Comment by dang
1 year ago
We haven't touched those stories except reduce the penalties on them (user flags mostly) and moderate them less than we normally would (per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045
If you (or anyone) read those explanations and still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is. These practices have been in place for many years and haven't changed.
@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?
The home page already has a massive bias in favor for pretty much any kind of negativity, but doubly so for anything involving a tech company. It doesn't matter whether the stories are untrue, unverified, repetitive, etc, they'll still get voted up, and the comment threads will half full of low quality complaints repeated from past discussion, often only tangentially related to the submission.
And it creates a very visible feedback loop, as users start to think that this is what HN is supposed to be. They're probably the biggest quality problem of HN.
> posts critical of HN/YC are going to get a log of flags
You can take this with a grain of salt as I'm obviously not the most neutral observer, but from everything I've seen (which at least is a lot!), yes they get a lot of flags, but they get even more upvotes. It's hard to say which side wins out in the tug-of-war. The tendency towards negativity that jsnell's comment describes is very real, and it's on the upvote side in these cases.
Most probably the tug of war goes one way some of the time and the other way the rest of the time. The funny thing is that as mods, we have to have a regulating influence either way. What I mean is that if a rage story hits the top of the front page, we'll downweight it (though not necessarily all the way off the front page); but if a rage story about YC gets too many flags, we'll reduce those or remove them altogether. The recent shitfest is a good example; let me dig up some links for you... Edit: oh wait, I already mentioned those links in the GP. Sorry, I'm getting a bit tired here!
Did I answer your question?
> Did I answer your question?
@dang You did–thank you. I hope my question didn't come across as accusatory. This is a hard problem and, unfortunately for you, many of us enjoy discussion of difficult problems. What many of us may not see is you having to have the _same_ conversation over and over. Thanks again for your work. I don't envy your position.
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