Many good points. I'd like to add a common open secret that I believe is wrong: 1 upvote = 1 karma point.
This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam, anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user point of view it is not - at least for me.
When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the time. Needless to say that I never participated in things that would be considered unethically (voting-ring etc.). Also not a complaint at all, just an observation that goes against what is often written in "about HN" type posts (but not OP).
EDIT:
1. My observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed.
2. As lordnacho points out below this seems to be true only for stories. Regardless why it happens, awarding stories with less points than comments makes a lot of sense to me. After all posting a suitable story is much less effort than writing a decent comment.
Do you mean on stories? I've noticed upvotes on stories don't give you 1 karma each, it's less. Not sure if it's a linear 0.5. But upvotes on comments seem to be 1 each.
I think the karma from a story is more or less capped to the number of comments on the story. At the same time, a story which gets more comments than upvotes quickly vanishes from the front page.
my observation is that when you are starting out your stories generate more than .5 per comment, not sure if it is 1 per comment, but at a certain point you get capped to .5 per comment on story. Have not noticed any capping on favorites for comments though.
Yes, I observed it on stories. I don't remember if I ever looked into comments. Also my observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed.
My bet is that some upvotes don't count either for your karma nor the karma of the post. And the upvotes that don't count are from account which HN considers as bots.
> Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).
Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
> Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
Call me a fool, but it's never occurred to me that he wasn't. I've always pictured him as a Chinese gentleman, a sort of Confucian scholar in 0s and 1s holding up the mortal world to ancient standards of virtue.
I might come across as reading far too much xianxia, and that would be accurate.
China has not many surnames I think? A little google search showed that dang is one of them.
```
Chinese : The surname Dang comes from a branch of the ruling family of the Zhou dynasty (1122–221 bc) that spread to the state of Jin and the state of Lu. The character now also means 'political party'. German: from an old personal name Tanco, a cognate of modern German denken 'to think', Gedanke 'thoughts'.
```
So I'm guessing if you're from a country where that is a regular surname, you might assume it's like that and not DanG, so yeah I guess that happens
I always thought he was of Vietnamese descent. Today I learned. I'm kinda glad that bit of information was added to an otherwise very mathematical post.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
I agree, the paragraph is strange and at best reads like a non-sequitur.
Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
> Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
Right; it took me forever to realize that "dang" was "Dan G" and not just a word. Especially since HN usernames can have mixed case, so he could have picked "DanG" (which... I still would have probably read as a funnily-formatted word but it'd be more of a hint:]). Though for all I know he predates HN supporting uppercase in names, and stylistically I can totally see preferring lowercase.
There's been a lot of misguided moderation that happens to be in favor of China. Earlier in the pandemic, the left bought into the propaganda that the lab leak theory etc were racist. I attribute the pro-China moderation to good intentions and ignorance.
I just assumed he had some intense business interests involving trade with China. He has had a heavy moderation hand when people are critical of the CCP or for example what was formerly thought of as the conspiracy theory about COVIDs likely lab leak origin. He seems to have come around a little bit on this maybe he read about the Uighurs or who knows.
OT pretty much — but not completely: My daughter had a wonderful first grade teacher of English descent named Emily Chewning. The kids called her "Miss Chew." On the first Parent-Teacher night many parents were surprised to learn that "Miss Chew"/[Chu] wasn't Chinese.
This thing is that almost any well written (and not too much technical) post can reach the frontpage it only requires 3-4 people who like the post enough to upvote it during the first 30 minutes. As a result reposting works for those kind of content. And as it is not forbidden, people do it
Either I missed it or it does not mention "posting too fast" feature, which is very annoying, because if you commented on something you can be restricted from commenting on another, unrelated topic.
It's extremely annoying. It doesn't give you any indication how you triggered it, nor does it give you any indication how long you need to wait until you can post normally again.
What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two things are oversights.
Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this feature is intended to be annoying, because your contribution was deemed harmful, but not ban-worthy, I say this:
I disagree that this approach is correct in that case. If you want to discourage certain behavior, then, on a site such as HN, you should treat your users as adults and tell them what you don't want them to do. Simply locking them out for an unknown amount of time, for unknown reasons, is just going to drive them away. This is just basic operant conditioning. Presumably, driving the user away entirely is not the result one wants a significant portion of the time.
It's beyond annoying. It's disrespectful as hell. Hacker News lets users waste time composing a question or answer, and THEN says they can't post when they try to submit it.
Interesting how that page doesn't cover shadow muting. If too many of your comments hit -4 in too short a time period you'll get nothing but "you're posting too fast" messages for several hours, possibly a day.
You get this regardless of score I think. I was excitedly posting on a Dune thread the other day with all comments +4 and still got told to settle down lol.
Something not mentioned in either article is how karma is handled on submissions. 1 comment upvote = 1 karma point, but 1 submission upvote isn't. E.g. this [0] post got 286 points but the submitter only has 118 karma. Also, what's the deal with the "prev" and "next" buttons that just appeared in the last few minutes?
I suspect that I might be part of the reason for the prev and next buttons. HN has bad accessibility when it comes to screen readers and following the parent/child relationship between comments. Some time ago I answered to the wrong person for the wrong reason and a commenter said that they will ask the HN staff for a solution. If my case was not unique, those comments might be the answer. In terms of accessibility, those buttons are not as good as using the semantic html <li> tag, but they help somewhat.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
I don't see how it matters whether he's Asian or not. For all I care, he could be a sentient pineapple tree and it wouldn't matter at all to my HN user experience.
The Thanksgiving themed one that I googled and googled and googled for but couldn't find, which was taped to my mom's refrigerator, was the disappointed bird standing in front of the open refrigerator, lamenting: "Dang, somebody ate the middle out of the daddy longlegs!"
We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and using HN primarily for ideological battle. Those things are against the site guidelines because (a) they are not what this site is for, and (b) they destroy what it is for—regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against.
Dang is amazing because he's got a weirdly razor sharp ability to keep a relatively huge overton window without removing much, but still keep the discussion going without entering chaos.
Compared to the strictly moderated Reddit forums that are completely useless for perspectives outside of the status quo, often to a frightening degree in all directions.
I can't emphasize this enough. When I see dang gently remind folks to not engage in ad hominem, or post thoughtful explanations of why controversial comments or articles were left up or taken down, I am encouraged to be a more thoughtful contributor on the internet.
I'm always amazed by how attentive dang is. I think he's a huge part of why this community is somewhere I visit multiple times per day. Thank you, dang!
dang seems to be fairly cool headed, despite the deflagration often directed at him, for being, a bouncer, babysitter, teacher, help manual, advocate etc.
One thing I really appreciate about dang is how he links to previous related discussions on similar articles. This has helped me to find many interesting discussions!
Thanks for this. The article was a nice read, and one I hadnt seen, though I'm relatively new to participating here. Interestingly I noticed this comment [1], which was basically what happened to me when i emigrated to reddit back in 2006 from Digg.
> In other words, the story must persuade 13.3% or more of readers to up-vote. That’s a pretty high conversion rate.
This I feel is a very good thing. Up-votes to readership is a good correlation and is better than Reddit's hotness algorithm for finding good content which seems to be just up-votes over time.
The main contribution to article goodness seems only to be the choice of those that read and up-vote however and there is no system that can replace that yet.
Was it on the bottom half of the front page? If so, it might fall under the moderator-curated group that the author mentions. Or, if it was lower, it might have been there earlier.
Without getting to robotic: given how I also think dang is awesome, has anyone ever tried to compile of list of tactics dang employs to receive such high praise by almost everyone on the site? Meaning, like some sort of case studies that map back to higher order principles/values he's acting on.
If you read through dang's comments he is very articulate about his values and tactics. There was also this recent self-referential article linking to some particularly incisive comments between another commenter and dang, with associated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28853335
I'm really curious about voting ring detection. Oftentimes I've seen posts from the same company hitting the front page over and over again, and none of them was particularly interesting, nor was the company any of HN's "love children" such as Stripe. I can't recall any specific example, but when looking a bit closer it was usually some small- to medium-sized startup with maybe 10-100 people, which would technically be enough to make a big dent into a post's score.
On the one hand I'd love to know more about the detection algorithm, on the other hand that information would be inevitably abused by those shitposters to game it.
When I read "voting ring" I think of accounts trading votes - a group of accounts votes for each others' stories.
But your description (possibly accurate) is that asking people to vote for a story is a "voting ring".
Once in a while my company makes an announcement of some kind and emails that announcement to some portion of our customer base. Sometimes that announcement includes a link to an HN story that I create with an invitation for discussion. We never make any mention of voting or scoring.
This makes good sense because we don't have a forum and everyone prefers the HN user interface anyway.
Is this a voting ring ?
If this is not a voting ring, per se, is it likely this still trips the voting ring detection ?
> But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how.
That really depends on how it works, and whether you know how it works. Simple signals such as IP location and temporal distribution of votes are easy to use for detection, but also easy to manipulate. On the other hand, if you employ a graph of user associations based on votes and comments in the past, you can detect clusters among them, voting collaboratively. This is way harder to circumvent in the long run, but also extremely difficult to implement accurately.
Silly replies (like you might get on many Reddit subs) get downvotes. But so do comments that contain factually wrong information. Particularly if the author uses the falsehoods to attempt to convince.
These posts typically have a top reply comment correcting the parent.
The downs help people reduce or avoid being influenced by even glancing at information that is no good.
When I disagree as a matter of opinion, I don’t have an urge to downvote. Sometimes I respond when I’m moved to, otherwise, like you, I just keep perusing.
Fortunately I don’t see many comments that are so wrong that I can say they are in fact false, but it does happen. In those cases, I think a downvote is valuable.
>HN’s anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good enough
A chilling effect of this can be that moderators have a much more direct hand in choosing what kinds of content is successful if their criteria for "good enough" is not the same thing as "was not actually a vote ring". There are a few other sources of bias introduced by the human/automation moderation relationship.
Another issue is that HN's flagging system is routinely abused by small groups of users to remove content which does not actually run afoul of the guidelines. It's effectively a super downvote: it removes content entirely, works for posts and comments, has a much lower minimum karma threshold, and it's very hard to rescue a flagged post, and you can't "vouch" before a post gets flagged - only after.
Add to the list, users can also be shitlisted instead of shadowbanned. If dang doesn't like your account, you will start getting rate limited with extreme prejudice with the message "You are posting too much".
One of the things about Hackernews karma system is that a lot of downvotes get filtered out as fraudulent. However, once you are “targeted” that filter is removed and downvotes against you become more powerful. I used to have a very high karma nearing 1000, and then one day it’s like a switch got flipped and my karma began a decline that never stopped, a year later I’ve been completely drained of karma. I might never really recover. It’s a bad feedback loop because when you know nothing you say or do can make things better there is less incentive to be cordial in your messages.
It's really hard to devise software protections to help HN stay within its mandate that don't at the same time end up penalizing a certain amount of benign activity. It's a bit like how white blood cells also kill some things that aren't a threat. But the solution is not to turn off the white blood cells - that would be really bad.
It must be no coincidence that my karma lately has seen a modest boost, rising out from the negatives.
Personally I think downvotes should also be calibrated by user, a person who rarely downvotes should carry more weight in a downvote than someone who downvotes everything, and perhaps even have user-to-user calibration where your downvotes against someone become weaker the more you target them. It would help nerf people who scour a post history looking for more comments to downvotes, and help prevent downvote gangs of people who consistently downvote the same person no matter what they post.
A certain amount of dissenting opinion is necessary to keep discussions novel and break up echo chambers, but you don’t want to allow so much that you become poisoned by it.
[edit deln.] How can you want to be part of something when you don’t even know what it’s like on the inside?
What happens when you are given a task you do NOT want to be part of? What happens when a task has moral gray area? What happens if you suddenly decide you really want to be part of something else?
[edit deln] if you’re hiring someone you want someone with valuable skills who is ready to be of service, ready to do whatever you ask, and will remain loyal so long as they are paid. You don’t want people to be nice, you want them to be predictable. That’s true value.
> Hacker News has software to detect vote manipulation (ie. asking friends to upvote)
Putting on my conspiracy robe, I imagine it's not just about 'friends upvoting friends', but the relative ease at which new accounts are created (No SMS one-time-tokens, not even email required to register etc); and then using those accounts to artificially inflate certain stories.
If there are accounts being created for the purposes of artificially inflating stories, and their 'score value' then I would hope it's about interesting content, and not some politically tainted fluff piece used to persuade and misinform/dis-inform.
Largely HN seems to work in favor of interesting content, and I agree with this article when it says: "If you get past the voting ring detector, you won’t get past the readers."
I mean, if you somehow developed a voting ring, you would have to jump even more hoops to get that article/link the respect it deserves. And the HN audience are very articulate in pointing out flaws in services/articles/sites in general.
There are also a ton of ongoing news stories and stories in that past which were completely censored off HN. I cannot talk about them or link them here, but please know that they exist.
Why not? I'd like to see them. I also think that if you're going to make grand claims like that, you should include links so that readers can make up their own minds.
What if you create an article listing all of them, submit it to HN and post a link here in the comment? I routinely check dead links to see why a few people found it so controversial to censor it. I'd say 80% are true positives - spam, SEO junk, or some utter nonsense. The remaining 20% is content that is controversial to some people for some reasons. I learned quite a lot from it. There are days when this censored content is more interesting than top submissions.
I also happened to submit one such article somehow. I found an article on BBC saying things that are controversial today. It was flagged very quickly. It was interesting to me because BBC is a relatively reputable source and they don't publish junk.
This story makes no sense to me. For example, he says
“Chance of escaping sandbox = upvote conversion rate x views”
“Chance” must be a probability. But this formula will yield a chance > 1 most of the time. That makes no sense.
His example is 30 page views and an upvote conversion rate of 13.3%, which means the “Chance of escaping sandbox” = 3.99.
Reading more, I see that most of the math makes no sense. But I’d love to “triple” my chances of getting to the front page by making my probability 11.97.
i don't get it. This looks like seo spam and is well below the usual high standards of hn. I agree about dang though, this place would fall to pieces without him. I would add that the guidelines are incredibly well written. Dang gave me the link once and i read it 5 times to understand what he wanted from me
I'm not the only moderator, and there are a few non-moderators who also contribute to pool selection.
I'd really like to open that mechanism up to the community but it's still not obvious how to make that work well. Most ways of doing it would just recreate the voting system, and we already have one of those.
It's possible for HN readers to make suggestions for the pool, and I'll do this periodically.
Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment, most often.
I don't nominate my own posts, of course.
It may be a matter of how many such nominations occur, but I'd say my success rate is >50% in having those accepted.
TL;DR: it's not just dang, and normal HN'ers can participate.
I thought he was a Chinese guy until I read an article about him. I'm sure a lot of people thought similarly, that it was one syllable "dang!" rather than Dan-G.
>HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page
this is interesting if you only see it like once per year or less, when logging in on a new device. I'm not a daily user, but I exclusively come in via RSS and a direct link to a post.
You can use the "hide" link to hide a thread, so that you wont see it and comments will not show up under the "comments" link. However this appears broken for Ask HN links.
>readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing [...] stories that were placed there randomly
>HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page
If a "greatest 80s hits" radio station started broadcasting music from the 00s and people got pissed off you wouldn't say "listeners of this station have an intense emotional relationship with it". When they tune in to the "greatest 80s hits" station, that's the only thing they're looking for; they don't want to listen to random songs.
HN is not a “greatest 80s hits” radio, though. Users submit links and users vote on them. There is nobody making editorial decisions about what goes on the front page, beyond extreme cases. Sure, there is some tweaking, but in the end it’s all stories posted and upvoted by us, collectively. So it is entirely pointless to whine about the content: it is what the community wants to see.
The parent is trying to tell that off-topic is not welcomed by some users. I am the same opinion, I don't want to see on HN news about some non-technical political thing in LA or India , or see 3 days in a row someone toy Rust project.
You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO, some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on topic. But don't submit something like "God says vaccine is bad but hearth pills are good" since is obvious off topic , though I am curious about such illogical believes if I want to learn more there is a better forum for that.
> So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.
You're trying way too hard to make this about bias. There are more charitable and simpler explanations, such as signal-to-noise ratio and the expectation that submissions to HN are focused on geek-oriented science and tech topics.
I'd reckon the majority of users, you see this all over the internet where there's ability to vote or 'like' something; Twitter, Youtube, Facebook etc - the vote will usually outweigh the comment count.
On HN the culture of 'nothing good to say?; say nothing' is fairly baked in so will create this effect even more so.
It's quite possible meta stories are the most upvoted category of all. I posted an article about how HN was moderated and it netted more karma than anything else I've ever done on this site, by a wide margin.
Exactly, the "self analysis" bias is very strong and probably has its roots in psychology. HN's psychologically mature audience and mods (comparatively) probably tones down that tendency a bit, but many platforms need a separate meta category to prevent the community from spiraling around itself.
I love the content posted on HN, but I deeply loathe the comments section. As well, HN is extremely bad at accepting criticism and is completely humorless.
Lame. There's nothing here about Hacker News's disrespect for users, and their disgraceful "You're posting too fast" bullshit.
They let people waste their time composing questions or answers, and THEN tell them they can't post when they press the "add comment" button. And we're talking two or three posts in a matter of HOURS being flagged as "too fast."
Many good points. I'd like to add a common open secret that I believe is wrong: 1 upvote = 1 karma point.
This might be true internally and initially, before any ant-spam, anti-upvote-ring detection takes place. Effectively, from a user point of view it is not - at least for me.
When I look at the points one of my submissions get and compare my increase in overall karma it is very roughly 50% most of the time. Needless to say that I never participated in things that would be considered unethically (voting-ring etc.). Also not a complaint at all, just an observation that goes against what is often written in "about HN" type posts (but not OP).
EDIT:
1. My observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed.
2. As lordnacho points out below this seems to be true only for stories. Regardless why it happens, awarding stories with less points than comments makes a lot of sense to me. After all posting a suitable story is much less effort than writing a decent comment.
Do you mean on stories? I've noticed upvotes on stories don't give you 1 karma each, it's less. Not sure if it's a linear 0.5. But upvotes on comments seem to be 1 each.
I think the karma from a story is more or less capped to the number of comments on the story. At the same time, a story which gets more comments than upvotes quickly vanishes from the front page.
Both modulo moderation, of course.
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my observation is that when you are starting out your stories generate more than .5 per comment, not sure if it is 1 per comment, but at a certain point you get capped to .5 per comment on story. Have not noticed any capping on favorites for comments though.
Yes, I observed it on stories. I don't remember if I ever looked into comments. Also my observation is from more than a year ago, so things might well have changed.
Think the first 5 upvotes are ignored on submissions wrt karma.
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What are stories?
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My bet is that some upvotes don't count either for your karma nor the karma of the post. And the upvotes that don't count are from account which HN considers as bots.
Just this week I had a submission hit the front page and end up with ~80 votes, but I only got ~40 karma, so I think this is still true.
A collaborative resource with more information about undocumented/norms on HN: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
> Personally, I’d stay at 3. I’d also wait at least a day between re-posts (and try re-posting at different time slots).
Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules. If I'm about to submit something and I found an older submission with the same URL, my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again. Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
> Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
> > Hacker News is moderated mainly by dang aka Dan Gackle (pronounced ‘Gackley’). He’s not of asian descent
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
"Dang" is a surname in Vietnam, China, and elsewhere [1], which has led to subthreads like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang_(surname)
Cue the “You’re not Chinese?!?” joke from Seinfeld…
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> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
Call me a fool, but it's never occurred to me that he wasn't. I've always pictured him as a Chinese gentleman, a sort of Confucian scholar in 0s and 1s holding up the mortal world to ancient standards of virtue.
I might come across as reading far too much xianxia, and that would be accurate.
> my personal rule is that it should be older than a year ago before I'd submit it again
That's indeed the rule, but only when the story has had significant attention (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
When a story hasn't had significant attention in the last year (or a bit longer), it's ok to repost a small number of times.
Past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
China has not many surnames I think? A little google search showed that dang is one of them. ``` Chinese : The surname Dang comes from a branch of the ruling family of the Zhou dynasty (1122–221 bc) that spread to the state of Jin and the state of Lu. The character now also means 'political party'. German: from an old personal name Tanco, a cognate of modern German denken 'to think', Gedanke 'thoughts'.
```
So I'm guessing if you're from a country where that is a regular surname, you might assume it's like that and not DanG, so yeah I guess that happens
I don't know about China, but in Vietnam there are 14 family names which account for about 90% of the entire population.
Roughly 40% of all Vietnamese people are called "Nguyen", which makes it one of the most common family names in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_name#Family_name
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I always thought he was of Vietnamese descent. Today I learned. I'm kinda glad that bit of information was added to an otherwise very mathematical post.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
I agree, the paragraph is strange and at best reads like a non-sequitur.
Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dang
> Then again I always associated the username "dang" with the word "dang", which I thought it was an amusing (and appropriate) choice of name for a moderator.
Right; it took me forever to realize that "dang" was "Dan G" and not just a word. Especially since HN usernames can have mixed case, so he could have picked "DanG" (which... I still would have probably read as a funnily-formatted word but it'd be more of a hint:]). Though for all I know he predates HN supporting uppercase in names, and stylistically I can totally see preferring lowercase.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
Not just that, but for some time you could observe subthreads accusing him of being a chinese subversion of HN in china related discussions.
There's been a lot of misguided moderation that happens to be in favor of China. Earlier in the pandemic, the left bought into the propaganda that the lab leak theory etc were racist. I attribute the pro-China moderation to good intentions and ignorance.
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I just assumed he had some intense business interests involving trade with China. He has had a heavy moderation hand when people are critical of the CCP or for example what was formerly thought of as the conspiracy theory about COVIDs likely lab leak origin. He seems to have come around a little bit on this maybe he read about the Uighurs or who knows.
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OT pretty much — but not completely: My daughter had a wonderful first grade teacher of English descent named Emily Chewning. The kids called her "Miss Chew." On the first Parent-Teacher night many parents were surprised to learn that "Miss Chew"/[Chu] wasn't Chinese.
> Wow, that's not how I parsed the very same reposting rules.
Some posts get reposted a lot see this website for example https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lihaoyi.com some were posted 7 times.
This thing is that almost any well written (and not too much technical) post can reach the frontpage it only requires 3-4 people who like the post enough to upvote it during the first 30 minutes. As a result reposting works for those kind of content. And as it is not forbidden, people do it
Either I missed it or it does not mention "posting too fast" feature, which is very annoying, because if you commented on something you can be restricted from commenting on another, unrelated topic.
It's extremely annoying. It doesn't give you any indication how you triggered it, nor does it give you any indication how long you need to wait until you can post normally again.
What's more, since the people who wrote the code for this feature are pretty smart, it's hard to believe these two things are oversights.
Edit: In response to a now deleted comment on how this feature is intended to be annoying, because your contribution was deemed harmful, but not ban-worthy, I say this:
I disagree that this approach is correct in that case. If you want to discourage certain behavior, then, on a site such as HN, you should treat your users as adults and tell them what you don't want them to do. Simply locking them out for an unknown amount of time, for unknown reasons, is just going to drive them away. This is just basic operant conditioning. Presumably, driving the user away entirely is not the result one wants a significant portion of the time.
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It's beyond annoying. It's disrespectful as hell. Hacker News lets users waste time composing a question or answer, and THEN says they can't post when they try to submit it.
I always read it as dang! the exclamation! There should have been a spoiler alert. Oh, well -
>Three posts with the same URL for three consecutive days seems a bit too much.
The article is talking about stories that haven't got much attention. You can infer it from the quoted text mentioned just before the 3 rule:
>If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
Dang is a Vietnamese surname (I know more than one "Dang"), which is why I also assumed he was Asian.
Interesting how that page doesn't cover shadow muting. If too many of your comments hit -4 in too short a time period you'll get nothing but "you're posting too fast" messages for several hours, possibly a day.
You get this regardless of score I think. I was excitedly posting on a Dune thread the other day with all comments +4 and still got told to settle down lol.
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Something not mentioned in either article is how karma is handled on submissions. 1 comment upvote = 1 karma point, but 1 submission upvote isn't. E.g. this [0] post got 286 points but the submitter only has 118 karma. Also, what's the deal with the "prev" and "next" buttons that just appeared in the last few minutes?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28996500
I suspect that I might be part of the reason for the prev and next buttons. HN has bad accessibility when it comes to screen readers and following the parent/child relationship between comments. Some time ago I answered to the wrong person for the wrong reason and a commenter said that they will ask the HN staff for a solution. If my case was not unique, those comments might be the answer. In terms of accessibility, those buttons are not as good as using the semantic html <li> tag, but they help somewhat.
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These were added sometime in the last day or so, I believe.
I always assumed he was from the Far Side, not the Far East.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026166
it took me ages to realise dang was actually his first name/surname initial tho i get the handle's other meaning is intentional.
> ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include...
I don't see how it matters whether he's Asian or not. For all I care, he could be a sentient pineapple tree and it wouldn't matter at all to my HN user experience.
This would be quite fascinating, as pineapples don’t grow on trees. Your point is well-stated, nevertheless.
I thought he was asian lol, cause dang is an asian name
Similar article from 2013 but with much more numbers and analysis / reverse-engineering:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9097596
> he is the best moderator in the world
Yes he is. Dang, you are amazing. Thank you for tending this beautiful garden in the middle of a sad and boggy Internet.
Reposting my tribute to Dang (with archive.org links when possible) from https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c9/08/a0/c908a02a8dfa42db9973f743b...
The Thanksgiving themed one that I googled and googled and googled for but couldn't find, which was taped to my mom's refrigerator, was the disappointed bird standing in front of the open refrigerator, lamenting: "Dang, somebody ate the middle out of the daddy longlegs!"
http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/index.php?date=092405
We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments and using HN primarily for ideological battle. Those things are against the site guidelines because (a) they are not what this site is for, and (b) they destroy what it is for—regardless of which ideology you're battling for or against.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Dang is amazing because he's got a weirdly razor sharp ability to keep a relatively huge overton window without removing much, but still keep the discussion going without entering chaos.
Compared to the strictly moderated Reddit forums that are completely useless for perspectives outside of the status quo, often to a frightening degree in all directions.
Thanks dang!
I can't emphasize this enough. When I see dang gently remind folks to not engage in ad hominem, or post thoughtful explanations of why controversial comments or articles were left up or taken down, I am encouraged to be a more thoughtful contributor on the internet.
I'm always amazed by how attentive dang is. I think he's a huge part of why this community is somewhere I visit multiple times per day. Thank you, dang!
I've often wondered if dang is more than one person!
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You could almost say he's a dang good moderator.
Okay, I'll get my coat.
Having been dinged by dang I'd agree.
dang seems to be fairly cool headed, despite the deflagration often directed at him, for being, a bouncer, babysitter, teacher, help manual, advocate etc.
i hope it all stays at work most of the time.
librarian, too
One thing I really appreciate about dang is how he links to previous related discussions on similar articles. This has helped me to find many interesting discussions!
> he is the best moderator in [the](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25051566) world.
Oh, hey. This is my moment of glory, I guess!
The number of people I moderate has only increased since then. I still stand by those words.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415
Thanks for this. The article was a nice read, and one I hadnt seen, though I'm relatively new to participating here. Interestingly I noticed this comment [1], which was basically what happened to me when i emigrated to reddit back in 2006 from Digg.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25049415
> In other words, the story must persuade 13.3% or more of readers to up-vote. That’s a pretty high conversion rate.
This I feel is a very good thing. Up-votes to readership is a good correlation and is better than Reddit's hotness algorithm for finding good content which seems to be just up-votes over time.
The main contribution to article goodness seems only to be the choice of those that read and up-vote however and there is no system that can replace that yet.
>That’s a pretty high conversion rate
Hence the constant stream of articles confirming tropes that play to the HN demographics.
It's basically impossible to have a reliable 10+% conversion rate without targeting the lowest common denominator.
> A story needs to accumulate 5 points to appear in the Live List.
I don’t think this is right. During quiet times, I’ve definitely seen stories in the “live list”, and even on the front page, with only 3 points.
You're correct. It's 3, not 5.
Was it on the bottom half of the front page? If so, it might fall under the moderator-curated group that the author mentions. Or, if it was lower, it might have been there earlier.
This story is currently at position 5 with only 3 points:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024572
From my experience, its the speed that a post gets points/comments that matters. If you get three quick enough you should get on the front page.
Without getting to robotic: given how I also think dang is awesome, has anyone ever tried to compile of list of tactics dang employs to receive such high praise by almost everyone on the site? Meaning, like some sort of case studies that map back to higher order principles/values he's acting on.
If you read through dang's comments he is very articulate about his values and tactics. There was also this recent self-referential article linking to some particularly incisive comments between another commenter and dang, with associated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28853335
I'm really curious about voting ring detection. Oftentimes I've seen posts from the same company hitting the front page over and over again, and none of them was particularly interesting, nor was the company any of HN's "love children" such as Stripe. I can't recall any specific example, but when looking a bit closer it was usually some small- to medium-sized startup with maybe 10-100 people, which would technically be enough to make a big dent into a post's score.
On the one hand I'd love to know more about the detection algorithm, on the other hand that information would be inevitably abused by those shitposters to game it.
You can email dang and ask that he looks into a specific case in more detail (although usually the answer is "looks natural")
"I'm really curious about voting ring detection."
I am curious about this as well.
When I read "voting ring" I think of accounts trading votes - a group of accounts votes for each others' stories.
But your description (possibly accurate) is that asking people to vote for a story is a "voting ring".
Once in a while my company makes an announcement of some kind and emails that announcement to some portion of our customer base. Sometimes that announcement includes a link to an HN story that I create with an invitation for discussion. We never make any mention of voting or scoring.
This makes good sense because we don't have a forum and everyone prefers the HN user interface anyway.
Is this a voting ring ?
If this is not a voting ring, per se, is it likely this still trips the voting ring detection ?
Is this poor HN etiquette ?
Ring detection works for people who don't know it exists. And thus works well a lot of times. But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how.
And if I recall well, dang has already said several times that he will not disclose the algorithm https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> But is very easy to bypass, and I won't tell you how.
That really depends on how it works, and whether you know how it works. Simple signals such as IP location and temporal distribution of votes are easy to use for detection, but also easy to manipulate. On the other hand, if you employ a graph of user associations based on votes and comments in the past, you can detect clusters among them, voting collaboratively. This is way harder to circumvent in the long run, but also extremely difficult to implement accurately.
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One thing I’ve never understood is I can only upvote, but some comments are greyed out as if they’ve been downvoted. How does this work?
You need a higher level of karma to downvote.
Specifically > 500: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
Why would you downvote something? 'You weren't invited, just move along', exists. Happy to say, I only ever upvote.
Silly replies (like you might get on many Reddit subs) get downvotes. But so do comments that contain factually wrong information. Particularly if the author uses the falsehoods to attempt to convince.
These posts typically have a top reply comment correcting the parent.
The downs help people reduce or avoid being influenced by even glancing at information that is no good.
When I disagree as a matter of opinion, I don’t have an urge to downvote. Sometimes I respond when I’m moved to, otherwise, like you, I just keep perusing.
Fortunately I don’t see many comments that are so wrong that I can say they are in fact false, but it does happen. In those cases, I think a downvote is valuable.
Why would you downvote something?
Sometimes people are mean about React and they must be punished.
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>HN’s anti-voting-ring software is now so strict that the main thing we have to do is turn it off when a submission is good enough
A chilling effect of this can be that moderators have a much more direct hand in choosing what kinds of content is successful if their criteria for "good enough" is not the same thing as "was not actually a vote ring". There are a few other sources of bias introduced by the human/automation moderation relationship.
Another issue is that HN's flagging system is routinely abused by small groups of users to remove content which does not actually run afoul of the guidelines. It's effectively a super downvote: it removes content entirely, works for posts and comments, has a much lower minimum karma threshold, and it's very hard to rescue a flagged post, and you can't "vouch" before a post gets flagged - only after.
Another open secret is that you can have the history of any posts' position here : http://hnrankings.info/
But they don't seem to compute the ranking exactly as HN does it. I guess they use the same formula but HN discard some upvotes from 'bots' accounts
Add to the list, users can also be shitlisted instead of shadowbanned. If dang doesn't like your account, you will start getting rate limited with extreme prejudice with the message "You are posting too much".
One of the things about Hackernews karma system is that a lot of downvotes get filtered out as fraudulent. However, once you are “targeted” that filter is removed and downvotes against you become more powerful. I used to have a very high karma nearing 1000, and then one day it’s like a switch got flipped and my karma began a decline that never stopped, a year later I’ve been completely drained of karma. I might never really recover. It’s a bad feedback loop because when you know nothing you say or do can make things better there is less incentive to be cordial in your messages.
You're talking about the mechanism that sama wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026954.
It's really hard to devise software protections to help HN stay within its mandate that don't at the same time end up penalizing a certain amount of benign activity. It's a bit like how white blood cells also kill some things that aren't a threat. But the solution is not to turn off the white blood cells - that would be really bad.
It must be no coincidence that my karma lately has seen a modest boost, rising out from the negatives.
Personally I think downvotes should also be calibrated by user, a person who rarely downvotes should carry more weight in a downvote than someone who downvotes everything, and perhaps even have user-to-user calibration where your downvotes against someone become weaker the more you target them. It would help nerf people who scour a post history looking for more comments to downvotes, and help prevent downvote gangs of people who consistently downvote the same person no matter what they post.
A certain amount of dissenting opinion is necessary to keep discussions novel and break up echo chambers, but you don’t want to allow so much that you become poisoned by it.
if i may, some constructive feedback...
try to make something like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=xwdv
more like this:
[edit deln.] How can you want to be part of something when you don’t even know what it’s like on the inside?
What happens when you are given a task you do NOT want to be part of? What happens when a task has moral gray area? What happens if you suddenly decide you really want to be part of something else?
[edit deln] if you’re hiring someone you want someone with valuable skills who is ready to be of service, ready to do whatever you ask, and will remain loyal so long as they are paid. You don’t want people to be nice, you want them to be predictable. That’s true value.
> Hacker News has software to detect vote manipulation (ie. asking friends to upvote)
Putting on my conspiracy robe, I imagine it's not just about 'friends upvoting friends', but the relative ease at which new accounts are created (No SMS one-time-tokens, not even email required to register etc); and then using those accounts to artificially inflate certain stories.
If there are accounts being created for the purposes of artificially inflating stories, and their 'score value' then I would hope it's about interesting content, and not some politically tainted fluff piece used to persuade and misinform/dis-inform.
Largely HN seems to work in favor of interesting content, and I agree with this article when it says: "If you get past the voting ring detector, you won’t get past the readers."
I mean, if you somehow developed a voting ring, you would have to jump even more hoops to get that article/link the respect it deserves. And the HN audience are very articulate in pointing out flaws in services/articles/sites in general.
There are also a ton of ongoing news stories and stories in that past which were completely censored off HN. I cannot talk about them or link them here, but please know that they exist.
Why not? I'd like to see them. I also think that if you're going to make grand claims like that, you should include links so that readers can make up their own minds.
Just in recent memory:
Anything relating to the scam MMO known as Dreamworld that Y combinator funded, and how its funding was possibly due to nepotism.
Anything relating to the admin of KiwiFarm's rebuttal [1] of Byuu's attacks on his forum or how her suicide was proven fake.
[1] https://kiwifarms.net/threads/my-response-regarding-byuu-nea...
There are others but either I can't remember them right now or I don't have adequate sources to them.
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What if you create an article listing all of them, submit it to HN and post a link here in the comment? I routinely check dead links to see why a few people found it so controversial to censor it. I'd say 80% are true positives - spam, SEO junk, or some utter nonsense. The remaining 20% is content that is controversial to some people for some reasons. I learned quite a lot from it. There are days when this censored content is more interesting than top submissions.
I also happened to submit one such article somehow. I found an article on BBC saying things that are controversial today. It was flagged very quickly. It was interesting to me because BBC is a relatively reputable source and they don't publish junk.
Actually, I would be interested to know how the comments are sorted.
It's upvotes with some sort of recency bias so that newly posted comments get a few minutes near the top of the thread to be seen.
The sum of upvotes of the comments which replied to you are probably also into the score
You might be interested to know that sometimes they show YOU that your comment is posted, but it isn't. No one else can see it.
So you're really just farting into the wind, because Hacker News thinks your time is free. Assholes.
This story makes no sense to me. For example, he says
“Chance of escaping sandbox = upvote conversion rate x views”
“Chance” must be a probability. But this formula will yield a chance > 1 most of the time. That makes no sense.
His example is 30 page views and an upvote conversion rate of 13.3%, which means the “Chance of escaping sandbox” = 3.99.
Reading more, I see that most of the math makes no sense. But I’d love to “triple” my chances of getting to the front page by making my probability 11.97.
i don't get it. This looks like seo spam and is well below the usual high standards of hn. I agree about dang though, this place would fall to pieces without him. I would add that the guidelines are incredibly well written. Dang gave me the link once and i read it 5 times to understand what he wanted from me
If pool is curated by moderators and dang is the only moderator, does it mean that pool is actually dang selection?
:)
I'm not the only moderator, and there are a few non-moderators who also contribute to pool selection.
I'd really like to open that mechanism up to the community but it's still not obvious how to make that work well. Most ways of doing it would just recreate the voting system, and we already have one of those.
> I'm not the only moderator
I misunderstood the article and translated "main" to "only". Thanks for the clarification!
It's possible for HN readers to make suggestions for the pool, and I'll do this periodically.
Usually it's for a story which simply died in queue, which as TFA notes, is the default. Occasionally it's to see if a discussion might get "re-railed" after it's gone off on some tangent --- people responding to a title or an early comment, most often.
I don't nominate my own posts, of course.
It may be a matter of how many such nominations occur, but I'd say my success rate is >50% in having those accepted.
TL;DR: it's not just dang, and normal HN'ers can participate.
It's nicest when people don't nominate their own posts, but plenty of users do that as well.
I didn't know we could do that. What's the process for nominating a story?
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My front page metaphor: You’re taking off in a plane, down the runway
If you get clicks / comments you get lift
Not enough of them, you run out of time, hit the end of the runway- crash and burn
If you get off the ground you may go far but only if you keep getting lift from all those click/comments
> He’s not of asian descent.
What?
I thought he was a Chinese guy until I read an article about him. I'm sure a lot of people thought similarly, that it was one syllable "dang!" rather than Dan-G.
"Dang" is still a common word in English though. It sounds like the article implies it's a common name or something, but Asia is a pretty big place
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>HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page
this is interesting if you only see it like once per year or less, when logging in on a new device. I'm not a daily user, but I exclusively come in via RSS and a direct link to a post.
Something I've never seen anyone mention:
You can use the "hide" link to hide a thread, so that you wont see it and comments will not show up under the "comments" link. However this appears broken for Ask HN links.
> Most stories ‘fail’ and have only one or two points
Stories are like startups it seems :-)
Far too many of them are all about JavaScript?
>readers reacted negatively, even violently, to seeing [...] stories that were placed there randomly
>HN users have an intense emotional relationship with the front page
If a "greatest 80s hits" radio station started broadcasting music from the 00s and people got pissed off you wouldn't say "listeners of this station have an intense emotional relationship with it". When they tune in to the "greatest 80s hits" station, that's the only thing they're looking for; they don't want to listen to random songs.
HN is not a “greatest 80s hits” radio, though. Users submit links and users vote on them. There is nobody making editorial decisions about what goes on the front page, beyond extreme cases. Sure, there is some tweaking, but in the end it’s all stories posted and upvoted by us, collectively. So it is entirely pointless to whine about the content: it is what the community wants to see.
There is nobody making editorial decisions about what goes on the front page, beyond extreme cases.
HN is more actively moderated than this, you can find piles of moderator comments about it.
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You can't scroll past a song on the radio
Radio is a one way medium though. HN missed an opportunity to sell users on it but adding it as an opt-in/invite feature instead.
So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.
The parent is trying to tell that off-topic is not welcomed by some users. I am the same opinion, I don't want to see on HN news about some non-technical political thing in LA or India , or see 3 days in a row someone toy Rust project.
You can try to change my mind that I should never use GOTO, some fanatic submitted such articles and comments using the "NEVER" and I will be happy to reply because is still on topic. But don't submit something like "God says vaccine is bad but hearth pills are good" since is obvious off topic , though I am curious about such illogical believes if I want to learn more there is a better forum for that.
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> So as long as something doesn't challenge our beliefs, values, opinions or prejudices it's OK.
You're trying way too hard to make this about bias. There are more charitable and simpler explanations, such as signal-to-noise ratio and the expectation that submissions to HN are focused on geek-oriented science and tech topics.
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Playing 00's music on an 80's radio station isn't challenging someone's fondness of 80's music, it's just annoying.
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Is the sandbox the same thing as "new"? I've literally never visited there and had no idea that it had any role in things moving to the front page.
Anomaly: How can a thread quickly get a lot of points, many more points than posts? So, who is voting up points but not posting?
I'd reckon the majority of users, you see this all over the internet where there's ability to vote or 'like' something; Twitter, Youtube, Facebook etc - the vote will usually outweigh the comment count.
On HN the culture of 'nothing good to say?; say nothing' is fairly baked in so will create this effect even more so.
Voting allows lurkers a voice, who often are the majority of users (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lurker citation 11).
Impressive how this has managed to get to #1 right in the middle of the temporal 'dead zone.'
It's quite possible meta stories are the most upvoted category of all. I posted an article about how HN was moderated and it netted more karma than anything else I've ever done on this site, by a wide margin.
Meta is the crack of internet forums, so mostly* a bad thing. We downweight it pretty proactively. There would be a lot more of it if we didn't.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpxuvOs0NkM#t=210s
Exactly, the "self analysis" bias is very strong and probably has its roots in psychology. HN's psychologically mature audience and mods (comparatively) probably tones down that tendency a bit, but many platforms need a separate meta category to prevent the community from spiraling around itself.
Europe's been awake for several hours already.
Sometimes my rank/points go up or down without any vote change?
Best is the page I visit. How is "best" determined?
I wish some of this information was in the FAQ.
What specifically?
Honestly, everything! I just think that, if it's on your site, it should be in your voice.
I've always wanted to know a bit about the algorithms putting, and then keeping, stories on the front page.
I also understand if there are certain details you don't want to call attention to because you don't want others gaming the system.
BRB. Going to go learn about gut hub branching
You got them some more guts?
Startup idea - GutHub - facilitate peer-to-peer microbiome sharing!
Where did you sort all this stuff out?
one thing not mentioned:
new accounts are heavily penalized when posting.
and I thought dang was a bot!
I love the content posted on HN, but I deeply loathe the comments section. As well, HN is extremely bad at accepting criticism and is completely humorless.
Where's the source code assholes?
Open secret: dang encourages using archive links to bypass paywalls on a site where people complain that content creators should get their fair share
LAME. There's nothing here about Hacker News's disrespect for users, expressed in its disgraceful "you're posting too fast" bullshit.
They let you waste your time composing a question or answer, and THEN tell you that you can't post AFTER you press the button to submit it.
NO EXCUSE, ASSHOLES.
With your case it's perhaps a relief to the rest of us.
Lame. There's nothing here about Hacker News's disrespect for users, and their disgraceful "You're posting too fast" bullshit.
They let people waste their time composing questions or answers, and THEN tell them they can't post when they press the "add comment" button. And we're talking two or three posts in a matter of HOURS being flagged as "too fast."
ASSHOLES.
Reddit is that way ->