of users that "an
| important topic like that is deemed untouchable." I can't
| speak for others, but for me that is absolutely not what I
| think, and it's not why I flagged this particular submission.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| That isn't clear at all. You seem to be saying that if you
| anticipate that people _might_ question other people 's
| competence or motives, or in your view a discussion won't
| lead people to think the right thoughts ("encourage
| _actual_ understanding ") then you flag it to try to ensure
| nobody can discuss it.
|
| But you also say that making it undiscussable is also not
| about making the topic untouchable. That's just playing
| with words, isn't it? It's exactly what you're trying to do
| and exactly why you're flagging it.
|
| This particular case is really egregious. Fauci has said
| this draconian policy "just sort of appeared", yet you damn
| anyone questioning his competence or motives as lacking
| humility? What would it take for you to allow criticism of
| this guy?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Your response highlights the exact thing I'm talking
| about, as it ascribes motives to me that are totally
| foreign to me, and takes the tone that flagging an
| article means that I think I want to "ensure nobody can
| discuss it."
|
| I could respond to some of your other sentences, but
| you've exactly proven my point, so thank you.
| oramit wrote:
| Yeah this list seems to be pretty low quality stuff. There's a
| couple economic/political links that I think are interesting
| but I can totally see why they would be removed as off-topic or
| likely to produce a flamewar.
|
| It's pretty clear to me that any online forum needs good
| moderation to be healthy long term. HN has been good about this
| with a strong community providing upvotes/downvotes and a
| moderation team that seems pretty light handed but not afraid
| to say no when necessary. Please keep doing what you're doing.
| tmaly wrote:
| Props to the mods for keeping the post quality high.
|
| However, I do see a few decent posts in this list that probably
| warrant a second chance.
| kortilla wrote:
| The moderators are mainly the users. Flags are what kills a
| story quickly
| screye wrote:
| > mod*s*
|
| plural ?
| reductum wrote:
| I witnessed a recent front page link silently get changed to
| point to a parody video, then silently changed back later, with
| the top comment that remarked on the change silently removed.
|
| That told me all I needed to know about the moderation of this
| site.
|
| Thankfully someone captured a screenshot:
| https://merveilles.town/@cancel/111834048502040552
| mkl wrote:
| Dang explained it was a copy-paste error:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39182625
|
| huppeldepup's comment in the screenshot (and the replies)
| does seem to have vanished.
| fire_ball wrote:
| Imagine this itself getting removed... :)
| arcastroe wrote:
| > "literally the first rule of HN moderation is that we
| moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved"
|
| source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045
| tptacek wrote:
| That rule does not generally apply to HN meta debates, which
| this is, so it's a bit of a corner case. If there was a
| duplicate of this story on the front page tomorrow, I'd
| expect HN to honor the user flags on it.
| debacle wrote:
| It'd be interesting to see removed vs flagged, if you can scrape
| flag kills.
|
| The flagging system is a great utility, but certain things (e.g.
| anything pro-Musk) get mass flagged for emotional reasons.
| maxbond wrote:
| I really don't like Musk but I don't flag things Musk related.
| I frequently upvote them because I'm interested in the
| discussion.
|
| Unfortunately those stories often turn into flamewars. That's
| probably why people are flagging them.
|
| I don't think it's wise to draw so many inferences about why
| people vote the way they do. Frequently I see comments where
| someone makes a reasonable point, but also drops a bunch of
| flamebait, and when they're inevitably flagged they edit their
| comment to claim that the flags prove their point and that the
| problem who disagree with them are overly sensitive and
| censorious. But in reality a lot of the people flagging them
| probably agree with them, but don't want them to start a
| flamewars. I flag a lot of comments like that, even when I am
| agree with their overall point. (I actually did that with a
| comment just now.)
|
| It's a form of self fulfilling prophecy and further entrenches
| you into your position, which is antithetical to curious
| discussion.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > certain things (e.g. anything pro-Musk) get mass flagged for
| emotional reasons.
|
| Lots of Musk stuff, including positive stuff, on the front
| page. Yesterday there was a story about petabytes of data on
| the Starlink laser network, based only on Starlink PR afaict.
| persedes wrote:
| > While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard
| to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
|
| I consider myself very optimistic and often naive, but even I
| would not be surprised by this kind of HN user reaction :D
| jerrygenser wrote:
| Only saw one Gary tan link removed. I thought I'd see more. Maybe
| it was only removed because it was a dupe? I'm referring to the
| "Gary tan tupac lyrics" one.
| s_dev wrote:
| There was a bunch of Gary Tan links -- you can see in my
| comments I was arguing with a bunch of HNers today about
| whether he's right or wrong on that "Die Slow" tweet. Probably
| dang removed it because it's a dupe story.
|
| He could have phrased it a little better but the people calling
| for his removal from YC are just plain silly.
| lars_francke wrote:
| > While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard
| to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
|
| I am, so you can believe it. But: I don't flag things that I'm
| tired of.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| If I could, I'd hibernate until such time as I didn't have to
| hear about generative AI anymore.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I agree, I don't find it very interesting.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It took about 10 years for the crypto headline hysteria to
| taper but it might have been only because ai is now the big
| annoying thing to shoehorn into everything. Monkeys pawl will
| curl and you will emerge out of your hibernation to more
| disgust at whatever the next annoying thing will be.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think the difference is that AI is definitely _useful_
| and here to stay.
|
| Crypto was mostly scams or pie in the sky ideas that will
| never work. It will stick around for money laundering &
| buying drugs but that's about it.
| smaudet wrote:
| Eh? I'm not pretending digital coins or dubious "tokens"
| were all particularly useful, but crypto (in the sense of
| cryptography) has been around for decades and is
| definitely here to stay...
|
| The people who made coins and tokens bad for society are
| doing the same thing with GenAI...
|
| Both are useful and both come with huge problems. Neither
| one is some panacea or a sustainable get-rich-quick
| scheme (obviously, both people in "crypto" and in "GenAI"
| are getting rich, but neither are going to lead to some
| sort of great societal good).
| sfink wrote:
| > but crypto (in the sense of cryptography) has been
| around for decades and is definitely here to stay...
|
| But that's not the sense under discussion.
| "Crypto"=cryptography lost the language war and was
| completely supplanted by "crypto"=cryptocurrency. I
| really wish the word could regain its original and useful
| meaning, but it's too late now.
|
| Ironically, "I work in crypto" went from meaning
| something useful to society to meaning being a parasite
| on society, and you'd best not accidentally use the
| phrase expecting people to understand it to mean the
| original thing (cryptography).
|
| (Yes, not all uses of cryptocurrency are a parasitic
| detriment. But if you happen to be working on actually
| useful stuff and we meet socially, then please be _very_
| quick about saying that you work at doing something with
| cryptocurrency or blockchain that is intended to provide
| actual benefit. If you just say "I work in crypto", I
| will excuse myself at the first opportunity.)
| smaudet wrote:
| > "Crypto"=cryptography lost the language war and was
| completely supplanted by "crypto"=cryptocurrency.
|
| On the timescale of the past 4-5 years, you are correct
| about the popular usage.
|
| However, if cryptocurrency continues to recede from the
| public eye, then in another 4-5 years I think "crypto"
| will no longer mean "cryptocurrency".
|
| Understanding both the current lexicon and the "archaic"
| and "recently archaic" uses of the term I hold is both
| useful and pertinent to being able to communicate
| effectively. Which is why I immediately clarified, I'm
| talking about the 40+ year definition of the term, not
| the current whimsical linguistic fad.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Also, it's very clear from the messaging and breathless
| hype that the NFT grifters packed uo their stuff and moved
| over _en masse_ to the GenAI space
| projectazorian wrote:
| Was at a networking event recently and "I was in the
| crypto/NFT space but I'm now pivoting to GenAI" was by
| far the most common way people introduced themselves.
|
| At least it made it easy to figure out who I didn't need
| to talk to.
| nemothekid wrote:
| There was some heavy handed moderation decision that moot made,
| can't remember what, but he enforced it by saying " _One man 's
| shitpost is another man's board culture_". I think about that a
| lot when it comes to moderation because people tend to assume
| everyone in the community is just like them; and really only
| moderators have a gauge on how saturated certain can be.
|
| It's also why I don't like the "free speech at all costs" meme
| that gets thrown around when $corporation bans $person_i_like.
| Every community needs moderation and it's often a thankless job
| that feels like nothing is being done at all when it's being
| done right.
| captainpiggies wrote:
| Why does seeing moot quoted suddenly make me feel old.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I make my money building things with LLMs and even _I_ am tired
| of reading about them
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah me too and I also wouldn't flag them. I flag things that
| are false or misleading or just especially stupid.
| dang wrote:
| > it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-
| related news
|
| For sure many are. This happens with every Major Ongoing Topic
| (MOT) and LLMs are way beyond a MOT [1]. The hivemind tires of
| repetition extremely quickly [2]. The trick is to try to
| separate wheat from chaff, where 'wheat' means the stories that
| bring Significant New Information (SNI) [3] and 'chaff' means
| the follow-up and copycat stories, which are legion [4].
|
| It's important to understand are that there's a wide spectrum
| of opinion about this stuff. If you imagine a slider with
| "allow zero posts about $TOPIC" at one end, and "allow all
| posts about $TOPIC" at the other end, pretty much every user
| would slide it to a different position. This is true for every
| $TOPIC and especially for the biggest ones.
|
| Frontpage space is the scarcest resource HN has [5] and every
| reader has a different 'signature' of preferences that they
| would like to see (or not see) there. This means not only that
| it's impossible to satisfy everybody, but that it's impossible
| to fully satisfy _anybody_ --because nobody's 'signature' is
| perfectly matched on the front page, and (lest any of you be
| thinking of this quick riposte) certainly not the mods'!
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| [3]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| [4]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| [5]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| maxbond wrote:
| Have you ever considered writing a book about what you've
| learned about moderation and community?
|
| You seem to have developed these concepts pretty extensively.
| Seeing you break down this terminology whets my appetite to
| hear from you in long form.
| dang wrote:
| I'd be pretty miserable doing that, but one of these years
| I'd like to condense the past explanations into something a
| bit more definitive and put them up as sort of glosses on
| the site guidelines. I imagine most of those HN Search
| links I'm constantly posting could be replaced by a link to
| some sort of canonical paragraph on the topic.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I will occasionally flag things that will result in discussions
| that are always the same because I'm tired of them. Stories
| about tipping at restaurants or Trump or Biden, for example --
| literally every argument for or against has been made and
| there's nothing new or interesting to say. But I'm more likely
| to hide them.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Why would one ever flag stories they believe will result in
| the same useless discussions rather than just hiding them?
|
| I think I've only ever flagged one or two instances of spam
| personally.
| em500 wrote:
| I would also include the periodic Monty Hall re-post
| (everything that ever comes up in the discussions can be
| found in the Monty Hall problem wikipedia page).
|
| And also pretty much any article about inflation.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| LLMs are like crypto, where scams and scam-adjacents are
| _everywhere_.
|
| I am the biggest local ML advocate you will find. My 3090 is
| either running Yi 34B queries or other experiments all day, my
| job is with local LLMS... But I am totally OK with heavy handed
| AI-related moderation. I dont want the sea of AI grifters to
| have a _single second_ on the HN front page.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I'm sick of LLM-related news. I'm fascinated by the technology
| and the progress, but for every one article about something
| novel, there are dozens rehashing the same points about social
| impact, bias, deepfakes, plagiarism, etc. These topics are of
| some interest to me, but the vast majority of the articles
| bring nothing new to the table and are reactionary responses to
| the latest infraction.
| strict9 wrote:
| Good moderation is exactly why I check HN every day and not so
| much other places. Thanks mods!
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > I sent an email to the moderator. @dang, who was very kind and
| quick in his response, explained to me that the Story had been
| flagged by users even without being explicitly [flagged], and
| that he could therefore only hypothesize the causes of the flag.
|
| Maybe this is a consequence of Hacker News not having a way to
| downvote stories?
|
| I only flag stories that are blatant violation of HN's
| guidelines: SPAM, politics, racist... Otherwise, if I don't like
| a story I don't do anything.
|
| Maybe I'll start flagging stories that I don't like?
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, I suspect a sizable number of people use "flag" as a mega-
| downvote for things they passionately don't like, rather than
| for policy violations and spam.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Absolutely. I flag every single story I see that's even
| somewhat related to crypto "currency".
| goles wrote:
| For anyone that is concerned about over flagging, please
| consider turning on showdead and vouching responsibly!
|
| If as many people thoughtfully vouched as maliciously flagged
| it may be less of an issue.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Wait, how do you vouch for something that has been flagged?
| I don't see that option, even with showdead turned on.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You may have to click into the comment directly.
| jlokier wrote:
| For recent dead comments, click on the time ("31 minutes
| ago") to bring up the comment's own page where there's a
| "vouch" option next to the other comment options if you
| have enough karma.
|
| For dead stories in the "new" queue, I see a "vouch"
| option already without going to the story's own page.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Yeah, like you I would have never thought to use the flag
| unless it was violations etc but turns out it's a weird
| behaviour of many users. Not sure why or when it originated but
| seems like its been driving the up/downs of a number of
| topics/posts for years now. Still use with moderation.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Where do you see that quote in the OP? I searched for it and
| didn't find it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "WHY? Feel free to skip this part or click to expand"
|
| looks like you didn't feel free.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard
| to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news."
|
| If you believe that HN is a hive mind and all users must believe
| in the exact same things, then yes, this is probably hard to
| believe.
|
| I however, am tired of LLM news, but I just simply ignore them as
| I'm well aware that many people here are very much interested in
| them. So at least an anecdotal response of one that some HN users
| are tired of LLM related news.
|
| You might also be surprised that not all HN users like social
| media while some do. Some are very privacy conscious while others
| will freely post all of their everythings to anywhere. You might
| find it hard to believe that some lean left while others lean
| right with some even landing straight in the middle. Why you
| would think anything is hard to believe in this day and age is
| very strange to me.
| mindcrime wrote:
| > You might find it hard to believe that some lean left while
| others lean right
|
| And then you get those of us who are simultaneously left-of-
| left and right-of-right...
| ryandrake wrote:
| That "While I have no reason" line has been quoted in six top-
| level comments so far, obviously it struck a nerve here.
|
| It would be ultra-cool to have rough topic filters here, so I
| could just go to settings and hit a checkbox to ignore all the
| LLM-this and AI-that articles. Easier said than done, I'm sure.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Any time you paint with a broad brush with comments like
| that, you're going to miss some of the details. Looking at
| the time stamps of those comments shows they were pretty much
| at the same time. I use the phrase "group think" a lot, but
| intentionally do it to in part rabble rouse, but also to get
| those in the group think to maybe think and take a second to
| question if it truly is group think behind their current
| position.
| zogrodea wrote:
| I think this is an unnecessarily uncharitable reading, that the
| author assumes HN is a hive mind.
|
| Replace "HN users" with "most HN users" (it's common to use
| general language when one's intention is to point out a trend
| in a population) and, as another person tired of AI/LLM news, I
| would also be surprised given how much popularity (upvotes,
| comments) HN users tended to give to those stories.
| guhcampos wrote:
| > While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard
| to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news
|
| Surprise! Yes, We are!
| jjackson5324 wrote:
| Yep, supports HN's reputation as being hilariously bad at
| predicting tech trends + future innovation.
| nottorp wrote:
| The corpse of blockchain would like to have a word with you
| :)
| jjackson5324 wrote:
| Um, have you seen the price of bitcoin? Or the Bitcoin ETF?
|
| What are you talking about lol.
| saagarjha wrote:
| No because most people stopped talking about it
| sdsd wrote:
| Yeah, people _on HN_.
|
| I'm tutoring a friend's homeschool kids (who live in the
| US, I'm in Central America) in Spanish and the mom
| couldn't set up Payoneer so yesterday she asked if I'd
| accept bitcoin.
|
| I'm an Urbiter and everyone in that scene is all about
| crypto.
|
| It's still big but you're right, it's more confined to
| specific niches, instead of MSNBC talking about NFTs
| ESTheComposer wrote:
| Yes the corpse that just got approved for a BTC ETF with an
| ETH ETF on the way and with multiple companies winning
| lawsuits against the SEC. But sure, because it's not on HN
| anymore it's a corpse.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Believe it or not, it's possible to be both interested in
| LLMs and also feel that there is too much LLM content on a
| given aggregator.
| tomrod wrote:
| Eh, what I see popular on HN tends to be the trend 5 years
| down the line.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I fully expect AI to be huge in the future, and only get
| bigger.
|
| Doesn't mean I want 50% of HN to be about AI.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Especially when none of it brings anything new. A lot of
| the AI announcements are from companies who are basically
| saying "we can send what you typed through GPT-4 with maybe
| a slightly specialized system prompt". And when it comes to
| blogs, there's only so many times one can tolerate reading
| the same exact arguments for or against AI.
|
| I don't know why this has happened with both AI and
| cryptocurrency that people feel personally attacked when
| others just don't want to be bombarded with it 24/7.
| Bobaso wrote:
| this post in now at the top, I wonder wether it will be removed
| ;)
| top_sigrid wrote:
| Is there any reason why you would assume this in such a snarky
| conspiracy-esque tone?
|
| Like someone above pointed out, a rule of moderation on HN
| literally is, that stories about HN or ycombinator companies
| itself are moderated less [0].
|
| [0] -
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| ziml77 wrote:
| Probably because if they bring that tone to enough topics,
| eventually they will be right. Though also probably not for
| the reasons they think (e.g. they say a post will be removed
| because it discusses a controversial topic when in reality it
| was removed because it was just plain garbage content).
| pwenzel wrote:
| Fine with me! I keep coming back here because the site is
| relatively un-cluttered. Thanks mods!
| andrewsy wrote:
| Some feedback by the way: might want to sort the dates in reverse
| chronological order so the newest removed stories show up first
| :D
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| It looks like some of these are cases of duplicate threads being
| migrated, which isn't completely obvious when looking at this
| Github page.
|
| For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219568 was
| just a dupe. Maybe that's the case for some of the more technical
| stories that are removed.
| dvaun wrote:
| When I had more downtime I'd spend a lot of time browsing /new.
|
| There's a wealth of great blogposts that show up there which
| don't always make it to the front page (understandable; we only
| have so much attention to give).
|
| What I will say is that there is a ton of cruft that spams the
| board. Thinking of spammed blog posts from one or more accounts,
| sensationalist news, etc which wouldn't provide much value here.
|
| Flagging really helps on /new IME. It's worth spending time there
| if you haven't tried HN other than via the front page
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| this is an excellent project, which highlights what a stellar job
| the moderators are doing
| CipherThrowaway wrote:
| > While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard
| to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
|
| I am. Completely sick of it! Thanks dang for your diligent
| moderation.
| ktsakas wrote:
| I love HN and I think the moderators are doing a great job. But
| could one of the mods explain the logic with some examples from
| the Github repo?
|
| just trying to see what makes the moderation good :)
| numbsafari wrote:
| > While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard
| to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
|
| If you can't fathom people being tired of LLM-related news, have
| I got an NFT for you!
| _uqca wrote:
| i feel like every news source, forum, link aggregator, ... has
| its own target audience and scope of topics that make for
| productive discussion, its own biases and predispositions, its
| own trolls and need for pruning and moderation.
|
| i feel like yes of course there are many things i disagree with
| on this site. but ultimately i value the information shared and
| the discussion enough to keep coming back. any relationship where
| people always agree there is probably only one person doing the
| actual thinking.
|
| i have learned so much about tech here, i have learned about many
| best practices and projects that i would have never heard of, i
| have made no bones about my thoughts on various subjects that
| could easily be classified as touchy, i have really enjoyed the
| discourse. for the time being i definitely plan and hope to
| continue doing so.
|
| (so while this site is an interesting artifact, and maybe it is
| good that someone is taking a look and keeping a record, i
| personally won't bother unless/until i see a pressing need. at
| which point i will maybe just move on instead tbh.)
| pleasantpeasant wrote:
| I think you're going to see people start leaving Reddit as the
| IPO approaches and many will be coming to HN or other reddit-
| clones.
|
| Half the comments on Reddit really do seem to be made by bots,
| you can easily tell when you look at their post history.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I wrote a program that tracked the changes in story titles on
| Hacker News a while ago. Some of them were really quite strange.
| I can't understand some of the policies, like why the words "How"
| and "Why" are stripped from the front of titles (eg "How I
| rewrote my app" would be changed to "I rewrote my app"). Some
| very small proportion of the title changes could definitely have
| been construed as politically motivated but overwhelmingly they
| were benign.
| fragmede wrote:
| did you write up your findings anywhere? I'd love to read about
| them!
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I didn't, mainly because the findings were so mundane! I
| still have the data, so perhaps I will some day.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Can we please have this in reverse chronological order - later
| dates at the top? Also, another request -- can we change this to
| TABLES instead of the plain Markdown list. I believe this is
| where a tabular display will be much easier to browse.
|
| Thanks.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| > While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard
| to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
|
| I think the answer to this is... go set up your our LLM News web
| site and build a community. I really love HN but I wanted more
| retro computing and gaming news so I created by own site
| (https://twostopbits.com/) using the HN source code. It's not
| hard. Go build the thing you want and moderate it.
|
| I've been in various online communities for over 35 years and I
| can tell you that by far the best moderated and longest
| successfully running community is HN (for a while The Well was
| amazing).
| felideon wrote:
| > It's not hard. Go build the thing you want and moderate it.
|
| Does the source code include moderating tools, or is it just a
| bare bones aggregator with a default ranking algo?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| There are moderation tools. I can do things like kill a
| story, ban a domain, ban a user, alter the score on a story,
| mark a story as dead, lock a story so no one else can edit
| it, see how many sock puppets voted for the story, edit any
| aspect of a story.
|
| I modified the default source to have a concept of tags on a
| story because I wanted people to be able to filter stories by
| their areas of interest (e.g. everything Commodore 64:
| https://twostopbits.com/tag?q=c64). All my changes are open
| and here: https://github.com/jgrahamc/twostopbits
| rhaksw wrote:
| > alter the score on a story
|
| It's cool that you set up your own instance, but do you see
| no problem with covertly altering the score of a story?
|
| Such secrecy leads to oversized, over-trusted forums, and
| is what this post seeks to address.
| duck wrote:
| I hadn't see this before, but that is exactly what I've been
| wanting more of - thanks for setting that up John! I'm curious,
| do you feel like lower traffic communities like yours serves up
| the content mix you were hoping for when you started it?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I have no idea. I created it as an experiment. It's fairly
| active despite being a few months old. We'll see what
| happens.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I have bookmarked and will post something if I get my
| Everdrive64 ordered.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Thank you! Hope you enjoy the site.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Wow very cool love the retro angle. Assuming you are using
| Workers for this?
| jgrahamc wrote:
| No, I use a lot of Cloudflare products (the domain is
| registered through Cloudflare, the site is proxied and
| protected by Cloudflare, I use Cloudflare's free Web
| Analytics), but I am not using Workers for this.
|
| The HN source base is a monolithic Arc program and Arc is in
| Racket/Scheme. To use Workers I would have had to get Racket
| working on Wasm which I simply haven't tried. Also news.arc
| does a bunch of file system access and I'd have to rewrite
| that to use Workers KV or something. So, I decided to use
| lots of Cloudflare and run the Arc code on a VPS I've had for
| many years. The whole thing is running in a screen session
| which I can hop into and be in the REPL when I want.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm most seem to be idiotic, spam or off topic for HN.
|
| I wonder if a useful application for these "AI"s could be to pull
| interesting - to someone - stories from what the hive minds
| rejected ;)
|
| Just to be clear, this is stories that got completely removed off
| the front page and does not include whatever is still available 4
| pages behind but got overtaken by other stuff?
|
| Sometimes I see an interesting heading but skip it, and when i
| reload it's gone. I doubt they were all flagged into oblivion.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Essentially because users are tired of some topic that threatens
| them (LLMs or AI) we censor it.
|
| I think this is the beginning of HN becoming irrelevant in its
| old age. It starts to ignore realities it doesn't like.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| This is an interesting dataset. I suspect the main things that
| get removed are A) politics B) duplicates.
| smaudet wrote:
| I'm echoing others, but the article on rust async/await seems
| good.
|
| You may or may not agree with the conclusions of the post, but
| its a technical topic with at least some specific exploration
| of the (performance/code writing) issues, that links to quite a
| few further topics for exploration.
|
| https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html
|
| That said, I noted more than a few typos in the article, so I
| wonder if there is generally a spell check filter for article
| quality.
|
| https://trunk.io/blog/git-commit-messages-are-useless
|
| I also found this one interesting. I don't agree with the
| article, but its an interesting viewpoint and I learned a bit
| about what some people are doing with git. I couldn't tell you
| why it dropped (unpopular)?
|
| Which is where its possible that this (new) tool falls short,
| it can't actually tell what was censored, just what wasn't
| popular.
|
| Unpopular things sometimes are so because they fly in the face
| of conventional wisdom, but aren't actually wrong or
| invaluable, which might be the real value of this tool.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > but the article on rust async/await seems good.
|
| It is really not. It is a rant that produced no good
| discussion anywhere else on the internet. It has no novel
| insight and is dressed up in a really ugly way. I'm not
| saying HN should have removed it, but I don't mind that it
| got flagged.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Using the official HN API, the service fetches 90 Top Stories
| every minute and makes a comparison with the first 30 Top Stories
| (i.e. the Front Page) fetched the previous minute. It logs all
| missing Stories here. The assumption is that a Story cannot go
| from the top 30 to a position higher than 90 in a single minute,
| without having been explicitly removed.
|
| The OP's hypothesis is that, if rank drops from top-30 to below
| top-90 (I think "higher than 90" is a typo?), in less than a
| minute, then it must be due to moderator action.
|
| Is that true?
| lolinder wrote:
| No, it's not true. I have many times been the person who hits
| "flag" and then refreshed the page to find the story
| disappeared as [flagged]. When that happens the story is
| completely gone, off at least the first 3 pages (which is what
| OP is measuring).
| dang wrote:
| It's definitely not true, as lolinder has pointed out. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537 for more.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I've wanted something like this for years. My top requests would
| be to offer this as a standalone separate site, with sorting in
| reverse chron order, and an easy way to click into the comments
| for each story. Right now I can click into the info for the link,
| and to the outlink, but there doesn't appear to be a one-click
| path to the HN comments themselves.
| petsfed wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure if that's a bad thing. To an extent, it
| seems like reddit's "sort by controversial". If you're looking
| for a flamewar, _here you go_.
|
| It's interesting to see the comments sometimes, but since part
| of the reason these things get removed is because of the
| flamewar detector, I feel like I can't be that surprised or
| edified when I open the bag labeled "manure" to find it is full
| of shit.
| gamepsys wrote:
| It's great that they offer the source code so you can modify it
| and run the program on your own hardware to make sure stories
| aren't being removed from the stories removed from the Hacker
| News front page list.
|
| While the above is me joking, I appreciate the extreme
| transparency that showing code and explaining methodology
| provides. This adds more credibility than any other single thing
| the author could have done.
| calibas wrote:
| I wrote something similar, it's a simple Python tool that
| estimates what a story's rank should be based on the score, and
| compares it to the actual rank. It's rough and only tested on Win
| 10 so far:
|
| https://github.com/calibas/hacker-newd/blob/main/hacker-newd...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Spammer wonders why stories are being "removed".
|
| How can you complain about your submissions getting hundreds of
| upvotes and a bunch of discussion over the last 4 months only.
| That's a decent amount of eyeballs.
|
| Other than the blatant offtopic/spam ones, most of them are just
| ones that have drifted away and are _old news_ , or flagged, or
| dupes. It's driven by the flow of the site and its users.
| mapreduce wrote:
| > In the case of the first, the Story was among the first on the
| Front Page, until its title was changed from "Stable Diffusion
| Turbo on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 generates an image in 29 minutes"
| to "OnnxStream: Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 Base on a Raspberry Pi
| Zero 2". This effectively "killed" the Story.
|
| > In the case of the second, the Story was in third place on the
| Front Page, less than an hour after the submission. In this case
| it was simply removed from the Front Page.
|
| With repeatedly getting flagged articles like this, at some point
| you have to begin to wonder if you are not simply spamming the
| community by trying to promote your links.
|
| I get that people want to promote their stuff but the community
| has preferences too. The community can get tired of LLM articles
| reaching the front page everyday! The community can refuse to be
| spammed and the community can flag articles!
|
| > While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard
| to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
|
| Denial? Why is it so hard to believe that HN users would get
| tired LLM-related news. I get tired of it myself but I don't have
| flagging privilege. I find it very believable that HN users who
| have the flagging privilege might want to flag LLM-related news.
| yamrzou wrote:
| I went to check if the story I submitted today ( _Breathing 101_
| -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39227295) was present in
| the list, and it was indeed! I don't know how it reached the
| front page and why it got removed.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I would have downvoted that for a number of reasons. I guess
| people flagged it, since there's no downvote. I don't flag
| unless it's something egregious (racism, spam, etc). But since
| this thread is all about the topic of why stories might not
| make the cut here, this is why I would have downvoted it if I
| could:
|
| 1. "Breathing 101" is an uninformative headline. I correctly
| guessed that it was literally referring to the human act of
| breathing, but it's still a bad title (I know it's not your
| title, and that HN encourages using the original source's
| title; it just sucks).
|
| 2. You submitted the link with no comment or context about what
| the article was or why it might be interesting. If a headline
| grabs my eye, I always click on the "N comments" link and the
| article link to open two tabs, and I look for additional
| descriptive text from the submitter, or a comment from them
| about what they found interesting. Sometimes I read the actual
| article first, but if the title is ambiguous or the topic is
| contentious, I'll usually start with the comments tab and see
| if I'm going to be wasting my time before I read an article.
| This alone wouldn't be a reason to downvote, but if I was
| leaning that way, it would factor in.
|
| 3. The word "wellness" in the link's domain is a huge red flag.
| To me it means "this is going to be a bunch of hippie crap".
| Not a primary factor, but seeing that would be enough to make
| me dig farther and find evidence so that I could Angry Downvote
| something I don't want to see on HN ever, if we could downvote.
| Yes, this is petty.
|
| 4. The very top of the linked article says "Click here to make
| an appointment". This indicates spam.
|
| 5. The article is just bad. There's not much information. It's
| not scientific. It touches lightly on some potentially
| interesting things but doesn't dive into them at all, or link
| to better sources, and it ends with what appears to be advice
| and encouragement to incorporate breathing exercises, but
| without much information about how or what the benefit is.
|
| It looks like spam. It's the kind of clickbait that floods my
| Facebook feed.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I started collecting the /news feed something like 7 years ago in
| a script, I think it's still running. It's fascinating watching
| stories get dropped or auto-killed and then running stats to find
| out what the algorithm is trimming. I think I started it because
| there'd be things changed or removed and you couldn't tell unless
| you had looked at it before it was culled. At some point I'll
| kill the linode it's running on, maybe move it to a Lambda, push
| the database to GitHub.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > It's fascinating watching stories get dropped or auto-killed
| and then running stats to find out what the algorithm is
| trimming.
|
| So what did you learn ??
| llm_nerd wrote:
| I've always assumed that when a story rapidly drops past the
| first three pages (e.g. >90) it is because it has been flagged
| some indicative, disproportionate number of times[1] by users
| with flag functionality. The submission seems to presume that
| such drops are only the result of Daniel or whoever manually
| doing it.
|
| Which is true?
|
| [1] - Notably the majority of the "removed" stories have pretty
| tiny number of upvotes, so if flags are weighted proportionately
| it wouldn't take many.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| > The assumption is that a Story cannot go from the top 30 to a
| position higher than 90 in a single minute, without having been
| explicitly removed.
|
| I'm not sure this is a valid assumption. https://news.social-
| protocols.org/stats?id=39094387 looks to be a story that dropped
| to the thirties pretty quickly. Maybe due to other suddenly
| popular content?
|
| Looking at the 13 stories listed for Monday, January 22, 2024
| only 3 seem to have been removed from HN. The other 10 stories
| still exist.
|
| The HP story, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39087776, was
| likely kicked from the front page due to being a duplicate of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39060793
|
| The Ford story, https://news.social-
| protocols.org/stats?id=39089599, seems to be incorrectly
| detected.
|
| Honestly only 3 or 4 out of 13 look like possible moderation to
| me. And they don't seem bad. Does a story about razor wire in
| Texas belong on hacker news? I'm in Texas so the story is of
| interest to me but I'd expect to hear about it elsewhere, not on
| HN.
|
| Overall it just makes me think HN is doing a good job at
| moderation.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Does a story about razor wire in Texas belong on hacker news?
| I'm in Texas so the story is of interest to me but I'd expect
| to hear about it elsewhere, not on HN.
|
| Perhaps in TX you don't realize it, but it's a big national
| story, implicating the Constitution, federal authority, even
| the Civil War.
|
| It's political, for sure; but it's not local.
| Macha wrote:
| HN is present in more than just the US
| dang wrote:
| It's not a valid assumption. I'd better post about this at the
| top level: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I dont understand what "explicit" means here.
|
| If it gets algorithmically deranked for user flags, but but not
| hidden, is that explicit?
|
| I assume "explicit" means manual moderator intervention, but I
| don't really see anything that suggests that.
| StopTheWorld wrote:
| I demand to know why "Men are going to brutal boot camps to
| reclaim their masculinity" was removed from the front page!</s>
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| * 96% of U.S. temperature stations fail to meet what NOAA
| considers "acceptable" [pdf] ? why remove
| asmor wrote:
| While I understand why "Secret Plan against Germany" - a story
| about Germany's far right planning "remigration" of even citizens
| - was removed, I still would've liked to see the part of the
| discussion that wouldn't have been arguing about the semantics of
| the term "nazi". This is the article that sparked a never seen
| before mobilization of demonstrators against these planners and
| their party in Germany.
| nathanyz wrote:
| Long overdue transparency. Sometimes these are innocuous or
| warranted removals, but there is also an element of protectionism
| at play. And that may not even be due to mod actions, but blocks
| of users who all flag articles to get them pushed to no mans
| land.
|
| There are companies who if you submit a negative post about,
| within short order the post is pushed out of view of the top
| pages.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >blocks of users who all flag articles to get them pushed to no
| mans land
|
| This is just another way of saying that a critical numeric
| threshold of users didn't like something. Framing the
| opinions/actions of groups of people on the internet as
| conspiring or dog-piling is a fallacy. E.g. if a person Tweets
| something that a million people read and a hundred of them
| reply to disagree, you'll often see that person follow up with
| something like, "wow, now all these people are attacking me",
| even though everybody acted in complete isolation and did
| nothing strange or harmful individually. Nobody rang a bell in
| the town square and handed out pitchforks. The internet breaks
| human psychology.
| nathanyz wrote:
| Except when it's not. If you don't think groups within
| organizations all message each other to quickly flag posts
| that are negative towards them, then you may be looking
| through this with an idealistic lens that hasn't been
| shattered yet.
|
| I'm not denying your premise that yes sometimes independent
| people with no coordination, all flag an article. That is how
| the system should work. But there are also articles that will
| quickly get flagged through coordination of interested
| parties.
|
| Hacker News has a lot more power than many think in terms of
| tastemaking in the tech industry. So there is a lot of
| motivation and benefit for people to manipulate its
| functionality to either boost or protect their business.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related
| news
|
| I know there are already a handful of comments about this line,
| but wow! It bears repeating: My eyebrows almost shot off the top
| of my head when I read this. What kinds of things does the author
| find _easy_ to believe??
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Thank you. Already saw one I would like to read.
|
| What is criteria to remove some of these.
|
| I've read the 'terms' for submitting. sometimes the removed ones
| don't appear to violate anything.
| dang wrote:
| > _The assumption is that a Story cannot go from the top 30 to a
| position higher than 90 in a single minute, without having been
| explicitly removed._
|
| That's wrong. Both the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated
| discussion detector) and user flags do that, and there are other
| software mechanisms that do it too. For example, if a story has
| been on the front page for more than (IIRC) 18 hours, it gets an
| automatic downweight unless we manually override it.
|
| Also, keep in mind that user flags affect a submission's rank
| long before the [flagged] marker appears.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| > keep in mind that user flags affect a submission's rank long
| before the [flagged] marker appears
|
| What kinds of user flags are there and why are they not public?
| People should know. Shadowbanning belongs in the 2010s.
| rezonant wrote:
| It's just the flagging you already have access to (as you
| have more than 30 karma). It's the flag option. There's
| nothing special otherwise that I'm aware of (at least at 2500
| karma)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| At some point you get the option to vouch for flagged posts
| as well.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| In your profile settings there is an option to show flagged
| topics and posts.
| nathanyz wrote:
| How do you keep user flags from being used as a way to squash
| articles on a particular topic before they have had the chance
| to be exposed to the wider HN community?
|
| Meaning if someone were to theoretically get a real time feed
| of HN submissions, and flagged articles that they didn't want
| seen as well as messaging a group of friends to do the same
| thing. Do you have protections for this type of behavior that
| would prevent this person from having undue influence on what
| can and cannot have a chance at being seen by others?
| kortilla wrote:
| What you're asking about is referred to as "voting ring
| detection" and it's something social networks keep very
| secret.
| nathanyz wrote:
| Yes, I know they do some form of detection on this for
| up/down votes, but flagging is supposed to be for content
| that violates rules, so I am curious if they handle it
| similarly. It doesn't really help you boost content, but
| can sure be used to suppress content if not tracked as
| flagging seems to significantly reduce visibility of a
| post.
| maxbond wrote:
| I don't have any proprietary knowledge of how HN does
| voting ring detection, but to offer an intuition about how
| it might work in the scenario proposed by GP, this voting
| ring would be detectable because their flags are highly
| correlated and clustered together in time. The more stories
| they attempt to flag down (successfully or otherwise), the
| more obvious the pattern will be.
|
| I'm sure you're already thinking of ways to bypass that,
| and yes what you're thinking will probably work, it's a
| game of cat and mouse and no one technique will be
| sufficient or work forever. (See also
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing)
| )
| dang wrote:
| I don't have a problem with users building things like this
| because the principles by which HN works are all easy enough to
| explain and defend--just remember that anything this complex is
| inevitably a mess, so you need to have high tolerance for
| messiness if you want to understand it accurately.
|
| However, it's important to correct inaccuracies like the one
| mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537.
| Robin89, can you please fix the text? I know it was just a
| mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.
|
| Also, it would make it easier for me to respond to the questions
| here if you'd link the HN IDs on your page to the actual HN
| threads. Currently they link to social-protocols.org. Obviously
| you can link to whatever you want but I'm having trouble tracing
| the questions here. Everyone has their own list of "what happened
| to story X, Y, Z, and what about W and V and J too" and while I'm
| happy to answer all those in principle, there are physical limits
| on how many I can work through.
|
| I'm going to be in meetings for most of the next few hours but
| I'll try to answer questions in this thread later, assuming I
| don't drown in it.
| rhaksw wrote:
| > Robin89, can you please fix the text? know that was just a
| mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.
|
| How can he/we verify it's wrong? The down-weighting you
| describe is not visible to users. Even OP won't know.
|
| You can say that down-weighting happens, but we're asking to
| see where down-weighting happens.
| bnralt wrote:
| Additionally, just because it's possible that this could
| happen doesn't really give us an idea of how likely it is. Is
| it one of those theoretically possible, but it never actually
| happens events? there's a huge difference between it
| impacting half of the stories that fall off that quickly, and
| it impacting 1 in 10,000 stories that fall off that quickly.
| rhaksw wrote:
| Communities would get a good sense for the frequency if
| forums would simply disclose content moderation to the
| submitting users. Offending users would learn what's not
| allowed and share that with the community.
|
| But today's forums frequently do not disclose moderation to
| submitting users, and that is why we are now seeing major
| court cases over 230, government-led censorship, etc.
| dang wrote:
| I don't know anything about other forums, but for the
| reasons why on HN we don't publish a full moderation log,
| see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 as well
| as the past explanations linked from there.
|
| You can, however, always get a question answered. That's
| basically our implicit contract with the community.
| rhaksw wrote:
| Full moderation logs are different than showing
| submitters how their posts have been moderated.
|
| On HN, my understanding is that you (moderators) can
| penalize stories without the submitter's knowledge. But
| if HN instead disclosed that penalty to the story's
| submitter, that would help this community communicate
| better.
|
| As for how it works elsewhere, if a YouTube channel
| removes your comment, you won't know [1]. Same thing on
| Reddit, Facebook, and X. So while HN is relatively small,
| the practice of withholding content moderation decisions
| from submitters/commenters is widespread.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e6BIkKBZpg
| kortilla wrote:
| Wtf are you talking about? He's literally telling us and has
| mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly
| crushes a story.
|
| I've seen it happen when I've flagged stories so either there
| is a vast conspiracy of moderators that receive pages when I
| flag things so they can downrank... or maybe dang isn't lying
| about something that should be super obvious as a community
| self policing mechanism.
| rhaksw wrote:
| > Wtf are you talking about? He's literally telling us and
| has mentioned in the community many times that flagging
| quickly crushes a story.
|
| It's discussed in the link, and elsewhere [1]. Some mod
| actions on HN are transparent, some are not. You should not
| assume that, just because you see marks of some form of
| moderation, that you can see them all.
|
| Undisclosed content moderation is like directly modifying
| your production database. It's faster, but always more
| troublesome. Nobody else knows what changed or why, etc.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312
| tptacek wrote:
| If you want a site with a public mod log, there's
| Lobsters. If you want a site with a mod log that's
| cryptographically auditable by users, I'm sure
| blockchainia has something on offer. You're not going to
| get either of those things here, for reasons the
| community has dug into in the past and you can surface
| with the search bar.
| rhaksw wrote:
| I support transparent-to-the-author content moderation,
| and I suspect that is in the future for today's major
| platforms, whether they want it or not.
| tptacek wrote:
| Sure, that could happen. And if it does, it will happen
| by way of people leaving sites like this one for sites
| moderated differently. I think we're all OK with letting
| the market decide.
| rhaksw wrote:
| I would prefer if the market decides, but there are a few
| non-trivial court cases coming up that may influence what
| happens.
|
| [1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/
| public/...
|
| [2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/
| public/...
|
| [3] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/
| public/...
| dang wrote:
| I appreciate the accuracy in your comment but do please
| edit out swipes like "Wtf are you talking about"--those
| spread bad feeling, and when we're talking about the
| community itself it's even more important not to do that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| falsandtru wrote:
| There are several low-point, long-lived but highly ranked
| unnatural posts on the top page that appear to be manipulated.
| Such unnaturalness and opacity make users feel that the ranking
| is arbitrary and unfair, even if for good reasons. Can you
| display the manipulation that has been done on the ranking and
| other lists per post? For example, a reset of the submission
| time should be easily displayed.
| dang wrote:
| > There are several low-point, long-lived but highly ranked
| unnatural posts on the top page that appear to be
| manipulated.
|
| Which are they? It's important to include links so that (a)
| we can say what's going on, and (b) so readers can make up
| their own minds.
|
| You might be talking about stories that went in to the
| second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool,
| explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308),
| which get a random placement on HN's front page.
| falsandtru wrote:
| If you don't know it could be a bug. Next time I find it, I
| will report it.
|
| I have heard that sometimes the submission time is reset,
| such as when returning from the second chance pool. This
| could also create an unnatural ranking order, so the
| original time before the reset should be listed as well.
| dang wrote:
| It could certainly be a bug! but it could also be a lot
| of other things.
|
| Yes, the timestamp munging is artifact of HN's re-upping
| system, described at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and links
| back from there. About the timestamps, there are past
| explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&
| page=0&prefix=true&que....
|
| The original times are always available because the
| modified time is used only on the frontpage and the
| article's /item page. If you find the article on /from or
| /submitted, for example, the timestamp will be the
| original. The two timestamps converge over time.
| falsandtru wrote:
| Can you also list the original times on the front page
| for consistency in rankings?
| Jun8 wrote:
| I use the downvote button for two reasons: overwhelmingly for
| rude, come-uppance, and similar type of comments; very rarely
| for comments spreading FUD for no particular reason. I just
| downvoted your comment for the second reason.
|
| Demanding transparency is fine but you've got to provide
| proof with your claims. If there are stories which feel
| manipulated to you link them and let the audience see, maybe
| you're right.
| falsandtru wrote:
| Dang explained here that it could happen.
| Jun8 wrote:
| I'm not saying you're wrong I.e. manipulation probably
| does happen, my prior=0.4 bec. it happens inmost
| platforms so why not here (0.5) but AFAIk HN has strong
| anti manipulation tools&practices in places (-0.1). Show
| me examples so I can update my mental model.
| g42gregory wrote:
| Interesting service. I think it would benefit from further
| improvement. Many stories are actually dupes, self-promotion,
| etc... It would be nice to see a much smaller list of stories
| that were actually censored by the moderators or self-censored by
| the community.
|
| How to do this? One idea is to write an appropriate prompt for
| GPT-4. Something along the lines of "if you were HN moderator or
| HN community, would you censor this story? Please give numerical
| score." Then post a much smaller list with top scores. That would
| be useful I think.
| noqc wrote:
| This is a good thing to be able to see, but I'm much more
| interested in identifying the soft censorship in comment
| sections.
|
| This is obviously harder, because vote totals aren't publicly
| available for comment sections, but it is much more important as
| a tool. What topics are on the front page is much more clearly
| the legitimate domain of moderation than what commentary is made
| about them, especially when moderation of those comments
| contradicts the vote mechanism.
| password4321 wrote:
| I am more interested in the mechanics of how something like this
| works, especially over time.
|
| All kinds of tools related to HN content generate front page
| interest even for days but then once that passes things that cost
| money or use unreliable free resources start to disappear at an
| ever more rapid pace.
|
| When they don't, the UI can become unmanageable... I'm not sure
| how this content will be organized over time but updating the
| README won't be tenable for long!
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| HN would be a much better place if they banned domains like the
| guardian, nytimes etc entirely. There's way too much journospam.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| I thought of creating something similar for flagged comments, way
| too many people are flagging things because it doesn't suit their
| narrative
| xnx wrote:
| Who's going to make this into a training data set for dang-bot?
| ennoriel wrote:
| I did something with a similar idea. Rather than looking at
| deleted stories, I historicize the stories and display them as a
| graph. You can see which stories have a second life (they were
| created several days ago, but the score doesn't increase until
| several days later). https://y-combinator-news-trends.vercel.app/
|
| You can see your story!
|
| The github isn't open source because the project isn't really
| finished (the page is ugly, by the way).
|
| I have to say that I'm not relying on the api but on scraping the
| front page. The reason was to migrate code I had from python to
| typescript (I'm better at the later...)
| stephenitis wrote:
| man I would love some sort functionality here
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Can we have it sorted in descending order by date?
| crackercrews wrote:
| Yesterday I posted a link that was flagged off the front page. I
| can see that your tool is driving traffic to it and appreciate
| that.
|
| Not everyone wants to discuss political topics on HN. They say
| there are other places to discuss such topics. I like to hear the
| opinions of the HN audience on a wide variety of topics. Maybe
| this tool will help those of us who value the HN community in
| this way by facilitating discussions on topics deemed
| inappropriate for the official front page.
| viccis wrote:
| Reddit used to have a similar thing (r/RedditMinusMods).
| Eventually when it got to the point that 48-50 out of the top 50
| posts were removed every 12 hours, reddit banned the sub for
| unspecified reasons.
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20221110043732/https://old.reddit...
| GoodUser77 wrote:
| Looks like good moderators sitting and managing
| jszymborski wrote:
| > While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard
| to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
|
| I don't know about everyone else, but I sure am, and I work on
| them for my PhD.
| opisthenar84 wrote:
| This story has close to 500 up votes as of 2:19PM Pacific and is
| no longer on the front page. Why flag an article that is simply
| trying to show how HN can potentially be improved?
| jv22222 wrote:
| I think it would be really interesting to get a tracker for the
| ones that hit the front page, then fall off, and then surge back
| in 30-60 mins. I wonder what's going on with those ones.
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