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> "If we didn't have a compensating factor, those stories would dominate the front page every day and HN would no longer follow its primary rule: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Of course that means HN is subject to our interpretation of what counts as "intellectual curiosity"

I appreciate the straight talk. I had some questions about the above. Suppose there was a post on the front page that was popular, and "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity", but it happens to conflict with the interests of

A) HN,

B) YC, or

C) Specific individuals within YC, such as sama or pg

Can you guarantee that such stories will not be negatively moderated for that reason alone?

In the interests of transparency, can posts that are negatively moderated be publicly flagged, so that people can form their own opinions on whether the mods are using their powers in a fair and unbiased manner?

Most of us HN readers appreciate the work you're doing in moderating this forum. We're all in favor of mods using their powers in order to further the site's stated goals, but we're also very wary of mods using their powers in order to further their own personal agendas. We're worried that without sufficient transparency, it's only a matter of time before mods start abusing their powers. Hence why posts like this, and accusations of censorship, are such major topics of interest.

We're all in favor of mods using their powers in order to further the site's stated goals, but we're also very wary of mods using their powers in order to further their own personal agendas.

HN is quite well moderated, IMO (and I have been a moderator, and I spend a LOT of my time rolling my eyes at how most mods are doing it wrong, damnit). Your comment is a kind of comment I see a lot on HN that sticks in my craw. I blogged about that very recently, so, it isn't you and I don't want to get into a pissing contest, but this is my cranky feeling about remarks of this ilk:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/03/hello-did-yo...

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Which part of my comment do you disagree with. I specifically mentioned that I and others appreciate the work the mods are currently doing.

You are wary of them furthering their personal agenda. I quoted that.

There seems to be this assumption that good only occurs when some Christ-like martyr falls on their sword for the benefit of other people. The entire world seems to think that the only good men are dead men who died as martyrs to a cause and if someone is getting something out of the deal, they are evil predators.

I loathe this idea with every fiber of my being and would like to see it wholly stamped out of existence. I believe HN is as high quality a forum as it is because it has a purpose that serves the needs of the people who created it and run it.

I have done moderating for free. At the scale of HN, unpaid mods would absolutely not work. I wholly approve of them having a personal agenda here. I think the fact that they need to meet a standard of enlightened self interest is part of why they do so much better than most moderating teams.

Is that clearer?

> "I wholly approve of them having a personal agenda here."

Any forum with a policy like that will never gain the credibility and respect that HN currently enjoys. If someone wants to create a private forum and moderate it in a way that furthers their personal agenda, as opposed to the community's interests, more power to them, but they should disclose it publicly. As community members, it is entirely reasonable if we ask them whether this is indeed the case.

Thankfully, Dang disagrees with you and isn't moderating HN in a personal-agenda-driven manner (see his post above).

Your reply suggests a huge disconnect between my meaning and your interpretation of my words.

Fwiw I hear you and Mz arguing much the same thing here. It's 'personal' in the sense of self-interested but not in the sense of a personal agenda beyond that... or at least we try hard not to be that way.

The best way to optimize HN's value to YC is simply by having it be as interesting as possible. Curiosity is the reason the community comes here, and the community coming here is why HN is valuable, so to do it any other way would trade a global optimum for a local one—basically trading the goose that lays golden eggs for some eggs. We're in an unusually fortunate position this way. If HN were a startup constantly needing to get its numbers up, we'd be under business pressure to do things that made HN less interesting. It's a happy coincidence that the most-interesting HN is also the HN that most serves YC's long-term interests.

Secondarily, HN has job ads and (more recently) 'Launch HNs' for startups that get special treatment. The job ads are written about in the FAQ and the launches eventually will be, but we're still figuring out the best way to do them. These are concessions HN grants to YC in return for being funded by YC, and our intent is to have them be both secondary and obvious. I agree that it's fair for HN to make these concessions and especially with your reason for saying so: it's the way to have a sustainably high-quality site, which does not come free. What HN doesn't do is make non-transparent concessions, like moderating anti-YC stories differently. But I've covered that elsewhere in the thread.

Your blog post mainly consists of the statement:

"Get a clue, people. Hacker News is an awesome discussion forum because it serves a business purpose. Please stop acting like there is something bizarre or ethically questionable about the mods making sure that this free service actually serves the business that pays all the bills for it. Geez"

I don't agree with the the assertion that HN mainly "serves a business purpose", perhaps in its early days its main purpose was to funnel prospective people into YC (second step from pg's essays, I stumbled on HN this way back in the day).

While you consider the arguments as "inane", I think there is merit in people trying to understand the mechanisms on which HN is being moderated. The "Don't worry your pretty head, it's being done right" argument only drives up more suspicion, because this is exactly the way less than savory practices in government and elsewhere are hidden. I don't think this is the case with HN but trying to argue that the suspicions arise not (just) because people are just jerks or stupid.

I don't agree with the the assertion that HN mainly "serves a business purpose", perhaps in its early days its main purpose was to funnel prospective people into YC (second step from pg's essays, I stumbled on HN this way back in the day).

If HN serves no business purpose, why does it employ full-time paid moderators?

Obviously: They illegally magic up money in their basement from printing presses to support their idealistic desire to give all their time away for free, in spite of the inconvenient need to somehow also eat and keep a roof over their head.

/sarcasm

When stories are negative about YC or YC-funded companies, we moderate them less than we would if they were about something else. That doesn't mean we don't moderate them at all—it would be foolish to leave open any loophole that large on the internet—but we're conscious and careful about doing it less than we usually would. That is literally the first thing pg taught me about how to moderate HN, and the first thing I've taught every other moderator. I've written about this many times: e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date....

An example: the other day someone reposted an old (2011) controversy article about Airbnb. It was a me-too post of the kind users frequently submit in response to something currently on the front page, which tends to be bad for HN because it's repetitive. Also, the article was misleading in several ways (as I understand it) and long out of date in others. Our usual moderation practice is to penalize such stories—i.e. that are derivative of something else or clearly misleading—but we didn't do any of that because it was about a YC-funded startup. We're very clear about this with all YC founders and everyone who works for YC.

Stories about HN itself are a little different because of the evil catnip power of meta, but it's still the same principle: we don't suppress stuff because it's critical of us.

The idea that more data would clear everything up is a fallacy. "Just make everything public" is the sort of argument that sounds great on paper, but I think it would more likely cause just the opposite. People already take things out of context and construct fun, rage-inducing narratives about how awful we are—not because we're special, it's just a fact of life on the internet. Why would it ever stop? Of course it will never stop. What it would do is consume far more of our time and energy than it already does. That would steal resources from the things we should be doing to make HN better, basically giving a small number of users (some well-intentioned, others not so much) the power to do a denial-of-service attack on the good things of HN. Hacker News doesn't magically self-regulate, unfortunately; it takes a lot of work to keep it interesting and stave off entropy, and that's what we need to focus on. Every time one of these things comes up, it takes hours, sometimes a whole day, to answer people's questions about it. There's a burnout risk too.

So I think the balance we gradually arrived at over the years is the right one: be open about the principles we use to moderate HN and answer questions in specific cases. Unless something big happens to change my mind, that's how HN will continue to work; I believe it's what serves the community best as a whole.

> I want to illustrate the point that we intervene less, not more, when judgments about ourselves are involved.

Given "ourselves" is all of us here, a way to illustrate that in a trustworthy way would be to expose the meta data around the story. Which articles were flagged and removed, who flagged, how much it mattered, etc. If not in real time, due to possible exploitation for ranking tweaks, then perhaps in an acceptable offset of time.

I also recommend implementing a cost of suffering flag type for articles which use negative emotional responses to spread the information in the article, especially when it is dissonant and viral in nature. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc for context.

This article seems reasonable, but here's one indication it's flirting with recursive irrational behavior:

> I have to admit that I found it a bit comforting that I wasn’t the only one who thought this all seemed a bit fishy.

Confirmation bias is still a bias. Making an argument with bias prevents exploring other explanations, such as errors in HN code, activity periods (lunch for example) and sharing of stories within other aggregates which elicit a negative response (a large company monitoring the comments may not agree with post, and consensus there effectively moderates it down).

>Given "ourselves" is all of us here, a way to illustrate that in a trustworthy way would be to expose the meta data around the story. Which articles were flagged and removed, who flagged, how much it mattered, etc.

Publicly pointing out who flagged a story seems like a bad idea. I think the data should always be anonymized. I just think it will lead down a bad path to ostracize people for specific votes or flags.

I do however think it would be interesting to see some data after the fact for some stories say ones that reach 500 points or greater.

Publicly pointing out who flagged a story seems like a bad idea.

Possibly better idea:

Moderators could take a look at unfairly flagged stories and silently adjust flag weights for flag-abusing users.

This is of course based on my unscientific thought that the majority of interesting (IMO) stories flagged of the frobt page are removed by competitors (political or business-wise) rather than moderators.

And commercial reputation management / PR firms. See the book Grassroots for Hire.

Unless I'm completely mistaken, the mods already do that (at least they've said "we'll take flagging privileges away from users that abuse them")

As a regular user, I have no interest in being witch hunted because I flagged a story. Votes and flags should be anonymous as far as other users are concerned.

This is highly irrational and speculative in nature. If an entity flags all articles by another entity or group, they should be held accountable for their actions, which could be shown to be biased. Further, a "witch hunt" would be driven by irrational decision making processes in the "hunter" aggregate, which is the point of exposing the meta data in the first place. Stopping recursive irrational thinking is the goal here.

If a user flags incorrectly it is up to the moderators to moderate. Not for other users. Note that I said 'as far as other users are concerned'.

Incorrectly indicates agreement on concensus of the aggregate. I agree with your assertions. Moderators, as infrastructure currently stands, serve an important role in shielding users from the truth of things.

It has to cost something to hide good content if you expect people to take the time to produce or submit quality content and engage with the community. Otherwise you'll end with the things no one cared much about.

And to engage with the community you use a throwaway account?

I'm more of an example of the latter.

If I got paid a revenue split whenever someone paid to get public data that involved me, I'd be OK with it.

The other post incorrectly had "2010" in the title and I made a comment about how this should be corrected. The "2010" was then removed.

If, like you say, the moderators never saw the story then who made these changes? I find it hard to believe that foob would put the wrong year in the title of his own post.

Good question! I will check.

Edit: ok, I think I know what happened now. A moderator put 2010 on the title by mistake. I haven't checked the timestamps on the user flags, but it's possible that people flagged the article because they thought it was old, in which case the title change would have acted as a moderation penalty even though obviously we didn't mean it that way. I was wrong to say "moderators never saw it" because I checked the log for moderation penalties, found nothing, and didn't look for title changes. So I made a mistake too.

We're sorry for the mistake. I don't recall this particular thing ever happening before, but plenty of other moderator errors have. We try to admit them and correct them as soon as we know about them.

As much as I love this place, every time I find out more about how the sausage is made, I lose faith in HN a little bit more.

Look at just the stuff from this case - heavy handed uneven constant moderation (you claim moderators dont see a bunch of stories, but those that you do see like this one, often get adjustments), misreporting, questionable transparency, too much hardly visible power of flags, etc.

I know the rules, but It really seems like at best we are a few moderator changes from having this place turn to something that wouldn't be valuable to people like me.

Are there other online discussion forums that also go into such detail about how the sausage is made you can point to as an example?

From the ones I frequent, HN via Dan and team is the only one I've come across which frequently and directly engages the community in a detailed and genuine way about their policies.

Slashdot.

I'm sorry that any user who loves this place would feel that way! I've tried to answer some of the concerns you mention in comments elsewhere in the thread—not that you'll necessarily agree with the answers, but if there's something unaddressed, let me know, and if you don't get a reply, hn@ycombinator.com is best.

Would there be a way to be a bit more specific about flags? E.g. "inaccurate title", "duplicate post", "advertising"?

There's been times when an older article is posted and adding the year in the title might give better perspective. Or other times where it's clearly a PR post for a company and we just want it off the front page.

I know how difficult it can be to run a volunteer review system, but we have done it for years and have learned a few lessons. One thing you should do here is remove privileges for a bit from the moderator in question. Reviewers need to have some consequence for mistakes, otherwise they will tend towards moving faster and faster in their actions, with lower quality as the result.

> There's no way around the need for moderator intervention on a site like HN—the clue is in the word 'moderator' itself: left to its own devices the system runs to extremes and it needs a negative feedback loop to dampen it.

Uh... not really?

Left to its own devices, the system will include both extremes and non-extremes. In order to cut extremes out you have to sample what the extremes are, detect them and then minimize them.

The sampling comes by letting extremes pop up. The detection comes by letting users tag stories by content and emotional weight. You can minimize them with moderation tags and meta-moderation flags and automating balancing algorithms.

Currently you support story flagging, comment flagging, up/down voting. You have no way to identify what the significance of these are, though. Without better tools for your community maintain itself, of course you need moderators. But there are simple ways around this that would cut most of the moderation out and allow the system to simply re-weight stories as they become more obviously extreme in one or multiple tag/flag configurations.

Here are the categories of the 30 newest stories at time of writing: social media, privacy, programming, sysadmin, espionage, consumer products, politics, health, games, science. The stories vary in emotional rating (1-5, meh -> i am upset). As tags come in for any given story, trends emerge about how that story is perceived: it is relatively emotional, it is political and science based, and it is upvoted very quickly. Clearly, this is more likely to be controversal than the low-emotion programming topic that takes an hour to reach front page, so the latter should get higher priority, because it is less controversial and more "important to HN".

Notice that no moderator is needed to figure out what is controversial and change the balance, and we didn't even need to do something complicated like analyze speech patterns in comments or story content.

> The detection comes by letting users tag stories by content and emotional weight.

So what's to stop malicious users from tagging a post they don't like in such a way that the system sees it as controversial?

Assuming they have basic protections to stop malicious users massively-downvoting stories they don't like? The number of [real] users rating the story improves the balance, and you can use the same system they do now to prevent voting by brand-new users, things like that.

If you don't mind answering, is there a reason [flagged] doesn't show as soon as it starts to downweight?

I would guess that most front page articles have some number of flags from concern trolls, and the down-weighting effect is probably not linear, so it just wouldn't be very informative.

Do you want it show right away? I assume that showing it right away (as soon as possible) will only cause it to fall off even faster and fewer people bother to look at it and possibly upvote it.

I assume that similar to HN meta stories resulting in upvoting trances, seeing [flagged] leads to ignoring the submission.

Tons of stories get flagged—in fact above a certain point threshold the majority do—and in most cases the effect isn't that strong.

The same reason that you can't see the number of votes for comments. If you see [flagged], you're more likely to flag.

> Meta is basically crack, so we routinely downweight such posts

Interesting that you make a drug analogy. What's wrong with letting HN users have their crack? Unlike actual crack, there's no danger of side effects, dependency, withdrawal, etc. Maybe the "upvoting trance" is the expression of a sincere communal desire? It's not like it's "trashy" content... meta is simply self-reflection. Why penalize it?

Maybe the fear is that the front page will be overrun with meta content... that makes sense, but I feel like one or two meta posts couldn't hurt. I think self-consciousness is a positive attribute for a community.

Speaking of meta, perhaps there could be a Meta: area strictly for meta discussions, similarly to Ask HN:? Then the meta addicts could congregate and upvote all the want there? A slight modification might need to be made so that Meta: prefaced titles never appear in the regular submission queue, or if they do they start with a huge negative factor.

This is more or less what works for Stack Overflow.

How about if there was a bit associated with every post that indicates whether it's meta or not. A submitter can set it when they post if they like; a mod can set or clear it later. Perhaps users could flag posts as being meta as well, i don't know.

Then we just take all the meta posts off the main page, and show them on another top-level page like Ask HN or Show HN.

I i think i'd be happy for meta posts to appear on the 'new' page. There aren't that many of them, so they won't flood it. If they get upvoted, they get promoted to a different place to substantive posts, so they won't clog it.

It's a bit like a GC which allocates large objects in the nursery, so you can still, eg, create a scratch buffer quickly, but promotes them to a large-object heap instead of the normal tenuring generations.

I'm in no way affiliated but I think it would be to cut down on what "shitposts" that are just meta-related and are low quality posts. While this one seems to have interesting theories, over on Reddit there is a scourge of highly upvoted posts that do little to nothing to motivate discussion or contribute to the community.

I call it 'crack' semi-facetiously and semi-affectionately, but it's an interesting analogy to play with.

> Unlike actual crack, there's no danger of side effects

There's a big danger of side effects to HN itself. When taken excessively—the natural tendency—it makes the site less intellectually interesting, which alienates the best kinds of user (and attracts the less best kinds). Maybe if we could be like David Cross and just do crack once each...

> one or two meta posts couldn't hurt. I think self-consciousness is a positive attribute for a community

This I agree with but HN is extremely well-resourced in this area. The intention behind penalizing such stories, as I tried to explain above, is not to suppress them but to countervail.

Could "vouch" be made available if there are any flags, even before the full flagging threshold is reached?

We've been toying with doing something like this. The original intent of vouching was to rescue good posts that happen to be [dead] (e.g. because a banned user posted them) which is why we didn't implement it that way at the time.

I think that this is a great idea. I imagine that it's very difficult to differentiate between users flagging things that really don't belong on the site and flagging things that they dislike for more personal reasons. Showing a "vouch" link to high-karma users on stories that are being flagged would make it easier to separate the two cases.

Good idea. If a flagging brigade is active, early independent vouching would either stop the brigade, or make it easier to detect the brigade.

You'll just create competing teams of brigades. Better to just go to a moderator and say, "I think my submission was brigaded, help!"

Doesn't flagging trigger moderator review? If not, should it be called something stronger, like "killing"?

I honestly don't know, but I'd guess that there are only so many mods, and a lot more users/posts that demand their attention. To be honest though, I base this on experiences moderating communities in the past, not particular experiences here.

If moderators don't have review capacity, HN could have a dedicated page for flagged posts, so that users could review and vouch as needed.

I'm sure that kind of thing could work, especially with the group of users here, but it would probably represent a full-time job for a mod just to police that page and make use of it. They may simply not see the benefit?

Moderators would not need to police it, users would use the page to rescue incorrectly flagged posts.

In any case, someone other than HN (e.g. Algolia) could construct a page/queue of flagged posts for review. It would be used by a subset of the audience for the "new" page.

No permission needed from HN moderators. Users already have the power to vouch for stories, they only need a timely way to review.

I think the rate of objectively incorrectly flagged posts is very low. The author's previous post is an example. Flagging meta posts is not objectively incorrect. Flagging posts that suggest nefarious motives by the moderators is not objectively incorrect. Flagging posts that are technically mediocre (i.e. not reflecting knowledge of HN's moderators or the long published general ranking algorithm) is not objectively incorrect. The only obvious objectively incorrect situation of flags killing a story is when there is organized effort to flag a story to death for ulterior motive...and I suspect that is probably already covered reasonably well algorithmically.

Technically and opinion aside, given the weighting function, what is supposed to happen when someone vouches for an eight hour old thirty-five point story? Does it move to page the middle of page two? How is justice done?

To quote Dennis Moore blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought.

In the weighting function, wouldn't vouching invert the changes that were previously effected by flagging, which in fact took place on an incremental basis? Or are you saying that vouching is not needed?

Generally, I think that a vouching queue looks like another way for people who like the sort of submissions that HN tends to flag to further promote that content.

I don't think flagging is creating problems in terms of HN's quality. As I indicated, there were lots of reasonable criteria under which to flag the previous post. To me, this post has characteristics that meet those criteria as well.

Where vouching might have a role is a quality story with very few points that is flagged dead based on misunderstanding or malintent. A story that hits the front page has had many eyeballs upon it and if it is killed from there by organic means, that's the way the system is supposed to normally work. Even when I think the story does not deserve it.

How does one "go to a moderator" on HN?

And besides, if a submission is flagged off the front page by that point I would think the damage is done short of resetting the gravity of the post to allow it to be in the same position on the front that it "should" have been. I'm not even sure if this is something they can do.

E-mail worked for me when I needed to ask them a question. The whole thing was resolved in less than a day, and it was painless. From what I've seen they're pretty active here in comments too, and seem inclined to reply to reasonable questions posed to them, including, "Mind if I send you an e-mail detailing some concerns?"

Talk to them... they're people.

...so what's happening to this submission now, since it dropped from #1? :P

You're so quick! I'm busy adding to my comment to explain.

Flagging should be much less effective.

There's no reason why a few people clicking 'flag' should ruin the experience for everyone else.

The experience wouldn't exist without flagging in the first place. They're an integral part of HN's system, without which it would be overrun with spam, sensationalism, and other kinds of posts that don't belong here.

It's true that the effect of flags isn't perfect in every way, but we have to evaluate this on a whole-system level. I'm not aware of any way to make the whole system work significantly better (otherwise we'd have done it already) and certainly getting rid of flags wouldn't be one.

Humble suggestion: Have a separate page on the site that shows stories which have had strong negative penalties applied to them, whether from being flagged or moderators.

Just change it to be less effective as it becomes more popular.

There's no reason to have a 'flag' link once a story hits the main page, for example.

Then people would just submit clickbait titles such that their submission gets quick upvotes for flag immunity.

Good point -- but certainly you can agree that after a certain point threshold flagging is increasingly less valuable and should be more to simply let the mods know to take a look.

Anything is preferable, at this point, to the methods used. Perfectly good articles are getting dropped and it comes across as censorship.

Or just monitor the stories that get flagged off the front page (~25 over several weeks according to the post) and take appropriate measures (e.g. restoring with relative time and penalize flaggers). Of course they first have to decide whether they want users who cares about the stories they submit and therefor think that non bad things getting flagged off the front page is a problem.

Suggestion: Make anonymized graph data available on submissions and flaggers so we can spot flag/upvote cartels. This would make for a great final project for some college course.

I suspect that the software does that automatically on the server. Given that 'cartels' are likely to be automated and hence at web rather than human scale, at least some of the counter measures probably should be as well.

Well those are the flagrant cartels. I hear there are pure-human cartels too. I see emails and Facebook posts and en-masse emails asking for Product Hunt up-votes from time to time from some VC associates. I imagine there is a similar thing going on on HN (but what do I know...i'm just a tiny startup staring at PyCharm most of the day.)

Because it is mostly a site for press release type content, I suspect Product Hunt has less incentive to discourage those sorts of get out the vote activities versus Hacker News. And Hacker News users have more incentive to flag posts that rise for reasons other than interesting content or comments. I mean, if I have an informed expectation of what I will get on the Product Hunt front page and it is different than my expectation about the HN front page in part due to the way get out the vote activities are treated.

I don't think you can say this unless you know how many flags are received by 'good' articles versus 'bad' ones.

Have asked this before but any reason you don't have in your profile that you are the moderator? Seems very clubby and exclusionary to only have experienced or frequent users know who you are on this site and what role you play. Ditto I used to say this about PG and others (paul and other partners).

Is the secret handshake that important to the success of HN? Why throw newbies for a loop or make them have to think about this?

It's getting flagged.

1. Downvotes after Xkarma you can downvote frontpage items

2. Flags _soft_ downvote people unlock easiers

3. Mods have a ""super"" flag which is the ranking equivalent of aging a post pre-maturely. So the weighting algorithm calculates the post as being much older then it actually is allowing it to slide off the front page faster.

Isn't there another factor on rank based on ones Karma or is that a per account thing?

Aka, I've noticed that most of my stories I submit never reach the front page, but a nearly identical, or sometimes the exact link will make it to the front-page. I can only speculate that there is some high karma aspect to the ranking algorithm that works against high karma HN users.

Kind of seems opposite of how it should be but maybe there is a good reason for this approach that the mods can share.

Not based on karma per se but there are various ways for an account to get penalized. People who are worried about whether that's the case are welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. We'll either tell you there's no penalty or offer to take it off in exchange for following the site guidelines a bit better.

Ah so it is personal, nice to know and what I always suspected.

This might be slightly off-topic, but is flagging supposed to be more like downvoting or reporting a post? The guidelines say it is for when a, "story is spam or off-topic," but that doesn't say what flagging means, just when to use it.

It's both. It's like a downvote in that it affects rank, and like reporting a post in that we monitor the flagged articles and take action based on flags. Sometimes the action is to turn the flags off.

Is there a threshold to the amount of flags you look at? If I am the only person to flag your comment here, would a moderator wind up looking at that flag?

> the post is completely wrong

I take a little bit of offense to this statement. The article identifies stories that had sudden extreme drops in position and then speculates that this could be caused by a hidden flagging threshold and/or moderator intervention. I strongly suspected that moderation was responsible in some of the cases but I also emphasized that this was because I didn't expect those stories to get heavily flagged and that we couldn't know for sure. All of these stories were effectively removed from the front page whether it was due to a hidden threshold or a moderator. I thought it was interesting to look at which stories were removed even if we could only speculate on the mechanism in each case.

You've confirmed that there are hidden thresholds in place that severely penalize stories and that the moderators make manual adjustments. I don't think that that makes the post completely wrong even if the moderator adjustments tend to be smaller and all of the stories I looked at were affected by automated means.

Do you have any thoughts on whether any of the listed stories are appropriate for the front page? As I said before, a few of these stories seem like "bad" posts but most of them appear fairly typical to me. Flagging is obviously necessary but maybe there is an issue with the user-specific weighting or how one of these thresholds kicks in if there seems to be a high percentage of collateral damage? I'm sure that you've spent a lot more time thinking about this than I have so I'm genuinely very curious to hear your opinion.

You're right, and I wrote that in haste, so I've taken out "It should really be lower than that because the article is completely wrong" and replaced it with "It should probably be lower".

Edit: I took a look at your list and don't see any pattern in those stories. Some belong on HN and indeed got a lot of time on the front page. Others clearly don't belong on HN. In a few cases moderators intervened to penalize the story or turn penalties off, but in a solid majority moderators didn't intervene at all. In a few cases a bunch of points were dropped by the anti-voting ring software so the 'real' score wasn't as high as it seemed.

To me all this shows, and the reason I described it as 'completely wrong', is that you can't reconstruct what's going on from timestamps, point totals, and story rank. There's simply too much data that isn't public. I know that's frustrating to the large section of HN's userbase who love to know what's going on and figure things out. But I don't believe making it all public would be helpful, so here's the balance we've arrived at over the years: we make public the the principles of how the system works, including moderator intervention, and we answer specific questions about specific cases.

Honestly this is typical of your usual responses to be dismissive, faux outraged... And also just incorrect, factually incorrect.

Someone finally has enough data to confront your obvious bias and enough people saw it that you had to back up and apologize but this is a rare exception.

Mods removed submissions and individual posts they find distasteful and it has nothing to do with HN guidelines, they are applied unequally just as some members get special treatment. hN is just not that honest of a place to have an open discussion on a variety of topics.

just a comment, then back to lurking:

no administration leads to 4chan like boards and newsfeeds

4chan has administration, moderation and rules. I think most chans are pretty well-moderated.

/b/ is the best known and least moderated board of 4chan; only child pornography and brony stuff is removed.

> There's simply too much data that isn't public.

Make it public?

The danger of making it public is that it makes the system much easier to game.

The upside is that it is easier to see who is gaming the system. Or that could be another downside if the answer is "the moderators".

How does it make the system easier to game?

> Or that could be another downside if the answer is "the moderators".

To me it seems like an upside if we know when moderators are gaming the system.

I was being a little cheeky there implying that the moderators don't want the users to know if they're manipulating the votes.

Security through obscurity is rarely a winning tactic.

All security is some form of obscurity, is it not?

I can't really think of any good forms of 'security through obscurity'. Is the elimination of buffer overflow vulns and sql injections a form of obscurity? Is SSL a form of obscurity?

SSL is based on obscure prime numbers. Another example is user passwords (obscure text). Sessions and API tokens, too. Credit card numbers, garage door openers, and SIM cards all rely on hidden information. Even door locks are a physical form of hidden keys.

But you're right, there are some forms of security that don't require obscurity. For voting systems though, I would categorize them as "cat and mouse" systems, which unfortunately fall into the obscurity category.

No. That's not what the phrase means.

This may be true for locks and cryptography but a message board is not really a 'security system' nor does it fail completely and catastrophically if someone manages to figure out the details of the ranking algorithm or spam countermeasures.

That's only true when it's known how to publicly secure something.

That makes gaming the system too easy.

Is there a way to get flag data on stories?

Just that it's flagged or not, if your karma is high enough.

You should allow un-moderated, un-indexable and un-crawlable side of HN where such stories can pop.

Is there a mechanism for detecting flagging rings?

> There's no way around the need for moderator intervention on a site like HN—the clue is in the word 'moderator' itself: left to its own devices the system runs to extremes and it needs a negative feedback loop to dampen it.

Then maybe the system needs to be changed?

> None of this is new information, btw. I've posted about it plenty over the years and am always happy to answer questions.

Is there anything in particular that should make us trust the information you provide? You could be lying for all we know.

An article comes out about how Hacker News has been censored, and Hacker News censors the post... because of "meta crack effect."

Without sounding too snide, it sounds like what's happening is that we do all of the work by posting articles and comments, and hacker news controls the narrative.