Ask HN: Why was this Airbnb HN post that hit 15 votes in 30 minutes removed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why was this Airbnb HN post that hit 15 votes in 30 minutes removed?

5 pointsijpsud15 comments

Apologies, as I'm not a HN veteran, and to be clear, I am not the person who posted the link. I just viewed the article and then went back to find the comments and it was gone (but I had the HN homepage open in another tab so was able to recover it):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707365

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/airbnb-to-halt-all-m...

I'm not proposing a censorship conspiracy theory here - just wondering why it disappeared. Thanks!

EDIT: @dang has un-banned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708065

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We buried it because the article was hard-paywalled, i.e. paywalled without workarounds. That's the policy on HN: paywalls with workarounds are ok, those without are not [1, 2, 3].

I emailed The Information to ask if they'd unlock it for HN readers, like they've done in the past [4]. They were nice enough to do so. I changed the HN link to the unlocked URL, posted about it in the thread [5], and unburied the submission.

In the future, can you please follow the site guidelines [6], which ask you to email us questions like this instead of posting submissions about them? There's nearly always a simple explanation. But if you post about it on HN, the thread will fill up with complex (often sinister) speculation that doesn't inform anybody, is off-topic, and takes time to properly reply to. Also, we often have no idea that the post exists. I only found out about this one because someone emailed to ask if we were planning to reply.

By the way: that article, though a good piece of reporting, is not a good HN submission. The fact that a company is making cutbacks is not an "interesting new phenomenon" right now [6], it's a dog-bites-man story. Since there's nothing intellectually interesting, the thread is guaranteed to be just another generic discussion [7] about Airbnb and/or the covid crisis. Normally, we'd downweight such an article off the front page, because when there is a flood of stories about a major ongoing topic (like this crisis), we prioritize the ones with significant new information [8]. But if we applied normal moderation in this case, people would accuse us of burying the story because it is about Airbnb. So a different rule takes precedence: we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or its startups are involved [9]. That's why we left the thread on the front page. Doing that makes HN less interesting, but the integrity of the site is more important, and this is one way we try to protect it.

If, after reading all this, anyone has a question I haven't answered, let me know and I'll be happy to address it.

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708065

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

[7] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527396

[9] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Thanks for the detailed response! And sorry for breaking policy regarding contacting you about this. I strongly agree with disallowing hard-paywall articles, since many HN members are from lower-economic areas that simply can't afford US-priced subscriptions.

Regarding the "silent" down-weighting, unless I've misunderstood, I think that's a very bad idea. I think all moderation activity should be transparent to the users of the community.

> we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or its startups are involved

I think it's great that you have this as an explicit policy! Thanks for all your work moderating this community.

Aside: I found the Airbnb post interesting because I recently saw a map showing a massive rise in the number of apartments for rent as home owners move off Airbnb. I'm in the market for a new rental, and I totally didn't see this surge in supply and consequent price-drop coming. So this topic is interesting to me. But, more generally, the particularly "harsh" externalities of the pandemic on specific tech markets/startups is interesting to me, and I saw this Airbnb post as another data point to add to my mental models of how pandemics like this affect various markets. I think the fact that it got 15 points in 30 minutes is evidence that some non-trivial subset of other HN users felt this way too. In any case, transparent moderation would probably help the community to inform you of accidental bad moderation choices (not to say you should always go with the crowd's decisions, of course).

> I think all moderation activity should be transparent to the users of the community

It's a reasonable thing to think, and a lot of people do, but the worry is that a full moderation log would lead to reams more meta-discussion and litigation, which would amount to a DoS attack on the limited resources we have. That is, resources which ought to go into making the site better for everyone would get squandered answering objections from the litigious sort of users who make two new objections for every answer you give them. That would be a catastrophic outcome, not only because of the DoS aspect, not only because those users are a tiny minority, but because of what it would do to moderator morale, which is precarious to begin with and could easily tip into burnout.

That doesn't mean we don't care about transparency—we do! We always answer users' questions. We just do it on an ad hoc basis rather than with a bureaucratic system.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Can I just say I'm quite glad this was posted publicly so I was able to read it? I find HN's moderation super interesting in itself, and this was great.

Thank you! That makes me feel less like I wasted my time...it's embarrassing to realize how long I spend writing one of those.

Define "removed".

There are three possibilities that could be considered "removed":

1) the post fell off the 'new' posts page. This is normal, the 'new' posts page is simply a reverse time ordered list of posts. So a sufficient number of new posts arriving quickly will push any given post off the first page of new items onto subsequent pages of the new list.

2) the post made it to the HN front page, but then disappeared from the HN front page. Posts make it onto the HN front page by receiving up votes from users, and the algorithm has some time based considerations that it uses to decide if a post qualifies to be one of the posts listed on the first section of the front page. The speed with which upvotes arrive, and how many upvotes in total, seem to have a bearing on a post being on the main page. So if this is the case, it is possible it got enough upvotes rapidly enough to make it to the main page, but did not receive enough additional upvotes once there to remain eligible to be on the front page. This is also normal, and is just how HN's front page algorithm works.

3) the third possibility is the post was flagged. In this case, a sufficient number of users pressed the "flag" link on the post to cause the software to mark it "flagged" and remove it from view. Note that you need a certain level of karma points before you gain the ability to flag a post. If the post was flagged, however, you would see that fact in the 'submissions' section under your account name. The post title will begin with "[flagged]" if this is what occurred. This is also normal, however the guidelines indicate that flagging should generally be used for spam or off-topic posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) so if the post was flagged, you might consider comparing the post's contents with the guidelines to see if it might have been considered off-topic or spam by some.

Hi, I'm not sure if what you've posted is a copypasta, but did you read the post? I linked to the post so you can see that it's not flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707365 It's a post with a link to theinformation.com which is quite reputable so far as I know. It is paywalled, but I don't think those are banned from HN.

I also mentioned that it is not my post, but your point #3 is written as if it's mine.

As I mentioned in the reply to the first commenter, it was on the home page (obviously, due to the 15 points in 30 minutes, as I mentioned), and then was gone when I went back to find it.

Is there any way to ping a mod to see why this might have happened? I don't think I can just write @dang or /u/dang, right?

Of course you can! Email us at hn@ycombinator.com. As I explained above, that would have been much better. The answer to your question was as simple as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708065, but when people bring questions like this up in the threads I feel obliged to write an explanation from first principles.

I would be unsurprised if it was also just downvoted a lot because the article is not readable without login.

The actual reasoning has been listed already (you were close!), but I figure I might as well chime in to clear up a misconception:

Posts can't be downvoted, only comments.

If that were the case, wouldn't it have a low score? Instead of 17 votes? I regularly see theinformation.com posts highly upvoted on HN and as far as I know they're all paywalled. Also, it's not on the first 12 pages of the homepage, so there's basically no chance that this hypothesis could explain it, because it would have gotten down-voted to the second or at most third page, and then slowly drifted to later pages as the recent-ness component drags it down. Unless HN's algorithm is really different to Reddit's, that is.

It shows up in the search index, so it clearly hasn't been removed.

Sorry, I mean it was nearing the top of the homepage, and then it was removed from the homepage. The post still exists (hence my link to it in the original post).

Doesn't appear to be flagged, has 19 points. Most likely it fell through on point/new-ness(age) and dropped off the front page.

I believe new posts are weighted a bit higher - but there is also some threshold going from "new" to front page. This appear to me to be a typical "almost interesting" (as judged by up-votes) - made it to the front page, but then got overtaken by other posts.

Ed: the current code behind hn isn't open source, but it might still resemble this to some extent: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/apps/news/...

15 points in 30 minutes? I have enough experience with HN to be near 100% confident that it should have been on at least the first 10 pages. It was completely missing. Honestly, I'd be nearly 100% confident that with a score like that in 30 minutes it should have been near the top of the first page (like it was one second, and then completely gone the next).

I'd have guessed that it was a part of some sort of filter - perhaps a "voting ring" was detected or something, but I'd really like to hear from a moderator, or something, because this seems a bit strange.

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