Comment by rhaksw
1 year ago
> 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.
I don't know anything about other forums, but for the reasons why on HN we don't publish a full moderation log, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 as well as the past explanations linked from there.
You can, however, always get a question answered. That's basically our implicit contract with the community.
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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
If you want a site with a public mod log, there's Lobsters. If you want a site with a mod log that's cryptographically auditable by users, I'm sure blockchainia has something on offer. You're not going to get either of those things here, for reasons the community has dug into in the past and you can surface with the search bar.
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