Ask HN: [Meta] Popular/active political posts disappearing off the front page? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: [Meta] Popular/active political posts disappearing off the front page?

22 pointsanon_app_guy20 comments

Over the past few months, I've seen a number of very popular and active political posts disappear off the front page in a matter of hours. Notable examples that come to mind are yesterday's various travel ban threads (such as this one[1]) and Sam Altman's blog post on Thiel[2] and Trump[3] — all with hundreds of upvotes and comments, but buried several pages down next to posts that are one or two days older. On one hand, I realize that the most likely explanation is that a large contingent of the site is rabidly opposed to political discussion and downvotes/flags these posts en masse. However, I've also seen convincing evidence on Reddit and elsewhere that huge throngs of far-right accounts — whether genuine, automated, or funded by outside political forces — tend to brigade these kinds of topics and swing votes in their favor.

First, does HN have the means to monitor and counteract this kind of vote manipulation?

Second, would the mods consider giving these kinds of contentious political posts more front page weight? I was stunned that the last two sama blog posts disappeared off the front page in a matter of hours (to the point where most people probably didn't even see them) whereas normally they'd stick around for a day or more.

These discussions are buzzing with activity and are absolutely vital to the future of our community! I strongly believe they deserve to be read more widely.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13509509

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12728249

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13507993

When there's a deluge of political stories, as in the last couple days, users heavily flag most of them. But there have still been plenty of major threads spending plenty of time on the front page. That's the status quo for HN: most politics are off topic, but not all. It's a delicate balance and an important one. Letting politics overrun this site would kill it.

There's no satisfying anybody about this: not the readers who want more politics, not the readers who want less, and certainly not the partisans on an issue. When you see something you don't like, e.g. stories being flagged or not being flagged, the mind leaps to "the other side must be manipulating this" as an explanation, but that's almost never the case. What you're observing is the behavior of a large community—divided in much the way society at large is divided—plus randomness.

If anyone has concerns about a particular post being manipulated they're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com, but please don't post insinuations about that here. Unless you have real evidence, that's reliably an uncivil and unsubstantive move in discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

Probably related?

These discussions are buzzing with activity and are absolutely vital to the future of our community!

Well, count me a non-right-winger who'd prefer my HN sans political crap. If I wanted yet another forum where I could be inundated by American political drama, I'd still be on Reddit (or Facebook).

I come to HN for posts about technology. Politics touches all aspects of our lives, so it can trivially cross over as "relevant" on a forum like this. But I'd prefer we set that bar very high. Because if this place turns into another /r/politics, I'll remove HN from my RSS feed and find somewhere else to frequent.

Around the election there was a ban on political topics because the front page was almost entirely politics and flame-wars. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 for details.

Now that politics is an open topic again and Trump is President of the United States, people seem even more charged. What dang originally called out during the politics detox week was this:

> A community like HN deteriorates when new developments dilute or poison what it originally stood for. We don't want that to happen, so let's all get clear on what this site is for. What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments. What it is not: a political, ideological, national, racial, or religious battlefield.

I agree with dang; I think a few political articles on the front page a day is okay, but It can easily turn into around the clock flame-war.

The sorts of stories that marry politics and intellectual curiosity are what I want to see on HN: anything about the technology behind fake news, research on fighting populism, using the internet as a tool against fascism, etc. Maybe less of "tech company takes stand X against Trump policy Y".

> I think a few political articles on the front page a day is okay, but It can easily turn into around the clock flame-war.

It will always turn into a flame war because most of these threads are either posted by activists, or they attract activists. Activists are not interested in a 'conversation', they post to win control of the thread by calling in a brigade to out post and down vote the other side.

Anyone can put together a brigade of a few hundred people in a matter of minutes on reddit or irc.

You have two options in this environment. You can have a politically neutral technology focused board and remove the incentive for activists. Or you let them run a muck and turn your board into a signal booster for there activism and destroy the commuinity.

That's precisely how I see it.

Activists are trying to manipulate HN to disseminate their particular partisan point of view, and in the process they are manipulating this forum to focus on serving their private agenda and in the process ruining it for all of us who come here for the tech stuff.

And people like me come here for the tech stuff, not some activist's political agenda and their bile-spewing.

It's like a form of parasitism on an already successful platform.

Coming for the tech stuff is a private agenda too.

> Coming for the tech stuff is a private agenda too.

The site is called Hacker News, not anti-Trump news.

First of all, I couldn't resist the childish double entendre.

Second, On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

not 'On topic: tech stuff'.

From what I've observed and read from others:

- Member flags push a submission further down in rankings even prior to the [flagged] tag appearing.

- There's an "overheated discussion detection" algorithm which appears to take into account time, votes, and comment rates, which, when triggered, will further push down a submission.

- On occasion, the mods will downweight a submission. Sometimes, particularly if it's a contentious issue related to YC, they'll purposefully override the downweighting and flagging to ensure the topic gets adequate attention.

And yes, I've observed a strong bias against political submissions, particularly those that cover well-trodden ground and are highly likely to devolve quickly if not immediately into flamewars.

'dang had a comment in response to a member the other day that I thought had a lot of truth to it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13507993#13509167)

> I want HN debating politics because of how HN debates.

That only works because HN mostly isn't about politics. There must be a name for this paradox.

From what I've seen, the HN community highly values the quality of its discourse and is fiercely protective of it, and rightly so, in my opinion. Figuring out how to maintain a vibrant, useful, civil, online community is very hard. While there's always room for improvement, I think HN manages a pretty good balance.

edit: Ironically, I think this post got flagged off the homepage. Maybe that tells you all you need to know about the HN community's stance on political discussion.

While definitely controversial [1], many HN commenters dislike the vitrolic flame wars that the political threads create. I think it's the regulars doing the actual flagging, but if you read the comments themselves on some of these threads, the alt-right people definitely appear in the threads and make the quality of discourse significantly worse.

I do believe politics has a role on HN, I submitted the second HN post that the OP linked. I also enjoyed reading this thread [2] on election night as it provided hope. However, I think these threads will always continue to be flagged, because while HN moderation does a good job, with these political posts it will never be good enough as it causes some of the worst commenters on the site to come out of the woodwork.

Perhaps HN should give these posts more weight (and they do sometimes override user flags), but alas, it's probably one of the toughest editorial decisions this site faces.

[1]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/silicon-valleys-most-po...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12909752

I don't understand how these are vital to this community, can you explain what we would be missing without them?

I would rather people hid these stories than flagged them.

I understand why people are flagging them, they tend to bring out the worst in HN, but it's probably best to reserve flagging for truly bad threads, and hide the threads you simply don't feel the desire to engage with.

I understand the motivation behind your suggestion. I don't see it being ultimately workable.

Discussions tend to spill over across threads. If there's a population that tends to discuss politics, they're not necessarily going to keep the political discussions in the political threads, nor should they be expected to. And people have different definitions of what constitutes political.

And if this lends itself to allowing more heated debate (because the political threads are expected to be isolated in some way), that same heated debate form will likewise spill over into other threads.

Flagging political threads isn't stopping that either - that spillover is what flagging comments and downvotes are already for, and moderators detaching off-topic tangents.

But what hiding stories does accomplish is preventing people who don't want to see that content from being angered by its presence, especially when a topic threatens to overwhelm the site, and otherwise takes up most of the comments feed in a heated discussion, or most of the new topics page in the case of a popular story.

Although a more proactive approach would be to better curate the comments feed. It still seems that high traffic or volatile threads contribute a lot of low quality spillover there, and a lot of low hanging fruit for flamebaiting and drive-by comments.

Flagging political threads isn't stopping that either

True. It doesn't stop it. I think it does limit it, to some extent.

a more proactive approach would be to better curate the comments feed.

Interesting. Do you think the community would bear more aggressive curation?

>Do you think the community would bear more aggressive curation?

As it wouldn't affect the rank of the stories themselves, I don't see why not. It might not need human intervention either, just apply a few rules before building the comment page such as not displaying comments from a certain depth (which tend to be tangential) or not displaying downvoted comments, and preferring upvoted comments.

Hmmm. I was thinking more along the lines of more aggressively flagging/downvoting. Though I think either would see (some) members complaining about censorship.

Good, political posts should be flagged. We can get that garbage anywhere.

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