Flag - duplicate - you may want to delete this.
There are about 10 threads on this in the last two hours. Some have 300 comments.
Take a look - one #28 is still on the front page now with almost 500 comments.
There are about 10 threads on this in the last two hours. Some have 300 comments.
Take a look - one #28 is still on the front page now with almost 500 comments.
When a negative story about YC emerges and generates a lot of comments so it gets pushed off the front-page and they just say "shame but its just automatic flamewar detector, <shrug>". I'm sure they think they are clever but it just erodes trust over the long term.
Trust me, there's no room for feeling clever in this job.
What do you think about leaving the penalties open for user customisation? I find its more miss than hit as a flamewar heuristic and would prefer to scroll past real flamewars rather than know that popular topics are suppressed.
It's literally the first rule of HN moderation that we don't suppress stories that are negative about YC or YC startups. More precisely, when stories like that appear, we moderate them less than we usually would. The reason is precisely what you said: long term trust is the most important thing. Also, before being moderators of HN, we're users ourselves, and wouldn't want the site to be moderated that way.
Sounds like an odd cough algorithm.
When people see something they don't like, they don't think, "Well, any even-handed system will put up things I don't like sometimes." They think: Bias! Outrage! And some rush to "J'accuse!". In any large group this will happen to quite a few people every day (sometimes the same few!), and it takes 100x as much effort to responsibly respond to the j'accuses as to fire them off in the first place. This would amount to a DoS attack on resources that we could otherwise use to make HN better.
Therefore our goal should not be the impossible one of placating everybody with a litigious bee in their bonnet, but (a) being able to say "no, we don't do that" in good conscience, and (b) retaining the good will of the community as a whole. Actually we like to help users with bees in their bonnets too, but to think it can always be done leads to madness.
We're toying with adding vouch links so users can vouch for a story they don't think should be marked as a flamewar. That's something that might improve the quality of HN.
Makes sense about releasing more stats - how about internally then? Could you take a look at the number of pro- and anti-YC stories that you've turned the system off for and see if it seems unbiased? Often it's easy to judge each story one by one and think you're being unbiased. But we're all biased. Going back and checking those stats may reveal something you didn't think was happening. Or not. Not as any kind of placation, but more as an internal quality check so you know you're on the right track.
I'm really disappointed in the quality of the discourse on both sides this election cycle. Straw men abound.
As with anything label-related, it's hard to determine who wears what label for what reasons and what elements of the label are made up by outsiders attempting to discredit the wearers of the label. But it is currently difficult to come to a conclusion other than yours given the facts I've been able to find.
As a small aside, I still hold a small amount of hope given the history of inaccuracy in the media's portrayals of 4chan. Hopefully this is similarly overblown and hysterical...
Having a CEO of a social media site impersonate users and censor comments calls into question the credibility of the their whole brand.
That's not a partisan perspective???
How would you feel if Paul Graham of HN changed your comment to "I am strong supporter of the alt-right?" ...you wouldn't like that. Opposing opinions are fine - using admin priledges to put words to literally put words in users mouths is madness?
I already made a comment elsewhere - but I'm surprised they haven't let him go. If reddit were a real company, they wouldn't tolerate that. I wonder what would happen if a middle manager started tampering with user comments - he would be gone.
It may very well be that there are "alt-right" people blowing it out of proportion, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal.
That is not the case.[1]
[1]: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-pan...
Kidding aside, it is, though. It crosses a line that, from a strict point of view (like that of permissions or data security) can't be uncrossed. It's equatable to any and every comment being edited or editable without labelling, presented as the unmarked original.
We're approaching the point where reddit comments are seen as valid enough to appear in congressional reports (re: the combetta bleachbit thing); I can't even begin to imagine the legal exposure this would give reddit if that were further along. (Though I guess I can; imagine if this were Twitter or FB; I'm sure some tens of thousands of cases would potentially be under question...)
And that's not even approaching the whole 'potential for historical revisionism' can of worms. Don't worry mate - the gravity of this isn't lost on all of us. :)
Absolutely.
> You think that other CEOs would have been?
Even if other CEOs who have done similar things have not been let go, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have been let go. This was a major breach of trust.
> If so you have not been following the news much.
Apparently I haven't been following the news much because I haven't heard of any CEOs doing something like this recently. The most "scandalous" (for lack of better word) thing that I've heard of recently concerning CEOs and political stuff was the controversy with GrubHub and Pepsi. If you're referring to events like those, I don't think they're comparable. I don't agree with the actions of those CEOs either, but there's a difference between the CEO of a company taking a stance against a political candidate and the CEO of a social media network putting words in his users' mouths by editing their comments. If you're not referring to stuff like the GrubHub and Pepsi and there have in fact been other CEOs who put words in their users' mouths by editing their comments or posts, I'd love some links. Either way, I still think they should be let go.
Censorship of this issue is seriously bad news: Either we expose the pedophile rings in our governments, or we are subject to their will - and abuse of power - at every point.
So, yeah. This is a huge breach of trust, and I hope that this story gets out there so that people can be informed while deciding whether to contribute to the reddit empire.
He used his admin privileges to CHANGE users comments.
Like if you made your last statement and then Paul Graham changed it to read "It's a huge deal, it's never happened before"...so that became YOUR USER COMMENT
So, people were saying "fuck /u/spez" (CEO's username), and he edited that.
If he was not CEO, he would have been gone by now with apology from the company.