Comment by next_xibalba
1 year ago
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?
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/item?id=39169622
Just to clarify one misunderstanding: most flags on submissions (nearly all actually) come from users, not mods. So if you see [flagged], it's almost always there because of users and in many cases the mods haven't even seen it yet.
But there are other ways besides flags for stories to fall suddenly off the front page: software penalties (e.g. the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector, various abuse detection systems, etc.) and moderation downweights. Users don't do either of those.
These points are covered in the FAQ although necessarily tersely. See "How are stories ranked?" and "What does [flagged] mean?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
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.
> all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed
HN had an enormous thread about the ICJ decision:
ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I don’t think these things, or even a lot or the other political topics are uninteresting. I’ll often still flag them, however, since I’m really very uninterested in what the HN crowd who responds to these sort of things have to say about it.
Part of this is because I’m European, and the whole “red vs blue” team sort or politics a lot of Americans seem to do these days is just silly, and often hateful. But part of it is also that we’re a bunch of people who know tech and business, but not international politics. I guess I could just ignore them, but I’d frankly rather they were kept to other places on the internet.
> 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...
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.
Besides upvotes, downvotes, and flags, there are software penalties like the flamewar detector and various anti-abuse measures, and moderation downweights. We do a lot of the latter—I don't want to underemphasize this. The HN system is a combination of these three subsystems.
You're right that user flags do more than mods do, just because the numbers work that way: there are many orders of magnitude more users flagging things than there are mods.
Edit: 5 orders of magnitude more, in fact!
Scott hasn't been a mod for years.
What is that impression based on?
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> 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.
> 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.
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.
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I think it's just that the community is so big now. If 1% of 100 regular posters are likely to get into flamewars over crypto, then that may result in a dozen comments or so. If 1% of 10,000 regular posters are flamewarriors, well...
An interesting heuristic I've seen play out a few times now across different communities (and that HN is starting to suffer from now on more contentious topics) is that too many comments on a post means that it's low quality. A handful of comments on an old post means there's not a lot to say about a topic; too many comments means that there's not a lot to change your mind about
That's not what the application is measuring:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055