Comment by foob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foob | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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