Comment by wolverine876
1 year ago
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/
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."
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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.
dang - thanks for taking the time to respond in detail. You really go above and beyond. I imagine this whole discussion landing like a concrete block on your plate (but hey, maybe you dig this part of the job).
I have/had no objection to the moderation on these posts. In fact, if I were monarch of HN and the Internet, I'd want an order of magnitude higher standard for the quality of posts, comments, and conduct. I want to spend my time and on the actual very best intellectual content and discussion possible - it would probably be mostly the very best books and papers from journals if I had my way. (Not that I think HN should serve my personal preference, I'm just demonstrating that I am far away from criticizing the moderation.)
My GP comment and my other one that you responded to [0] were trying to recenter at least part of the discusson on a factual basis, which I find much more interesting than the (completely unintersting) conspiracy theory aspect. That is, if we explore it factually, objectively, intelligently, how does it work? how does it work out? For example, I imagine there are some interesting emergent properties which would tell us about the HN population, emergent properties of algorithms, and the interaction between them.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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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.
The simple solution would be to display a log of all removed/flagged/shadowbanned posts and comments, like Wikipedia does.
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[flagged]
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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.
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.)
Not sure why both submissions about work preferences were flagged:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103483
Users flagged them. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case it might have been the desire to avoid gender flamewar hell, which is mostly always the same and which HN has had more than enough of. Also, one of the submissions was paywalled (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00169862231175831, the paper, has been submitted yet. That one might work, if you or someone wants to try submitting it.