Comment by jader201
1 year ago
> 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)
If I understand correctly, you have three concerns here: (1) the story was downranked off the front page; (2) your comment was flagged; (3) a comment that replied to you was not flagged. I'll try to respond to these in turn:
(1) the story was downranked off the front page because the topic had already been discussed a bunch—for example in these threads, two days earlier:
Amazon's Ring to stop letting police request doorbell video from users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138536, which only said "and?", was definitely an unsubstantive comment that deserved to be flagged (and killed) even more than yours did. The reason it escaped detection was simple, albeit unsatisfying: pure randomness. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here—there's far too much. I've flagged it now.
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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.
Trying to assess what's scientific vs. anti-scientific is outside the scope of what mods can do. I have my opinions just like you do, but hashing these things out is a community process, not a moderation issue. We could put our fingers on the scale, I suppose, but nothing good would come of that, so we don't.
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.
Yes, the carrot of automation would be so much easier than the stick of manual review. I haven't seen any system that works well enough yet though.
The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a go—and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd certainly like to see it. As would the entire community I'm sure!
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