Comment by dang
1 year ago
The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector. The last one was downranked by users. Admins didn't touch any of them.
Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of people's questions.
> The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector.
Just some feedback that I've found a number of articles fall off the FP due to the flamewar detector that I've felt were good articles/discussions. In fact, I think some of the more valuable discussions tend to have a lot of back and forth discussions relative to the votes.
But I also recognize that flamewars can also look a lot like that.
So I'm wondering if it may be worth revisiting the algorithm for this, and maybe having it factor in a few other things vs. simply the vote:comment ratio (which is what I'm understanding it currently is, but correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't think it necessarily needs to be a lot more complex, maybe simply add to it some standard deviation of upvotes/downvotes (or just a simple ratio), if that's not already part of it.
But I've seen some discussions fall off that I don't remember seeing a particularly toxic discussion happening (e.g. relatively little to no downvoted comments).
Again, happy to see flamewars fall off, but just hoping to see some more interesting/helpful discussions not get caught in the crossfire.
Absolutely. We review the list of stories that set off that software penalty and restore the ones that are clearly not flamewars. No doubt we miss a few, and also - not everyone interprets these things the same way. But if you (or anyone) notice a case of a good thread plummeting off the front page, you can always get us to take a look by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
Here's one from last week:
"Ring will no longer allow police to request users' doorbell camera footage" (npr.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138481
How did that slip past detection? How do I get the abusive flag on my comment reversed? This behavior seems to have managed to push an important story off the frontpage quickly. (yes there was a badly-worded dupe headline, but that's a separate thing)
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I have a compliant : sometimes there a proliferation of anti-scientific posts, in example I can mention those related to the "50 years nuclear battery", I remember particularly one from techradar.com that was especially misleading and anti-scientific and more similar to a PR campaign then scientific information, they was stating che you can power a smartphone or a drone with a betavoltaic battery (millionth of Ampere ). This is only an example, I noticed similar article , often related to green energy with the same anti-scientific cut and sometimes anti-scientific is a euphemism. Could nice to have a way to report them , even for occasional readers like me. Often the same articles have approval posts that IMHO are bot made. we live in times where scientific fraud amplified by the media is becoming a serious problem and I think everyone should do more to stop the phenomenon.
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There should be some way of doing language detection to detect the relative quality of 'flaming' going on.
So the highest quality 'flame wars' can remain untouched, but downranking everything else below that bar probably makes sense.
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How can users downrank headlines? I only have an option to upvote them. While it's not too frequent, there are things that make it to the front page that I'd like to express my disapproval of.
User flags, once they've accumulated above a certain threshold, have a downranking effect. Pretty sure this is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
I'm curious why there's no actual downvote for submissions. Was that ever discussed on here? I did a quick search for prior discussions on the topic but didn't find anything.
To me, "flag" means "this is a serious violation that requires moderator attention". Something I'd want you to see and deal with because it's bigoted, illegal, spam, etc. I wouldn't flag something simply because I didn't think HN was the right audience, or because I personally dislike the topic. You seem to be encouraging me to use it simply as a downvote.
I'm not going to start flagging things, nor do I feel that strongly about the lack of a downvote, but if flags are effectively downvotes behind the scenes, and if that's how users are treating flags (which they obviously are, from other comments on this thread), I think the UI should have a downvote button.
I assume there's been discussion about this before and I'm curious about the thought process behind the decision. I don't find the FAQ to be informative about this.
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I don't necessarily want to dissect every little story, but this post was a funny edge case:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39186297
I don't really have a critique or solution here, I imagine false negatives are an inevitability. Just sharing.
We try to, and often users help by, posting links to the previous discussions in the thread. But there isn't enough time to do that in all of them.
In this case, you can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39204186, but this comment was flagkilled, probably because of the personal swipe in it. (You can still see it but only if you turn on 'showdead' in your profile.)
I could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
Ahh, that would explain it. Showdead is off on my account and I guess I didn't find every result on my end. That's a shame. But thank you!
> could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
Yeah, i imagine if I went down every tiny rabbit hole it'd be a full time job. I'll leave that to the professionals haha.
Why don’t you make the system transparent? This will save you a lot of effort answering questions.
"Transparent" means different things to people, but if you mean a full moderation log: I think most likely it would produce more questions and effort, for no clear gain. I've written about this over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Here's how I look at it: if trust is present, then we don't need to publish a full log, as long as we answer questions when people ask them. That degree of transparency has been available here for many years. If, on the other hand, trust isn't present, a moderation log won't create it. It will just generate more data for distrust to work with—and distrust always finds something.
Thus our focus is on building trust with the community and maintaining it. That happens through lots of individual and group interactions, answering questions whenever we get them, in the threads or by email. That's what I spend most of my time doing.
We're never going to take the community's trust for granted because it's what gives HN the only real value it has, and it would be all too easy to lose. But I would tentatively say that this approach has proven to work well for most of the community. If people learn they can always get a question answered, that's a powerful trust-building factor.
Equally clear is that it does not work for everybody; but that's always going to be the case no matter what we do. I don't mean that we dismiss such users' concerns—quite the contrary, I make extra efforts to answer them. I'm just not under any illusion that we can satisfy everybody. It's satisfying enough if a few people can occasionally be won over in this way—which does happen sometimes!
While you argue against transparency, keep in mind that you are doing it in full public view.
Envision an airline withholding safety records, a car manufacturer keeping crash test results private, a restaurant refusing to provide health inspection logs, or a government refusing to disclose details of its budget allocation — all claiming that transparency would only complicate matters and provide "more data for distrust". In each case, the flawed nature of your core argument becomes obviously evident.
I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change (unless forced), but just wanted to point out that your argument against transparency is a cop-out and that you're on the wrong side of history here.
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People will game it. We don't need a transparent algorithm when we have transparent results, e.g. enable `showdead`, or the OP's project.
[flagged]
Or include the URL rather than just the HN ID so readers can follow the links.
yes! good point. Edit: I changed my GP comment to say "link" instead of "ID".
Thanks for replying with added context, didn't really mean to add more to your plate with this!
No problem! I see these threads as opportunities to explain things to the entire community so I try to make the explanations as thorough as possible, and to answer every question that I see. (though I'm sure I don't see them all - if anyone has (or sees) a question that didn't get answered, you can always let me know at hn@ycombinator.com)
HN ID? I don't see that in the FAQ, maybe it's defined elsewhere?
edit: oh duh. thanks all, answer was 'right under my nose'!
The url for this page is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513 so the id is 39230513
I changed my comment to say 'link' instead of 'ID' so everyone can follow the same links.
Thanks _kst_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232594
Presumably its the id parameter in the URL?
Most likely in the URL, id=3923
If you have nothing to hide, why not make all story and comment removal history publicly visible, like Wikipedia edits.
That would create a bureaucratic nightmare for no significant gain.
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232795, which makes a similar point.
That would create one more thing for people here to complain about. People here would just accuse the mods of faking the mod log to hide their "real agenda" whatever that is.
Just enable showdead if you want to see all of that. It's 99% botspam.
Wikipedia can and does vaporize edits.
I don't think revdel can actually fully delete a revision, there's always at least a revision entry left, perhaps with no user name or summary.
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The flags on the last item don't seem to be made in good faith. This looks like abuse of the flag system to me. Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
By "the last item" you're referring to "Avoid Async Rust at All Cost", right? Personally I don't think that's abuse; I would have flagged that post if I'd seen it. That's despite the fact that I agree with a lot of what's in the post. The title is just too inflammatory. And there are more inflammatory bits in the post, such as saying the feature is "objectively bad", and saying that a community member's post "gracefully omits" some information (where the word "gracefully" sounds like an accusation that they were being disingenuous). Totally unnecessary. Chop off the inflammatory bits and you'd have a perfectly good blog post making an interesting point, but as-is that post was not going to lead to a productive discussion.
Of course, it's only inflammatory because async is a darling to more than half of HN :)
But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war detection.
I assume you mean this one:
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] You Don't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 - April 2023 (0 comments)
dang, thanks for taking the time for such a thoughtful response. I didn't know about the policy regarding topics that have been on a lot lately, that makes sense. I've not been around as much lately and hadn't noticed that this topic was well-trodden.