Comment by a12k

> 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.

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.

I don't necessarily want to dissect every little story, but this post was a funny edge case:

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.

Why don’t you make the system transparent? This will save you a lot of effort answering questions.

Or include the URL rather than just the HN ID so readers can follow the links.

Thanks for replying with added context, didn't really mean to add more to your plate with this!

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'!

If you have nothing to hide, why not make all story and comment removal history publicly visible, like Wikipedia edits.

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?

Ok, I'm finally getting to this - sorry for taking so long! First let's find the actual HN submissions... here they are:

Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car - https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Asking them to star your repo first may be an ok tactic in other communities, but in the HN context it comes across as manipulative and is not in your interest at all."

---

I guess the summary here is that this list is a mix of clear calls and borderline calls, but defensible ones. Anyone is free to disagree of course! No two readers, including mods, would ever make all the same calls. But if you do disagree, please keep two things in mind:

(1) You have to take each decision in larger context. A perfectly good story can be a bad fit for HN's front page if, for example, the story has already had a lot of discussion; and

(2) If we moderated cases like the above ones differently, the consequence would be letting a lot more stories onto the front page that are more repetitive and/or sensational than the median front page story is today. I doubt that most readers would want that. You can't think of this in terms of isolated submissions or topics; there would need to be some principle by which the decisions would be made differently. HN's mandate is intellectual curiosity. If there's a way to serve that better, I'd certainly like to know what it is; but given the mandate, that's the only kind of change it would make sense to implement.

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.

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.

Not sure why both submissions about work preferences were flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103483

We don't freeze vote counts. What made you think that we did?

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.

This is the kind of explanation that makes sense when the association happens to come to mind—in this case, something like: HN -> YC -> Sam -> Helios -> nuclear -> obvious conflict of interest -> QED. But such chains of associations rarely have anything to do with what happened to a story on HN. The explanation is almost certainly much simpler.

In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738, it just set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. We sometimes turn that penalty off, but in a case like this we wouldn't do that because "$Celebrity says $thing about $common-subject" is almost never a substantial story. It's essential to HN to clear such stories off the front page in order to make room for more interesting, less sensational things. If we didn't, the front page would consist of little else.

Why not redirect to the original story?

It's dubious that HN mods think that way of Altman though.

> 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.

> 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'.

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.

HN is a leftist echo chamber, so “flagged by users” is still a relevant and interesting metric here (that I think would also prove my point).

> 17 years this month in fact! https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...)

That prompted me to check other dates in the archive: apparently the "Startup News" title lasted for around six months before changing to "Hacker News". I was pretty sure the change was before I made my account, but I didn't realize the "Startup News" period had been so short.

What did you think he was going to say? Explain that it was in fact a big HN conspiracy?

I mean yeah it probably was just a mistake but what do you expect somebody to say?

> after 11 hours of posting in this thread

The effort is appreciated by some if not most.

sctb stopped working on HN in fall 2019, alas!

Tldr the answer is “2”. Not sure how posting a link where this info is buried is helpful.

@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?