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Comment by mdhb

1 day ago

Have you actually ever browsed the secret “active” page where you can see what people are actually voting for without the mods putting their thumbs on the scale? It’s constantly filled with dead posts because someone said something that was vaguely unflattering towards Israel, venture capital, capitalism in general, the United States or Apple. Literally happens dozens of times every single day.

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mdhb

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dang  1 day ago

It's hardly secret—it's on the /lists page which is referenced in the footer of every page on HN.

It simply isn't the frontpage, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366656)

  • mdhb  1 day ago

    The level of discrepancy between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality is miles apart. Every day.

    Edit: since I can’t reply because my account was throttled for “posting too past” with a whopping 5 comments in the last 24 hours. Allow me to paste it here…

    It would probably help if I were to bring a bit more specificity to my accusations here so we aren’t just talking about an abstract concept.

    I’m making the claim:

    1. The active page (what people are actually engaging with) and the front page (mods choice) regularly are regularly out of sync not just in general but in very specific and consistent ways.

    2. There is a small group of people who intentionally use the flagging functionality in ways that have absolutely zero to do with the rules as they are written. People are incredibly open about this on a regular basis.

    3. We are left with a de facto situation where that same small group are able to effectively censor what the rest of the community is allowed to talk about.

    4. The moderation team seems to operate on the idea that everyone is just acting in good faith despite evidence to the contrary.

    5. When the discrepancies between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality occur they are very rarely corrected by the moderation team and I don’t know what other conclusion to draw other than you seem to think that things are going great as they are and there’s no need to change anything.

    6. You say the active page isn’t a secret but people are always saying they had no idea it existed. Surely you have some actual hard analytics numbers to show what percentage of logged in users visit the active page? I presume it’s in the single digits percentage wise but I’m open to being told otherwise.

    • dang  1 day ago

      That's inevitable, because consistency is impossible: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... How to interpret the inconsistency is a different question, of course. I'm curious what you see that seems most discrepant to you?

      The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. In fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.

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