Comment by dang
5 months ago
I spent all day responding to the replies here, and then detaching them in order to save space at the top of the thread. But I just had a better idea.
This is a stub comment so we have a single root to collapse the replies. This way (1) replies can stay close to their parent (the top comment) without flooding the screen with offtopicness; and (2) we can all re-experience the timeless truth of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_softwar....
If you want to reply, reply here. I've moved all the original replies back so everyone's on the same playing field.
Thank you, dang. I think you've done the right thing here, and I'm sure you're also under a lot of stress right now. Thanks for having faith in the community to discuss this amicably.
Thank you!
<3
I sometimes post snarky comments and a tiny version of dang that sits on my shoulder scolds me into editing it.
That's both strange and a testament to your work.
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Just wan to say Thank You again. I still dont know how you handle HN all the time. May be some day you could post about tips and tricks or lessons learned from moderating HN.
Thank you for your work.
Genuine question - What's the meaning of "activating" as an opposite to "interesting" in this context? I've never heard it used like this and couldn't get good results from searching.
Ah good question and sorry that wasn't clear—I use that word a lot. By "activation" I mean arousal of the nervous system, particularly the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates fight-or-flight responses, and the limbic system of the brain which assesses threats and seizes control when it feels that survival is threatened.
What happens in flamewars is that when people encounter material they strongly disagree with, these systems get activated and rapidly produce aggressive and defensive responses that have to do with self-protection, and nothing to do with thoughtful consideration of the material, things one might learn, points where one might be wrong, curiosity, playful interaction, and so on. When survival is at stake there is no time or space for the latter sorts of reactions. But it's the latter that we want on HN—they're what the site is for.
Of course we all know cognitively that our survival is not really at stake when someone disagrees with us on the internet—at least our frontal cortices know that—but our limbic systems and autonomic nervous systems definitely do not know that. They experience it as a threat and from then on it's kill-or-be-killed. The fact that survival is not really at stake has no effect; what matters is the feeling that it is so.
This is what underlies commenters being so angry, snarky, sarcastic, aggressive and so on, on the internet. It's also what underlies our inability to hear each other or respect each other.
I sometimes describe this is as 'reflexive' vs. 'reflective' responses (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). By 'reflexive' I mean when the rapid-response system I just described takes over and reacts from "cache", so to speak, to quickly counter a threat. By 'reflective' I mean the slower processes that happen when one is in a relaxed state and available for curiosity and play. In the jargon I'm using, 'activated' means being in 'reflexive' mode, and 'interested' or 'curious' means being in 'reflective' mode.
This has all kinds of interesting aspects. Here's one: you can't be in both of these states at the same time. It's literally one or the other. Think of the implications that has for a community like HN, where basically everything we want comes out of one of those two states and everything we don't want comes out of the other.
Someone is going to object that political developments can and do present real survival threats. That of course is true, and maybe to the extent that it is true, people have no choice but to function in kill-or-be-killed mode. But we feel this way and behave this way to a greater extent than we need to, and that's one factor preventing conflicts from being solved. That's a vicious circle which it's in all our interests to explore our way out of. We can't kill our way out of it.
In case it's not obvious, I'm using the word 'kill' metaphorically. What I mean by 'kill' is what we do when we try to eliminate threats (and the feeling of threat) by annihilating the other. That shows up as real killing in extreme situations like war, but the same (let's call it) psycho-physiological state shows up in other environments too, including trivial ones like internet forums. Here it shows up as people trying to annihilate the other by maximizing the aggressive potency of their language.
How do we end up getting so activated when we don't need to? and what can we do to become less activated in this way? I believe that if you tug on those threads and keep tugging, you arrive at the most important problem in the world. That's one main reason why I've kept working on HN for so long. Internet comments are trivial, but this environment is a laboratory for learning about this stuff—not just by observing others, but mainly by working with what they activate in oneself. In that sense it's a driver for growth and learning. This learning isn't primarily conceptual—it's more somatic.
p.s. Lots of people on HN know far more about the physiology here than I do. What I'm saying comes from my explorations of the therapy world, e.g. somatically-oriented trauma therapies and even-more-out-there stuff. That culture veers into metaphor more often than genuine specialists would be comfortable with. If I've done that in this comment I would certainly be interested in correction!
> Here's one: you can't be in both of these states at the same time. It's literally one or the other.
It is definitely the case that certain neuromodulators exert negative feedback on each other, but this may not be factual. Maybe the way I would make your point is that the external feedback we interact with can more or less quickly drive our brain into extremes on the brain state continuum.
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Thanks for this subthread!
In terms of wanting reflective and not reactive, one thought would be to gate it by time, and prevent replies to a comment until N number of minutes have passed. which I know exists as a flag that can be set on specific users, but it's a heavy hammer and extra work for moderators. If, on a post that the system has marked as a flamewar, hitting the reply page started a, say, 15 minute timer before allowing a reply, would that help lessen the reactivity of comments? personally if it's something contentious, sometimes I'll open up a reply page, write what I feel like writing, then give it 15 mins to sit, and then usually come back and delete and rewrite my entire response to be more in line with the guidelines. (though tbh, not 100% successfully)
technical fixes can't fix the underlying social ills, but sometimes you just need a simple lock to keep people honest.
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> By 'reflexive' I mean when the rapid-response system I just described takes over and reacts from "cache", so to speak, to quickly counter a threat.
That's exactly what's happening when people flag articles like this.
So what's the plan to achieve reflective flagging?
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Another word that is often used (you can look it up) is emotional reactivity. It’s when you “overreacting negatively to normal or even benign stimuli due to stress, depleted physiological resources, or emotional disorder.”
Ouch, you saw through me...
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Hello dang, out of curiosity: is this way of thinking directly connected to some specific religion or group of some kind? - you mentioned a jargon.
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In this context, "activating" is speech which elicits gut-reaction. Whereas "interesting" is speech which stimulates thoughtfulness.
I think there should be some balance. Passionless discussion never feels as satisfying. We're not all robots. Our reasoning should be clear, but our tone and the grounding of our opinions should also shine through.
I'd say it's a classic Spock vs. Jimbo take.
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As I read it, when someone is "activated" they are provoked to responding; someone replying because they want to say something. I see "triggered" as somewhat of an analogy, but a much more loaded word.
This seems to stand opposed to people who reply because they have something interesting to say.
Actually yes, I think I originally used the word 'triggered' years ago, but it was too...activating, so I switched to 'activated'.
> This seems to stand opposed to people who reply because they have something interesting to say.
Or something interested to say. Interested people say interesting things.
Hey Dang!
First I want to thank you for the tireless job of moderating this form, it is really the thing that keeps it as a special place on the internet.
I genuinely wanted to ask if you feel out of depth on moderating the current and upcoming news on both the US and AI.
Both feel like we are heading towards things many of us have not experienced in our lives.
How do you find your previous moderation experience is leading you in the current environment?
I don't feel out of depth. To me it feels like variations on places we've been before.
But I hasten to qualify this:
(1) This is just my feeling! You asked how I feel, so I'm telling you, but I don't claim my feeling is anything more than that.
(2) I'm only talking about dynamics on HN. I'm not talking about what Trump might do or AI might do; it's not my job to comment on those and your guess is as good as mine anyhow.
Appreciate the response.
Makes sense to really focus your commitment to HN.
I can appreciate your emotional discipline in these times. I could work on that more myself
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> As some of you know, this article was posted a dozen times and immediately flagkilled by users
That's because HN appears to be disturbingly pro-trump and they seem to organize to flagkill anything "negative".
You really should look into organized flagkilling.
You need only look at the threads that HN has hosted about this to see that "pro-Trump" is a strong overstatement. The community is divided, just like the society at large is divided (or societies, since many countries are represented here).
Given what we know about the demographics of HN—for example, users here are probably more likely to be college-educated, many come from outside the U.S., and so on—the community here is probably less pro-Trump than the general U.S. population is, but that still leaves a great many users on both sides of that issue.
Of course I understand that any level of pro-$X can be disturbing if $X itself is disturbing enough. But that's more of a qualitative experience than a quantitative one. I've called it the "shock experience" in the past and wrote about it here, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
You are not quite right and there are "organized groups" active on HN influencing sensitive topics. The equivalence you are making i.e. "society is divided, the HN community is a reflection of the society and therefore the community is divided" does not say anything about how specific groups may exploit the situation and push their agenda. They are not all rational actors nor is it a zero-sum game.
To understand what i mean take a look at;
1) Nassim Taleb's book Skin in the Game - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_Game_(book). Specifically his The Minority Rule which basically states that an intransigent minority can almost always prevail over a flexible majority. It is the asymmetry which is being used to game the system.
Nassim Taleb's article The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority - https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Nassim Taleb & Naval Ravikant video on The Minority Rule - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwlW2aamDFc
2) Also see Game Theory(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory) and the books The Evolution of Cooperation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation), The Complexity of Cooperation(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Cooperation) by Robert Axelrod
Veritasium's video on Game Theory and Axelrod's tournaments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
Influence decision models: From cooperative game theory to social network analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15740...
A Survey of Game Theory as Applied to Social Networks - https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/TST.2020.9010005
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Why would it have to be organized flagkilling? A combination of a sizeable pro-Trump faction (even 20% of users would be more than enough) and a sizeable "just keep US politics off the front page" faction would be more than enough to account for what you're seeing.
I’m curious what the new and interesting information is. I read the article when it was originally posted a few days ago. I just scanned it again and it seems the same as before. Just curious. Thanks.
I guess 2 days isn't new by firehose standards, but this particular story didn't get discussed until today and there's still some interest in it. HN has a long tradition of hosting threads about the exploits of young hackers.
I agree it's interesting and was disappointed when I saw the previous submissions removed. I definitely approve it being allowed.
> yet-another interchangeable flamewar
You have earned my respect, dang, but this is hardly an "interchangeable flamewar".
What is happening is frankly beyond anything we have ever seen before in the history of the country.
I'm not talking about the events themselves or how significant they are—I'm only talking about HN comment threads.
Often, a sequence of related stories (S1, S2, ..., Sn) produces threads that are more or less the same as their predecessors, rather than focusing on the specific new information introduced by any Si. This particularly happens when the topic is a major and divisive one, like the current one.
What happens in this cases is that people tend to post their generic views about $Person or $Topic, often in vehement terms and without much curiosity about the specific details of what's happening. In this way we get threads that don't differ very much from one discussion to the next. That's what I mean by "interchangeable".
Consider adding a mandatory keyword search when submitting a link - like every human-averse helpdesk.
Maybe if submitters see something was already submitted 800 times, they'll get the message; though, I have my doubts.
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Any chance of implementing a backend "merge items" feature that redirects dupes to the canonical item?
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You can’t have your cake and eat it too bud. You’re saying contradictory things. “Yes this is a shit show but please have civil discourse” just doesn’t work anymore.
We can be civil until the very end of the world, I guess. I’ll make sure to hold my knife and fork correctly while civilization falls apart.
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I tend to disagree, in terms of coordinated upheaval we saw something similar in Andrew Jackson's presidency. Nothing new under the sun, I'm afraid.
Please say more for those of us who are historically ignorant but interested!
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That same statement applies to literally every moment the country has existed.
Unprecedented things happen in every US presidency, they're just different things. (Hard to mention examples because the ones I am most familiar with are the last 6 terms, and each topic has flamebait potential)
I'm quite curious on your retrospective thoughts on this thread once this article goes off the front page! Also whether you'd do the same again.
Having looked around, probably around 80% of comments are mostly uninteresting/partisanship (though a fair few of those combine the mud slinging with an interesting fact or argument, which complicates categorization).
(Aside: One of the issues for me is that on high emotion topics like this I can't take people's word for things as much as in a usual thread, it just becomes visual noise)
My thought is that it's not great in absolute terms but reasonably ok in relative terms. Any thread on a topic this intense is going to have a lot of qualities that aren't good-for-HN.
We do some moderation things to try to nudge it in a more reflective/interesting direction, but there's a limit to how much that can help.
Ever since the salute thread, I have a lot of respect for you trying to continue these conversations. Thanks
It is an important set of facts and you did the right thing. Thank you, dang!
Thanks for your service dang
Dan, can we BAN all political threads unless we have fairness. There are a fair number of HN users that also want the USAID scandal covered with a post with 1500 comments. The time for HN to be left biased needs to come to an end.
Just as many people feel that HN is horribly right-biased as left-biased. I could give you hundreds of examples. Here are a couple:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42066014
The way out of this logjam is to stop thinking in quantitative terms (how many 'left' posts vs. how many 'right' posts) and instead look for the highest-quality articles you can find. If there's a high-qualty article about USAID, meaning one which contains interesting information and isn't primarily hammering on partisan drums, I don't see why that wouldn't be on topic here.
Thank you for looking out for flagspamming.
thank you.
> All: please don't post the sort of low-information / high-indignation comment that could just as easily appear in any semi-related thread. Such generic comments make the discussion less interesting and more activating. That's not what we're trying for here.
We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for, but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk.
We're being censored.
> We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for,
Alas, that is not true for all values of "we". Let's see how we do in the current thread. (Edit: so far it does seem to be a little better.)
> but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged
Yes, and at the same time we've turned off the flags on quite a few of them—enough that this continues to be by far the most-discussed topic on HN right now. I realize that's not enough for those who want more, but this is always the case whenever there is a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
* (because as far as I know, all the important questions have already been answered, which is not to say everyone is happy!)
It's thanks to this kind of guidance that HN survives as a focused technical hivemind.
At the same time, issues of this kind of revolutionary scope are important for users to process. We can learn a lot from each other.
Irrespective of politics, it's necessary to hedge systemic risk that's appearing due to destabilization of the US. That affects so many of us that it's hard to ignore.
Keeping some persistent outlet (front page post) for discussion of this major topic is important to give people a politically agnostic and technically proficient space to integrate what's happening.
Thank you for filtering the noise and fear with the posts.
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I would also say, that to me dang and team is doing a good job in general. I disagree with any sentiment that this is being censored, and I applaud the openness for discussing this.
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> But also by users who just care about protecting HN for its intended purpose, which is vulnerable to getting consumed by political flames.
I think there has been an element of backlash here. I believe there are people posting Musk articles repeatedly in response to the flagging, feeding the cycle.
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>this continues to be by far the most-discussed topic on HN right now
I wonder if you are maybe too close to the problem to see it from a normal HN user's perspective. From my perspective, I don't get this impression because I don't see the full breath of conversations that happen on HN like you do. People clearly want to talk about this here and I have rarely seen these stories actually on the front page of HN because they are so quick to drop off the front page due to flagging, downvoting, the flame war detector, or whatever other behind the scenes mechanics exist that you are obviously more knowledgeable about than me. People continuing to have conversations on posts that no one sees unless they specifically search them out is the equivalent of shadowbanning those conversations. Yes, they are still happening, but the normal HN user isn't actually seeing them and that is why you are fielding so many complaints from normal users who want to see these posts.
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On the whole, I appreciate and respect your approach to moderation. However, it’s hard to ignore the fact that many leaders in the YC sphere — possibly including Garry Tan — seem to be aligned with Thiel and Yarvin on the topic of government and democracy. (The “smart ones” should aggressively take over and restructure our republic in the image of a corporation.) If there is, in fact, an active and ongoing conspiracy against the government headed by SV technocrats, how can we trust moderation on this site to be unbiased? (This is my fear, not an accusation.)
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[dupe]
Why did you let the article that was posted about a16z and Daniel Penny get flag killed so many times?
It’s so lame and tiresome —- powerful tech people look like idiots, it gets killed on here.
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> Using the word 'censored' ultimately just means you'd like to see more of this topic on HN. I certainly respect that, but there are also a lot of other users who would like to see less of it.
Woo love changing the meaning of words to fit what I imagine other people are using it for!!
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At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but there has been an onslaught of stories about the damage Musk and DOGE is doing to the US government including lots of tech specific stories. This is an important ongoing story that is relevant to the community here and every post about it shoots up the front page of HN only to disappear minutes later because of mass flagging.
> At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic?
I'm not sure "big" is the right word because we're not optimizing HN for topic importance - that would make for a current affairs site, which HN is not [1, 2]. But maybe that's hair-splitting in this case.
The short answer to your question is that when there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT), moderators turn off flags on stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI) that is interesting in HN's sense of the word (i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) and there is a fair chance of the article supporting a substantively different discussion than the ones which have already recently appeared on the same topic.
If you want more information, I'd start with my other post in this subthread (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
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One solution might be to limit how many new discussions a user can flag within a certain period.
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Not everyone is censoring you. Some of us want to learn about cool technology, not read politics irrelevant to daily life.
Fine, you're welcome to skip the political posts. I've felt the same frustration.
But when any new post that has Musk in the title is flagged within a minute or two entering the 'new' queue, then we have a problem.
We are indeed being censored by any meaningful definition of the term.
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[flagged]
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[flagged]
its not censorship. There's several comments on here that have no relevance to the source article and are hand wringing which is unproductive and often is eager to descend into flaming. Lets talk about the article and its content and the potential cybersecurity risks to government data please.
> all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk.
I'm not a Musk supporter at all, but I flag these discussions for several reasons.
1. To keep my sanity. These stories are pretty much everywhere and will be all over for the next 4 years at least. I don't want to engage in them and lose even more time and get even more anxious.
2. The comments aren't useful and don't bring new information. It's pretty clear what Elon and the oligarchs are trying to do. Those who don't see it won't change their mind at that point.
HN is one of the rare forum to avoid flame war, let's keep it that way.
If your objection is that "I don't want to engage with it" and "I don't find them useful", it seems obvious to me that the solution is to simply not click on the thread and move on, rather than to attempt to stifle everyone else from engaging with it.
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But where this particular article is from Brian Krebs, a niche reporter on hacker news, and bringing SNI, significant new information to the table, why flag this one? The broader strokes of what's going on is obvious, but this particular article is a specific detail of a detail, from a source that is relevant to tits community, and not a generic breathless CNN or Fox News "something happened today"
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It's only censorship when the government does it, or so I've been told.
a ton of replies to dang's adminsitraviata comment are highjacking his "sticky" to coattail all their comments to the top, and the comments are generally right on the edge of being what dang's comment is trying to warn against.
I'd flag them all but fear that would appear heavy handed
Normally we turn off replies on pinned comments to avoid this problem, but today I decided to leave it open, to give people a chance to air their objections/counterarguments/feelings and hopefully get responded to.
However, to avoid the thread ballooning at the top of the page, I'm also detaching these subthreads as I reply to them.
I am responding to the content of Daniel's comment, not hijacking his comment to coattail my views of the article itself. I think the replies to his comment are the most appropriate place to respond to it.
The effect you describe is an unfortunate side effect of any threaded forum where the ordering of sibling posts is determined by some measure of quality: all responses to the first top-level comment, no matter the quality, precede the second top-level comment, which is probably of higher quality (on average). This is one of many reasons that threaded comments are flawed. Flat comments (phpBB style) of course have their own flaws and chronological threaded comments (LWN for example) have their own too.
My issue with this content on HN isn't that the conversation is sometimes garbage, which it is, but that it's overwhelmingly people repeating the same falsehoods that might, at best, have a kernel of truth, but have been blown out of proportion to the point of just being not-true. There is very little interest in actually taking a step backwards, challenging beliefs and the propaganda fed to us by corporate news channels owned by billionaires, and trying to objectively evaluate information without "so and so is literally worse than hitler" knee-jerk reactions. If people could actually steel-man (I hate that phrase) actions and have nuanced views, that would be interesting, but it's basically only anti-whatever people butting heads with any opinion that challenges their narrative at all.
I agree in principle, but these are the dynamics of every intense polarized issue and I don't think there's much we can do about it other than nibble around the margins. For example, we try to downweight comments that are primarily name-calling or flaming, in the hope of giving more oxygen to posts that are reflective, find something new to say, and so on.
At bottom, it seems like this is just how mass psychology works—it's what you get when the inputs are (1) human nature, and (2) modern media. It stresses me out too, but I have to remind myself not to fight battles we can't win. That's a recipe for burnout and worse.
Also, when the nature of an intense polarized issue about things of great importance overlaps into the things Hacker News is about, that's when to try very hard to study what's happening. What's happening with modern media is Hacker News-adjacent. What's happening in how modern world wars are fought is Hacker News-adjacent.
When the mechanics of how these things are put into play, begin to affect not only Facebook, Twitter etc but also Hacker News itself, that's very much Hacker News-adjacent. It's a meta sense where control of the discourse becomes not only the ground but also the figure.
Hackers are eager to think they, like the internet, will route around any censorship. If their ways and belief systems are studied to the point that flagging and argument becomes able to unilaterally censor discourse against the wishes of the hackers, that's when your action of picking a thread and taking pains to unflag it and attempt discussion anyhow, becomes the right thing to do :)
On mastodon I noticed an interesting approach: to warn in a visible manner that a topic is "sensitive". Not sure if that triggers less aggressive behavior, maybe its even the opposite? But just as there are instinctive red dots that grab our attention there might be digital blue dots to calm us down.
https://www.audubon.org/news/why-do-gulls-have-red-spot-thei...
I get your reluctance to do things you can't take back, but it seems like the emotional response to thinking your comment's being down weighted but not being told that's happening, or not knowing why, might be helped by being told why. eg if I'm calling people names but don't know or don't realize that's not accepted behavior here, someone with a persecution complex is going to think you're personally out for them and not their behavior.
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If it is any consolation, I don't think there's anything more you can do as a moderator to solve the problem, as it will require the underlying human nature to change. In this context, the problem is with what is called 'peasant mentality'[^1], specifically defending a bureaucracy that is being dismantled by DOGE.
[^1]: https://x.com/sridca/status/1846935493100888262
>> it's overwhelmingly people repeating the same falsehoods that might, at best, have a kernel of truth, but have been blown out of proportion to the point of just being not-true.
That describes basically all posts about AI, so let's all join in and start flagging any HN post about AI.
> “so and so is literally worse than hitler"
Can you give citations for where you’ve seen these sorts of statements?
However bad Musk is, I’ve yet to see anyone saying he is “literally worse than Hitler”
it's an example of the type of knee-jerk reactions, not a claim that people are literally saying that in every comment thread, however you're welcome to see for yourself how musk and hitler are discussed in the same comment constantly. it happens basically every day:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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[flagged]
If we end up with yet-another interchangeable flamewar about $BigTopic, that will only confirm that the flaggers were right'
No it won't. That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested judges who never comment. You're projecting your desire for a good civil discussion onto them without considering the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting in bad faith, ie with a view to shaping the outcome of the discussion rather than optimizing the quality thereof.
Edit: oh wait, I think I understand you now. When I said "that will only confirm that the flaggers were right", I did not mean "that will only confirm that the flaggers all had the right motive". (Obviously not all of them do, as I've explained below.) Rather, I meant "that will only confirm that this submission wasn't a good one for HN, and therefore it was good that it got flagged (even though not every flag was rightly motivated)".
-- original comment --
> That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested judges who never comment.
I don't follow this argument. Can you rephrase it?
Flagging flamewars is an appropriate use of flagging on HN. If this thread turns into the kind of flamewar we normally want to see flagged, that's evidence in favor of the users who made that call in the first place.
> the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting in bad faith
Yes. I've made this point many times, including in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092): there's usually two kinds of flaggers: users who want to suppress a story because they don't like it (e.g. politically), and users who feel like the story isn't in keeping with the site guidelines and are worried about protecting HN. I assume by "bad faith" you mean the first kind.
No, they are simply saying that someone who wanted these stories removed could both flag the story and engage in a flamewar. Then they wouldn't have predicted the situation, but created it.
Say some don't like stories about crypto currency, but tolerates them. So, stories about crypto currency appear and attract those interested in crypto currency. Say there are also stories about public projects, but those interested in crypto currency don't tolerate stories about public projects, so there are flamewars for those stories.
Your conclusion would then be that Hacker News is a good place for stories about crypto currency, but not for stories about public projects. Because stories about public projects creates flamewars and should therefor be removed.
When in reality those interested in public projects would be the ones wanting interesting discussions, while those interested in crypto currency would be acting against the spirit of the site.
As stories about public projects are removed eventually those interested in them would leave and stories about how public projects can't work would meet little resistance. Therefor not creating any flamewars and be good for HN. Yet, it would at best be the opposite of curiosity.
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While curious discussion is certainly a worthy aspiration for HN, it's inevitable that some some objects of curiosity will also be polarizing. The problem with the flagging mechanism and its lack of transparency is that a small group of people can stymie curious inquiry.
While I understand that you don't want to share flagging or voting preferences (though I don't consider this intimate data myself), it's hard for people have confidence in the flagging/vouching mechanism because there is no indicator of volume or frequency. One might argue that if there was it would be gamed, but the site is obviously being gamed as is. One indicator is the elevated volume of baity comments from throwaway accounts on some discussions.
My daily interface with Hacker News for the last decade has been https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42994293, flagged, unflagged, and flagged again.)
There is clearly something unusual happening with flags. There is an obvious correlation between the post topic and likelihood of flags, even when the post's comments are reasonable.
I think this motivated flagging is preventing productive discussion on HN, and it's healthier in the long term for Hacker News to allow perhaps excessive discussions on these currently popular topics. Otherwise HN risks developing a reputation that it systematically suppresses discussions critical of the current administration. I think that reputation would linger for far longer than the temporary irritation some might feel about the currently popular topic.
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What is the preferred approach for those of us who want fewer Trump/Musk-related posts? Other than, you know, participating in a flamewar.
The preferred approach is (1) flag the stories you think are off-topic for Hacker News, and (2) make peace with the fact that the front page sometimes has stories that you feel don't belong there. This is true for everyone, including me. It's a consequence of the site being under conflicting constraints, and frontpage space being the scarcest resource (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
Oh and (3) if you browse HN while logged in, you can always click 'hide' on a submission and the software will not show you that particular one anymore.
Yep, fair enough.
While I understand the sentiment (and support it with a lot of political content on HN) the start of this administration has an undeniable tech angle. If you don’t want to read the stuff, don’t click. But it belongs here.
Don't click into the comments would probably be a good start.
Something simple and direct you can do is don't buy Tesla. It may now genuinely be in America's national interest to not buy Tesla.
There's no point giving Musk more money, power, and influence. He's now calling for the impeachment of judges because he thinks they're in his way:
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5134725-elon-musk-impe...
He wants any opposition or limit or restraint to him gone. Here's an interview with Kara Swisher about Musk's mentality that's worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xXLycFv5Gc
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I don't see how this kind of story is on-topic for HN. Yes, we all appreciate that HN is more than just a website for discussing garbage collection algorithms, graph algorithms, javascript frameworks, etc (i.e. computer science and programming) but isn't it meant to be about things that hackers would find interesting by virtue of being hackers?
My understanding of that broader topicality was that it was intended to capture things like science news ("Feynman's lectures have been published online for free" or "The Higgs Boson has been confirmed"), interesting posts and articles of other kinds (e.g. that series of posts of horror stories about dangerous chemical compounds - "why I will never work with supernitroglycerin" etc) and occasionally general news stories of such significance that ANYONE would want to discuss them (eg. Russian troops have invaded Ukraine).
That isn't what I am seeing here. There is now almost always general American political "news" on the front page. It isn't particularly newsworthy. It feels like the only reason it is here is that people here don't have anywhere else to discuss it because HN is one of the few decent forums left on the Web. But that doesn't make it on-topic, surely?
I often see you remove flags from posts. What's the point of having the flagging mechanism if you just remove them when people complain? You say there's interesting new information, but is everything that is interesting on-topic? Or is the test narrower: it should be interesting to hackers by virtue of their being hackers. I am sure this is interesting to many hackers that are also US political junkies (which I mean in a neutral way) but not because they are hackers.
Do you see what I mean?
This is a (very) well-explored issue on HN and the solution we arrived at has been stable for many years: most stories about politics are off topic, as the guidelines say (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993906
The answer is that we don't "just remove them when people complain". We only remove them sometimes, when doing so seems in keeping with the principles by which we moderate HN.
I don’t know how many flags it takes to flag kill a whole article, but the threshold for comments is two or three flags. It doesn’t take a lot of people to kill an entire topic of discussion by flagging related articles, especially for users who only peruse the front page. Brigading on this site is almost trivial.
Dang’s anti-flagging mechanism is the human factor that balances that very blunt automated system. People don’t seem to vouch for articles as much as for comments.
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I don't see how this isn't hacker news: "What is the technical education of the teenager with security clearance to the network of the org that is responsible for nukes"
That sounds *literallyf like the plot for any 80s hacker movie out there. You know, when hacking was political and hackers were people interested in undermining structures of authority and bending the rules.
That is the origin of hacking, and as such it is totally in order to discuss such topics here, IMO.
I'd rather read stuff like this than another CEOs musings that are entirely marketing and make believe (cue Sam Altman). Just because it affirms billionairs viewpoints of the status quo doesn't make it apolitical. If it feels apolitical to you that probably says something about your political biases.
I mean hacker in the proper sense not in the colloquial/black hat sense.
I agree that content marketing posts are not the best but they can be interesting despite the underlying motivation for the posts being marketing instead of curiosity. Sometimes the result is interesting regardless. Removing content marketing means having to try to guess the motivations of authors which is fraught. Yeah sometimes it is obvious but not always.
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This site is called hacker news… the article is news about hackers
Ignoring the US politics angle, would this post have been flagged? It's Brian Krebs, back after being DDoSed yet again, reporting on hackers hacking. doxing and swatting people. hacking. That's not of interest on hacker news? If, then, the subject without the political angle, would have been of interest here, then why does adding, yes, a highly contentious topic on top of that, make it of less interest to the community?
The answer is repetition - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 for a longer comment in that vein.
Basically, how interesting a story is varies with its position in the sequence of related stories.
I think the fact that we keep hearing about DOGE grey-area accessing of computer systems run by the US government and not about whatever else the Trump administration is currently doing is pretty good evidence that HN maintains a bias towards stories of interest to hackers. Like it or not, I think most of the hackers here are also US citizens.
> It isn't particularly newsworthy.
I disagree. Krebsonsecurity has regularly delivered HN salient and interesting frontpage material, and this is currently the most flagged submission they've ever had on HN. We've discussed security assessments very similar to this in the past, even political ones, with technical curiosity and good faith discussion. The constraining factor is now people who unconditionally idolize Elon Musk. It's easy to see who's in the wrong when flagging relevant, well-written and objective reports like this one.
My personal view is that HN shouldn't promote political content at all. It should just be moderated out or flagged with no opportunity for recourse, whether it's Syrian independence or the invasion of Ukraine. But I abide by the exceptions made in HN's guidelines and consider this a technically imperative article that most can tune out if they dislike. It's very easy to see the title and decide for yourself whether you're comfortable reading and discussing the article.
You should leave the flags, for the same reasons as last time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933391
I hear you but I think this sequence of stories has interest to HN readers on both sides of the political abyss, though not necessarily for the same reasons, and I think one can find the stories interesting without crossing into personal attack. (It's true that some of the articles do that more than others.)
We don't want too much of this, but a certain amount is ok, and that's how HN has operated for at least the last 15 years.
@dang Considering how many are ready to label one of the “other side” as evil, I think it’s very irresponsible of you to allow articles about US politics in the front page, specially an article like this that it’s really an smearing attempt
I see you're "ready to label one of the “other side” as evil" but the article seems well researched and referenced while your comment makes vague claims.
I see a lot of really specific and well thought out raising of issues in this thread, as it applies to technology, commerce and security, all very much on topic for HN.
Criticism of the current administration is an important part of democracy, we need to hold the government accountable, no matter who runs it.
> I see you're "ready to label one of the “other side” as evil" but the article seems well researched
I meant here, in this forum.
> Criticism of the current administration is an important part of democracy, we need to hold the government accountable, no matter who runs it.
Typical american imperialist mentality where USA is the only country that exists and/or matters:
- I'm not american
- I don't need to (or can) hold your government accountable
- I still believe allowing any politically-inclined post like this is toxic to this forum
> I think it’s very irresponsible of you to allow articles about US politics in the front page
There are a couple answers to that. One is that it's not possible not to. We tried once, as an experiment, and it had the counterintuitive effect of making the site more politicized.
The other answer is that a limited amount of political overlap is actually part of optimizing the site for intellectual curiosity. Lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... if anyone wants more.
What in the article do you consider as lacking a factual basis?
I’m curious what you consider to be a smear. Are the items about his background & history factual or not? If true, it seems calling it a smear attempt might be disingenuous.