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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

> The bigger thread has already been downvoted off the front page

Isn't that the result of a Hacker News algorithm that hides stories that receive a lot of comments in a short time?

My experience on HN is that stories about sexism often disappear quickly. It's often that I click on a story on the front page to read the comments, only to see it flagged a few moments later.

My explanation is that there is a significant number of HN readers that flag stories about sexism in tech because they don't believe them, but of course I don't have any evidence for that.

> but of course I don't have any evidence for that.

I concur with your hypothesis; there're often comments on these links that would serve as evidence.

I'm sure some people are just being contrarian for fun and karma, and some would just prefer to see more links specific to technologies and not 'Silicon Valley "culture"'... but some of the comments REALLY make me scratch my head.

Anything that isn't scientific or technical in nature gets downvoted, including posts from the other end of the spectrum like false rape accusations and gamergate.

The exception is news from the large tech companies and unicorns.

I appreciate this community driven filter after being bombarded by inflammatory headlines, ideologies and news all day. It filters out "political" and "controversial" topics very well.

I didn't flag, and very rarely do I flag, but I can see why sexism stories don't do well here:

1. Many "stories about sexism" simply aren't persuasive. They present some gap and leave the reader to assume sexism was at fault. These stories are almost always lazy, misleading, and biased.

2. Other stories are allegations of harassment. Either there is abundant evidence of guilt and the comments are boring because everyone agrees that the accused shouldn't have done a thing or the evidence is inconclusive and the comments are boring because of all of the pointless, unsupported arguments.

Maybe there are some interesting subthreads in the comments, but the signal to noise ratio is low.

It's seems more likely that, like me, they flag them because they clearly fall into the Off-Topic category of the HN guidelines.

Were they off-topic in Uber's case? I'm not sure how something that took down Travis Kalanick isn't relevant on HN.

Yes. Some guy involved in scandal at company that provides a service that happens to be done through a computer is not "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". It at least falls under the categories of: crime that is not evidence of some interesting new phenomenon; maybe pratfalls; and, considering I saw it on The Today Show before HN, it's definitely covered on TV News. That's 3 of 7 stated off-topic categories.

I'm not usually a stickler for these kinds of rules but it has gotten to be too much as of late. I understand it comes in waves and usually goes away, but when the wave hits, the only tool we have to fight it is the "flag".

The topics don't go unnoticed, I'm sure HN isn't the only forum most people here visit. I occasionally partake in the conversations around this kind of story (not as a guideline Nazi), usually on Reddit, where it's expected.

The most I'm ever going to do about problems like this are to not be part of and discourage behavior like it in areas of my life I have actual control over, so I don't want to be angered hourly by stories I can't or won't do anything about directly. The guidelines seem to imply this site is supposed to be a place that aligns with that and, for the most part, it does, except when it doesn't, and that is what I think "flag" is for.

I imagine people are more likely to flag a boring off-topic story than an interesting off-topic story. "interesting" probably being some function of relevance to the reader.

Well the recent discussion about TK resigning has over 1,000 comments and was on the front page for at least two days.

It also had a zillion upvotes as well, though.

I gather that recency of submission and high comment rate contribute to a "controversiality" metric which can weight a story off the front page. But given the HN moderators' generally thoughtful style, I would not be surprised to see either that story retrieved and this one's comments folded into its thread, or that one's comments folded into this.

The problem isn't the mods' local actions (though the mods are not nearly as assertive as I would like in this area); it's the Hacker News community's toleration of bigots and therefore the macro action of failing to remove them.

Inaction is a form of action.

I didn't down vote these stories, but to be blunt they aren't value adding content. I come to hacker news for interesting discussions and to learn. Reading yet another story about sexism or inequality in tech doesn't add any value to my life. The stories are predictable; the comments are predictable; and there are very few opportunities for meaningful discussion or learning. I therefore typically ignore them and I can understand why others down vote them.

Bitching about things online isn't action. Changing behavior offline is action, and I doubt these stories generate any meaningful behavioral changes among the groups that need them, so what's the point?

Is that really how it works? Stories about Uber typically get high comment rates, and I usually see them near the top.

I think I remember it being something about the ratio of comments to votes; lots of comments per vote mean that it's controversial, and controversial posts age off faster.

I'm pretty sure this is it. I heard once that if a story has more comments then votes it starts falling, though I don't know if that's accurate.

Sadly there's basically zero transparency in flagging vs comments/downvoting penalty. However when a new thread with few comments is artificially low it's almost certainly due to flag abuse. Trends in the topics that tend to get flag abused become obvious over time.

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