Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcon620 | Hacker News Reader

This is the new standard on HN. People can bury news if they are organized. I agree that this is madness. I have seen the moderators defending this kind of behavior (with "it's out of our hands" type reasoning), which frankly makes me shake my head and wish for a HN successor.

Once you have a sufficiently large group of organized followers - in this particular case pretty much all of the "career C# developers" (there's a lot of them) chimed in by flagging posts that got negative traction to the whole Github-MSFT thing.

Edit: Your post was just flagged by the career microsoft people. Let's regroup at https://www.reddit.com/r/hnresistance/ (I just created that subreddit).

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The HN standard is the same as it's been for 10 years, and nobody is 'organized' except possibly the people trying to promote this story (to judge by the prevalence of new accounts in these threads).

Ok, in plain words, please try to justify why a gaggle of XYZ lang devs should be able to effectively silence a topic they think goes against their personal agenda by pressing the "flag" link once per user?

I don't to see how this kind of binary treshold-based flagging makes any sense in a healthy discussion environment. I've seen it being abused so many times now.

I answered this already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258458.

Given that the first submission had over 70 points after a few minutes, I don't think this is the case. I do think that people are interested in this story, otherwise it would not have become so popular.

Some people did not think the submission was interesting or insightful, and that's OK. But the right way to express that is by downvoting, not by flagging.

Yes, some users upvoted it and other users flagged it. The flags greatly outweighed the upvotes, and that represents the community verdict on the topic. This is how HN's system has always worked. There is no evidence of abuse, and the comments users posted, disagreeing that the story was serious, are clear evidence of what the bulk of the community thinks of it.

Indignation posts routinely get lots of upvotes. That's a weakness of the upvoting system, not evidence of a good submission. This is one of the reasons why HN needs flags in the first place.

Since this whole discussion is a non-story—HN working the way it has worked for over ten years—I don't think further comments are likely to add anything new.

Thanks for your reply. I'm relatively new to HN, so please excuse my ignorance if I'm misunderstanding how the site works, but it seems like currently there is significant feature overlap between downvoting and flagging, and in addition downvoting requires karma. This seems to incentivize flagging of submissions even if they are not "spam or off-topic" as described in the site guidelines.

I don't believe this was some kind of Microsoft-coordinated operation to censor criticism on HN, but I am surprised by how a few flags can silence such a popular submission.

I also do not consider the submission an "indignation post" or a "fanatic and paranoid dramatization" as it was referred to in a comment. I shared the link with the intent to make people aware of the removal of the repository from Trending, no more than that. I believe that GitHub is well within its rights to remove content from Trending, and I did not at any point complain or attempt to incite a flame war against Microsoft. My intention was simply to make people aware to allow them to make their own decisions about whether or not to continue using GitHub.

Regarding "over-promotion" of the story, I posted the original link shortly after I noticed the repository disappearing from Trending. I don't think anyone else posted it before, but if they did, I likely didn't see it because it was also flagged.

There’s no downvoting on stories at any karma level. Only comments. On stories, users can either upvote if they like the story or flag it if they think it’s the wrong type of content for HN. So, no overlap.

You might consider that dang has been an avid and respected user of HN since it began over 10 years ago, and has worked on it as his primary occupation for 6 years, so by now he knows a thing or two about what kinds of content, functionality and conduct are conducive to a healthy community.

In that case, maybe it would be beneficial to add that functionality and to encourage users to downvote instead of flagging. Currently, spam, malware and warez are treated the same as submissions some people consider uninteresting, and while that does eliminate many controversial topics that could've led to debates, it also removes an entire class of content that many people do find relevant and interesting.

I have no doubt that dang knows what he is talking about, and arguably flagging on Hacker News is very effective at combating spam. However, no system is perfect, and neither is Hacker News[1]. I believe that the majority of HN users is mature enough to have sensible discussions even about controversial issues, and that showing submissions that most people like won't lead to an unhealthy community, even if a small number of people do not find the submission interesting.

[1]: https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html

Before you comment or think too much more about this topic, it might be helpful to (re-)familiarise yourself with the guidelines about what is on-topic vs off-topic on HN [1]

In particular, what is on-topic is:

Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

That's it. Anything is allowed, and is embraced by the community, as long as it is intellectually interesting and cultivates interesting discussions, and people flag things that that are repetitive and lead to boring, predictable discussions.

Remember that the topic that triggered this discussion was Github's decision to remove from trending, a repo that was trending only due to activist campaigning, not due to being an interesting software project.

There has been no shortage of discussion about the MS/Github deal in the past week; there have been multiple stories about it on the front page at almost any time since the acquisition speculation began. For this particular micro-drama to be deemed below the standard of intellectual curiosity that HN expects, does not indicate any failure that needs to be remedied.

Can you not believe that after so many years of observing and guiding this community, that dang has developed a good sense of what the majority of the community wants and how best to keep it healthy?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you, I am very much familiar with the site guidelines.

GitHub's Trending page has previously featured many similar projects, open letters and other non-software repositories, so I don't see how this is relevant here.

I understand that not all readers are interested in or even affected by GitHub's acquisition; however, a large number of them are. For this reason, a downvote button would be significantly more effective and democratic than giving two or three users the ability to completely hide a popular submission they do not agree with.

I do believe that dang and the Hacker News moderators have developed a good sense of how to keep the community healthy. Unfortunately, the most reliable way of accomplishing this is to eliminate any and all controversy that could lead to debates and arguments. This, however, is not indicative of a good community, it simply places users in a filter bubble by only showing them content that no two other users have ever disagreed with.

Despite eliminating nearly all arguments and controversy, this nonlinear voting mechanism is dangerous to the community and society as a whole, even if it gives the impression of a healthy community. Removing controversial submissions just as quickly as spam, child pornography and incitement to violence as can be expected from oppressive regimes is not an indicator of a healthy community, but rather that of a community that only gets to see what everyone agrees with.

Many people who have spent much more time on Hacker News than I have agree that there is room for improvement (see, for example, the analysis from last year that I linked to above). Unfortunately, simply hiding all controversial submissions saves the moderators time, and it seems that they are currently not interested in investing additional time into creating a truly healthy community, one that is capable of remaining healthy despite openly holding and expressing different opinions, and thus the current form of moderation is likely going to remain as it is now.

> "I understand that not all readers are interested in or even affected by GitHub's acquisition"

Most people on HN are interested and affected, which is why it's been discussed so much in the past week [1]. Few if any stories have been so heavily discussed in all of HN's history.

> "giving two or three users the ability to completely hide a popular submission they do not agree with"

> "it simply places users in a filter bubble by only showing them content that no two other users have ever disagreed with"

If that was actually how the site worked, top users would mutiny, the whole community would depart, and then dang would lose his job as there'd be no community left for him to moderate.

> "eliminating nearly all arguments and controversy"

> "Removing controversial submissions just as quickly as spam"

There's disagreement and controversy on HN all the time. HN is not controversy-averse, it's averse to stories that lack originality and substance.

> "Many people who have spent much more time on Hacker News than I have agree that there is room for improvement (see, for example, the analysis from last year"

Sure. I agree there is room for improvement. Dang agrees there is room for improvement. You'll note that dang participated actively in the discussion thread about that post, and even helped with the writing of it by providing clarifications.

> "it seems that they are currently not interested in investing additional time into creating a truly healthy community"

Dang spends all day every day (including most weekends) working to make this community healthy, which includes reading and considering all the feedback that comes his way. He does this like his livelihood depends on it, because it does; if HN declines, he's out of a job.

It really does seem like your critiques are based on misapprehensions.

It's good that you're so passionate about helping to make HN better, but you'll be more effective at that if you spend some time properly understanding it :)

Anyway, I've said all I have to say so I think we're done here.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...

> The flags outweighed the upvotes.

Are you saying there were more flags than upvotes and that this is the trigger for the non-linear movement to page 3?

> Are you saying there were more flags than upvotes

Flags, I'm pretty sure, weigh more heavily than upvotes, on a per-item basis.

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