Hacker News Reader

Comment by flavio81 | Hacker News Reader

In this thread, some people are complaining of moderators downvoting (lowering the rank) of some submissions over others; and at least one person says "let the readers decide". I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit. No thanks, i prefer HN due to the behind-the-scenes 'curation' or choice of content, which so far usually gives very interesting, sometimes exciting news, posts, articles and "Show HN"s.

As for comment moderation, I think that HN is a community with the least amount of moderation i've seen. Which makes me really happy.

I have submitted only three or four things here, so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.

View on HN

I've found moderation on HN to be a bit heavy handed recently. Specifically when it comes to the issue of sexism in SV. No matter the opinion, posts on this seem to get removed shortly after reaching the front page.

Question for the mods: Why? It doesn't appear to be a bias towards either side. Is the perception just that people are tied of hearing about it? Why not let the users decide that?

I don't believe this is going on. I believe most sexism posts get flagged by users, not downmodded by moderators.

I strongly suspect that many users flag based on the title, without reading further. Most of the sexism focused pieces are pretty bad. I'm a woman and I tend to hate most of them.

Once or twice, I emailed the mods when I felt a post on the subject was poorly titled, but had worthwhile content. On at least one occasion, they changed the title and, I think, turned off flags for the piece so it could be seen.

I am careful to have a light hand. I seem to be the most prominent female member here and I can get accused of having an agenda for saying anything at all on the topic of sexism. *

I have tried to write more evenhanded pieces on one of my blogs. Some of those have gone okay, but they never really get all that much traffic or response on HN. But, as I see it, some of the problems with this topic include:

1) It has a long track record of ugliness on both sides, so some people kneejerk flag anything that sounds like it touches on the topic because they are tired of these toxic, pointless discussions.

2) Most pieces are pretty man-bashing. The audience here is predominantly male. They get tired of being hated on for having been born male. (I am also tired of the misandry, so I don't think that is unreasonable.)

3) Most pieces on the topic aren't really all that good. They are typically histrionic and blamey.

4) If you don't use the usual catch phrases in the title, people won't recognize that it is pertinent to a topic they are interested in. If you do, you can't sidestep all the baggage it involves. So trying to do something better faces a huge uphill battle in terms of even being recognized as both relevant and not guilty of the usual issues.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486833

Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy. If you want your forum to have some nutritional value than you can't let the candy topics run rampant no matter how much people seem to want them.

It should be noted that this is an explicit strategy by proponents of the status quo, to make any discussion of the topic so toxic that the topic itself becomes banned.

It's possible to moderate a discussion forum to avoid this, but it requires a high level of involvement from the moderators and a willingness to aggressively recognize and prune divisive commentary regardless of the specific tone or content.

I like HN because it is more mature and there's lots of places for people to have fun like that.

I think that makes sense. But how much is too much? Say you have a very high post volume on one side of an issue, so you start moderating more heavily. Do you allow posts through representing the other side? Is that "fair"?

The issue isn't really the one-sided-ness of the comments, or the volume of the comments. The issue is the quality of the comments.

Even on a hot-button topic, there are quality comments made, by both sides. Those are worth reading, no matter which side you take on the issue. And then there are the "You're so stupid, how could you think something so idiotic, I hope you die in a fire" comments. Those comments don't add much except noise. If you want the quality comments to be visible among the noise, you need to weed out the noise comments. You need this more on hot-button topics, because they attract more noise comments.

I believe there is an automatic penalty if the comment count goes above the vote count beyond a certain percentage

Makes sense. That's the clearest indication I've seen of contentious topics on HN (comment count higher than the topic vote count).

For the most part, the topic gathers posts from both sides regardless of the content of the linked article. So simply flagging the entire topic away is fair.

Huge flame wars get a lot of upvotes and lots of comments -- but it's essentially the forum equivalent of candy.

Sez you. The unspoken premise is that nothing is so important that it's worth stopping to have an argument over. Perhaps I'm misreading your views, but when they're tossed out as an aphorism they come off as smug rather than substantive.

There is a difference between an argument and having a knock down drag out fight.

For example when parents have a disagreement about how to deal with catching their child sneaking in drunk after a party.

This can go many ways but for the purpose of highlighting the difference take Chris and Pat.

(argument)

Chris: Pat, I can understand how you'd feel that way, but considering the family history of alcoholism, maybe we should take a more conservative approach with this.

(flame war)

Chris: Well, Pat... Maybe if your mother had cared half as much about you and your brother growing up as I'm trying to care about our kids and cracked down on you guys a little bit, maybe your brother would have stopped at that red light, and maybe your kids would have an Uncle.

Unpleasant as the flame war version is, it does cut to the heart of the matter rather than tiptoeing around it, which can perpetuate a problem. Both approaches have their place.

The users are deciding. We are flagging these stories because we don't see the value in endless flamewars over the same subject. If you can't get enough of debates about sexism in SV there are lots of other places on the internet for that.

I understand how that is the right policy for HN. But I'm wondering if you consider it possible that you're in a position where you have a responsibility to sometimes surface these topics on HN?

After all, for some of these topics it's exactly the people that won't go looking for them at other places on the internet where they may still make a difference.

To use an example that's slightly less controversial: I think it's important for people working with lots of other people's data to have some fundamental sense of privacy rights. And HN is probably one of the best places to reach those actually in the trenches that are in the position to say 'no' when, for example, the CEO of Yahoo tells them to allow the NSA full access to their users' emails.

Yet that's a topic that quickly turns to politics, so you'd probably have good reasons to wish those discussions happened elsewhere.

Just to be clear: I think the mix of topics overall is mostly fine right now. But just like Facebook or Twitter, I think HN may be in a position where your "editorial responsibility" should be somewhere on your radar. Not because HN is the size of those, but because it caters to a readership that has certain powers far outstripping its size.

I think that's about right. That's why we turn off user flags on articles that are particularly substantive or contain significant new information. It's mostly the copycat and follow-up articles (of which there are many more) that lead to the repetitive flamewars, arguably because they're so repetitive themselves.

I disagree. Most of the flagged topics are already being shoved in tech peoples' faces through Reddit, mainstream/tech news, their workplace and their social network (that is most likely liberal). Hacker News is a sort of safe space away from those topics. They are fully aware of the topics and choose to not participate in them.

edit: not sure why this is getting downvotes when it's a direct counterargument/response to the parent

I agree. I don't generally touch stories about new and important events on that topic, but when it's just a random gender-related submission that's bound to induce a flamewar in comments, I just flag it.

I flag almost every single one of those stories, because they stopped covering new ground after about the first day or two. I can't be the only one, maybe the users are deciding?

Outside of flagging, behavior within the post itself (lots of comments?) probably penalize them. Really, really good stuff makes the frontpage, though. The issues at Uber, for example, were widely discussed.

The first day or two of what?

Christmas of course.

What I mean is if you read the comments on an article about James Damore the day it broke and read the comments were the article to be posted today, they haven't really evolved. It's the same canards over and over. Damore being an example of a story that users were indignant about getting knocked off the frontpage.

It must have worked. I had to duckduckgo James Damore.

Typically the mods unflagkill gender discussion threads if they notice in time.

Great. Let's keep this place technical. How is "sexism in SV" of any interest to a global tech-focused community?

It's obviously of interest and obviously not limited to SV. The issue isn't whether it's off-topic for HN (it isn't), it's can we stick to substantive discussion about real things and avoid flamewar and repetition.

Besides the oft-quoted HN submission guidelines, another answer to your question is that women are usually the ones affected by sexism, and women read HN (no, really).

It's another example of women being sidelined. Most HN readers are male, and selfishly flag/downvote articles/comments about sexism because they want to read about the latest JavaScript framework instead.

That's not a helpful ingredient to pour into the well. You're basically just repeating a mental mock-up you have, not backed by data, only snark. Anyone who looks sincerely and closely will see how much more complex the situation is.

Moreover, there's evidence that repeating such generalizations—even though you intend them critically—makes the environment less welcoming and poisons it further for the equality you'd presumably like to see.

When you do this, you (i.e. we—we nearly all do it) are valuing the rush of morally posturing above our peers more than the cause we care about. If we're going to actually make HN be the welcoming place we want it to be, we'll have to do something about this.

How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective?

I have my doubts about how welcoming HN is for different demographics, and while the grandparent poster is handwaving things with a mental mockup as you say, absent transparency on moderation policies many people inevitably feel the same way about the moderation.

I mean, at present you have a bunch of secret rules to make everything run better. That works OK as a practical strategy, but it also reduces buy-in - which is why I get heavily downvoted any time I suggest that government intelligence services are inevitably going to adopt utility-maximizing strategies at the expense of liberty, no matter how many times I qualify this by saying I'm trying to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.

> How many women do you have on the mod team, for perspective?

This makes an excellent point, and the same could be said of the junior moderation team - the HN readers who up/downvote comments.

A practical solution: The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities for some honest, frank perceptive and feedback. Stop guessing and trying, and get some real knowledge. Look at particular threads (on sexism, etc.) and talk about how welcoming HN is to them and why. IME, there is no substitute for a lifetime of personal experience with these issues; most people without that experience - including myself - are surprised when they hear the realities and details.

You can identify who is underrepresented and who might feel unwelcome by what groups are referred to as "they". For example, in discussions of sexism women are often discussed in the third person - a good sign of who is the excluded group. If you think about it, those discussions should be led by the people who have experience with the issue, just like Java devs (hopefully) lead the Java discussion. This discussion, right here and right now, should have those voices - it's right in front of our eyes.

I'll add that religious prejudice against Muslims is particularly overlooked. If I were Muslim, I would not feel welcome here at all. As a practical test, substitute in 'Jews/Jewish/Judiasm' for 'Muslims/Islamic/Islam' (to pick a religious minority against which prejudice is rejected, as it should be for all) and evaluate the statement. I've seen many that unambiguously fail.

> The mods might ask people in underrepresented minorities

What makes you think we don't?

Oops! A very fair point and I actually meant to include that myself, because I don't know and didn't want to presume.

Gimme a break; I'm writing Internet comments not dissertations. Some things slip through the cracks. :)

EDIT: Also, re-reading my comment, I see it's all pretty critical. HN is the best forum on the Internet, IMHO, in large part thanks to the guidelines and moderation; but at the same time the competition is pretty bad and I think HN can be even better. My hope is that by developing and demonstrating effective practices, and then by sharing them, HN could improve discourse throughout the web. It sounds fantastical, but why not - the practices cost nothing, websites and online services everywhere are starving for a solution, and HN is in a very visible position and has a technically sophisticated team, a backing organization that loves innovation (YC), and an audience that can appreciate it.

For what it's worth, I largely cosign this critique of how HN is moderated.

I think there's merit to the suggestion that snarking about how unwelcoming HN is to industry minorities is counterproductive. But I don't think HN's institutional commitment to being more welcoming to industry minorities is exactly pellucid.

FWIW, I don't cosign this critique.

Personally, I don't feel any need to know how many women are on the moderating staff. That question has not ever crossed my mind as an issue for me, personally, as a woman posting here.

Like 'anigbrowl, I simply think it's worth considering the extent to which the moderating staff do or do not personally experience the hostility this place can exhibit to industry minorities.

Paul Graham is originally from the UK. I believe Dan Gackle is Canadian in origin. Patio11 is a white American male living in Japan. Jacquesm is Dutch. Tokenadult has an Asian wife and has lived in Asia.

My impression is that the forum is fairly multicultural. It is not a monolith of white American males/white American male culture.

I am much more concerned with feeling heard than with whether or not they have firsthand experiences like mine. I once wrote the mods and made my case for why something should be deleted as I felt it was actively putting a young woman in real danger. They didn't initially see it, but they did listen and ultimately redacted the information that concerned me.

I think if I have a real problem, they will listen. This is better in my mind than having been born with the same bits between their legs that I happen to have been born with.

I don't pretend to speak for all minorities. But my understanding is that both you and anigbrowl are white males. So I thought I would chime in just so the topic isn't being addressed solely by the demographic that you two express concerns about dominating the mod staff.

I don't think this is a super productive debate to have here, but I do want to clarify that I'm not calling for more diversity on the mod staff, as much as just an awareness of what the mod staff is.

I wasn't seeking debate. But I do find it ironic that you and angibrowl, both white men, expect to be listened to when you critique the moderating staff wrt to diversity, but you (in specific, because anigbrowl has not weighed in here) are quick to essentially dismiss my statement that as a prominent woman here, I do not have those concerns.

This is an insidious pattern that I see a lot. White men virtue signal about their concerns about sexism, racism, etc, then fail to give real weight to the voices of the very people they claim to be concerned about. The concerns of white males matter and should be heard. The voices of oppressed minorities still are irrelevant, even when the topic is the concern of fair treatment for them.

I honestly don't even know where our disagreement is here.

Then it would probably be best to just let this go since you have suggested it is not the time or place for it anyway.

Same. I just wondered about it because first-hand experience isn't always as transferable as one would wish.

>>Anyone who looks sincerely and closely will see how much more complex the situation is.

The situation is definitely complex, which is why it must be discussed at every opportunity and in every venue, especially by intelligent people who deal with complexity as a living (HN's core demographic). Downvoting and flagging stuff just because you personally don't want to talk about it is selfish. It is in fact the very definition of selfishness.

If someone does not want to discuss a particular topic, they can refrain from upvoting it and posting comments on its discussion thread. FLAGGING however prevents others from being exposed to it as well because it pushes the submission off the front page (where it rightfully belongs, based on votes) and sometimes even kills it if enough selfish people pile on. That only makes the issue worse because it is akin to mopping it under the carpet.

You may feel that discussions on certain topics don't add anything original. Did it ever occur to you that that's simply your perspective, shared perhaps only (or mostly) by other old-timers? Many people, especially those new to the industry, are unaware of these issues and they should be exposed to them within the relatively civil and intelligent medium of HN.

HN's readership is a bit less progressive than what you'd expect from the age/education demographics–or at least than what I'd expect.

See, for example, this very article calling out the moderation of a submission on anti-white racism in the restaurant industry, while there are probably dozens of stories buried each week exploring racism or sexism on the tech sector. Yes, some of those do make it to the front page. But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem> you need about a thousand female Uber employees invited to a strip club for every alt-right Googler that gets fired for writing the wrong memo.

It's also interesting to watch the insistence on "engaging with others' arguments" when it comes to literal mobs with torches calling for the next holocaust, yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.

> HN is far to the right compared even to

Pretty sure that's not true. IMO you're falling into the cognitive bias we all seem to have, of seeing the community as dominated by your ideological opposite. The other side sees it just the other way. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15388778, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307915, and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....

> But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem>

We can't use such a metric. The magnitude of those problems is so large that there would be nothing else on the front page if we did.

HN is trying to be a specific kind of site—one that gratifies intellectual curiosity: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I think it's ok for such a place to exist on the web, don't you? If so, many things follow. The site can't primarily be about litigating disputes or fighting for causes, even (especially) good causes. In fact it can't 'primarily' be about anything, because curiosity shrivels under repetition. Therefore HN's system (community + mods + software) is organized not to have too much, i.e. very much, of anything on the front page.

The issue isn't that HN suppresses discussion of e.g. sexism/gender in tech; it doesn't—there have been tons of threads, often large, often on the front page. The issue is that <front page time>/<how much I care about X> is always, for any X, less than you would like. For most casual observers, "less than I would like" feels like "censored completely". Meanwhile the readers who don't like X have the mirror-image view and say "HN is overrun with X". It's all an undergraduate psych experiment basically.

> But in terms of <front page time>/<magnitude of problem you need about a thousand female Uber employees invited to a strip club for every alt-right Googler that gets fired for writing the wrong memo.

I just think that's breaking-expectations-bias: "Man bites dog" stories get more attention than "Dog bites man", because the community expects the latter and doesn't see it as newsworthy.

> yet the overall treatment of these hot-button issues on HN is far to the right compared even to conservative outlets like the WSJ.

No, its not. (Its true that it contains content that is to the right of what you'd usually see in the WSJ, but it also contains content very far to the left of what you'd find in the WSJ; on balance, it is very much not to the right of the WSJ, though it might well be to the libertarian side of the WSJ.)

Lets describe a example of moderation by dang.

For an article a about work and unrelated to sexism, gender or racism, a commenter wrote out of the blue that all white men live privileged and easy lives. A second person replied and disagreed, arguing that some men don't have everything perfect and easy from the point of birth to death. The reply got moderated for causing a flame war, with third-party people asking dang why he targeted the dissenting view and not the original comment.

Wouldn't it be better to supply a link? Then people could make up their own minds.

Even if you're right, I'm not sure what evidence it's supposed to count as; everybody knows we make bad calls, and I know it better than anyone. But I searched for your incident and could only find https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14530877, which is close to what you describe and (I think) would strike most HN readers as pretty defensible.

I was actually referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15086798, but 14530877 also a good example.

The point is that if there is a bias, it would be that moderation seems to target those that disagree when people bring up sexism and racism in unrelated article discussions. It seems very safe, even profitable in terms of votes to bring up sexism and racism, which would be contrary to the views of matt4077.

I predict that if moderation was a bit more consistent in keeping out discussion about sexism and racism in unrelated articles (unless exceptional new insight), we would actually see less reader fatigue and lower amount of flagging for explicit articles about sexism and racism.

(Just to be extra clear, I don't disagree with the moderation itself on the two above examples if they had been the ones bringing in the topic of sexism into those threads).

I took a look at that along with the reply we detached, which was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15086980, and it seems to me a fair place to draw the line. The original comment was predominantly thoughtful while the detached comment was predominantly flamey.

These calls are somewhat arbitrary because when a thread degenerates, you can always trace the root of the degeneration further upthread. But moderation is more like pruning a tree than excising a tumor. The goal isn't to get rid of all malignancy—that would be too draconian and is impossible anyway. It's to detach the bulk of unwanted growth.

People can reasonably differ about individual cases, but the principle here ought to be pretty solid for anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and wants to use the site as intended.

Luckily the community largely self-moderates and comments are generally very high value. At the moment we don't appear to have a significant troll problem.

Reddit was like this almost 10 years ago. This is the bliss of obscurity. We should hold a wake for Reddit 2010.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=reddit,h... (though I doubt people coming to this site actually google it)

Supposedly if you find the right subreddits it gets better, but since I have HN I haven't bothered. Nothing lasts forever - I wonder how long before HN goes the way of slashdot and reddit.

The problem with obscurity is I don't know where to find another HN when it goes the way of Slashdot! How do people find small unique sites like this?

Some people mentioned this place in a few threads during the whole Slashdot 2.0 thing and that lead me here. I presume if this place ever does go south similar things will happen. Let's work to keep this place what it is and make it better.

I have the same concern. I assume right now there must be other similarly awesome communities that I just don't know about.

I was under the impression this site grew by word of mouth and that advertising it to any and everyone was a bit antithetical to then purpose of the site.

As the author of this article, I agree with you. I applaud the HN moderation for their work, and I think the result is a really great place for news and discussion. I'm just calling for greater transparency - and pointing out that the users are abusing the flagging feature.

> I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit.

The Reddit mods and admins are notoriously censorious. If you want minimal moderation, you would need to go to the anonymous imageboards. The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.

Agree so much. Any voting system is going to create bubbles. Head over to 4chan and you will get to interact with all sorts of different opinions.

Imageboards have a clickbait-based bubble. To survive on a busy board, you need to create a post that captures attention.

Hence, the effect of 4chan on the Internet — its top posters are the edge of the troll evolution.

> The content produced there is better in some ways, worse in many.

Could you provide some examples of how the content is better there? I'd be interested, but any time I've ever tried to investigate, I can't get past all the unfettered crap

At least on 4chan, the content is all time-limited, so finding persistent examples isn't really doable. However, the more niche boards are full of quality content for their particular niches, and depending on the culture of the particular board people can be very helpful.

I personally appreciate 4chan for generally weighing the value of a particular post on its own merits rather than any sort of user history or whatever - it's a good counter-balance to places like HN or Reddit where comments can get buried or removed if they go against the hive mind and there's no post history to dig through. I definitely get how the trade-off of inflammatory posts being more common isn't as palatable to some people, though, so it's kind of a mixed bag on if you'll get anything out of it or not. Opinions, etc.

The inflammatory nature of the chans is in and of itself a filter - people that partake in imageboard discussions tend to be more thick-skinned as a result.

I think that if I wanted a forum/news site where "the readers decide" and ONLY the readers decide, i'd go to Reddit.

Some of the most heavy-handed moderation I've seen lately has been on some subreddits.

Really, the users police themselves for the most part. People aren't as obnoxious as many Reddit users tend to be. That being said, the front page changes a good amount during the day so nothing really sits at the top for awhile unless it is a really popular post. The last one Drew submitted dropped down pretty quick if I remember correctly.

> Really, the users police themselves for the most part.

This is a very double edged sword, especially when advice is being given. Being able to anonymously down-vote BS rather than explaining one's objection creates a positive feedback loop.

Someone will ask about something, subjects that are not mainstream enough for many people to know but are still common enough for many people to have exposure to are particularly dangerous. Reddit's design amplifies even the slightest majority opinion to where it looks like a near unanimously held opinion. If the first ten people on the scene are laymen who just up-vote whatever the relevant old wives tail or urban legend is then an actual SME who comes along saying "but you're wrong, it doesn't actually work like that" they often get down-voted to oblivion.

People tend to Google it when they see conflicting opinions so what the first page of Google says is highly relevant. Now, for a semi-mainstream topic information on the general case is far more accessible than the specific case. The result is a lot of advice that is terrible for the specific situation but good in general gets tossed around like it's gospel.

Reddit doesn't self police. The appearance of consensus where there isn't one creates the illusion of everyone stepping in line because any non-majority (majority local to the sub) opinion is negative-weighted.

Edit: realized you were talking about HN users, my comment about Reddit still stands.

Reddit is a whole different story. Especially with the brigading that happens quite often in some sub-reddits but yes, HN users tend to be better at self moderation and the mod team has also done a pretty good job at running the site. Transparency will only benefit the users and allows us to see why some decisions were made and how we can fix them moving forward if we need to.

> so I don't really know how nice (or not nice) is HN from the submitters' point of view.

I submit a lot (although not nearly as much as some others) and I have no idea of what submission will be good or not.

Some things I think are good don't take off, and get put in the second chance queue. Other things I think are good don't get put in that queue, and I don't know why.

If you think something is particularly good you can always email us. We probably didn't see it.

I too prefer my echo chambers to be free of wrong-think.

None of that controversy in my safe space either.

I've personally found HN to be a lot more censorious than the subreddits I frequent. I really don't like the diverse fuckery the HN board software uses as "anti-spam" measures, like account creation IP bans ("Account creation temporarily disabled"), slowbans, hellbans and defacto bans that discard the content of your post and pretend to be temporary ("Too fast").

You might want to look at your comment history in an incognito browser window.

Are you posting via proxies?

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