Comment by nathanyz
1 year ago
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.
>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.
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.