Comment by dang
1 year ago
I don't have a problem with users building things like this because the principles by which HN works are all easy enough to explain and defend—just remember that anything this complex is inevitably a mess, so you need to have high tolerance for messiness if you want to understand it accurately.
However, it's important to correct inaccuracies like the one mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537. Robin89, can you please fix the text? I know it was just a mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.
Also, it would make it easier for me to respond to the questions here if you'd link the HN IDs on your page to the actual HN threads. Currently they link to social-protocols.org. Obviously you can link to whatever you want but I'm having trouble tracing the questions here. Everyone has their own list of "what happened to story X, Y, Z, and what about W and V and J too" and while I'm happy to answer all those in principle, there are physical limits on how many I can work through.
I'm going to be in meetings for most of the next few hours but I'll try to answer questions in this thread later, assuming I don't drown in it.
There are several low-point, long-lived but highly ranked unnatural posts on the top page that appear to be manipulated. Such unnaturalness and opacity make users feel that the ranking is arbitrary and unfair, even if for good reasons. Can you display the manipulation that has been done on the ranking and other lists per post? For example, a reset of the submission time should be easily displayed.
> There are several low-point, long-lived but highly ranked unnatural posts on the top page that appear to be manipulated.
Which are they? It's important to include links so that (a) we can say what's going on, and (b) so readers can make up their own minds.
You might be talking about stories that went in to the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which get a random placement on HN's front page.
If you don't know it could be a bug. Next time I find it, I will report it.
I have heard that sometimes the submission time is reset, such as when returning from the second chance pool. This could also create an unnatural ranking order, so the original time before the reset should be listed as well.
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I use the downvote button for two reasons: overwhelmingly for rude, come-uppance, and similar type of comments; very rarely for comments spreading FUD for no particular reason. I just downvoted your comment for the second reason.
Demanding transparency is fine but you’ve got to provide proof with your claims. If there are stories which feel manipulated to you link them and let the audience see, maybe you’re right.
Dang explained here that it could happen.
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> Robin89, can you please fix the text? know that was just a mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.
How can he/we verify it's wrong? The down-weighting you describe is not visible to users. Even OP won't know.
You can say that down-weighting happens, but we're asking to see where down-weighting happens.
Additionally, just because it’s possible that this could happen doesn’t really give us an idea of how likely it is. Is it one of those theoretically possible, but it never actually happens events? there’s a huge difference between it impacting half of the stories that fall off that quickly, and it impacting 1 in 10,000 stories that fall off that quickly.
Communities would get a good sense for the frequency if forums would simply disclose content moderation to the submitting users. Offending users would learn what's not allowed and share that with the community.
But today's forums frequently do not disclose moderation to submitting users, and that is why we are now seeing major court cases over 230, government-led censorship, etc.
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Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story.
I’ve seen it happen when I’ve flagged stories so either there is a vast conspiracy of moderators that receive pages when I flag things so they can downrank… or maybe dang isn’t lying about something that should be super obvious as a community self policing mechanism.
I appreciate the accuracy in your comment but do please edit out swipes like "Wtf are you talking about"—those spread bad feeling, and when we're talking about the community itself it's even more important not to do that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Wtf are you talking about? He’s literally telling us and has mentioned in the community many times that flagging quickly crushes a story.
It's discussed in the link, and elsewhere [1]. Some mod actions on HN are transparent, some are not. You should not assume that, just because you see marks of some form of moderation, that you can see them all.
Undisclosed content moderation is like directly modifying your production database. It's faster, but always more troublesome. Nobody else knows what changed or why, etc.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312
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