Getting Cancelled on HN a Thing? | Hacker News Reader

Getting Cancelled on HN a Thing?

19 pointsmmaunder42 comments

Just curious if anyone here, particularly the older guard, have found a pattern of A) Going against the grain on an issue and then B) being targeted with downvotes for pretty much anything else you post for a while after?

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My advise to anyone here is to not dismiss downvoted comments but independently read them and form your own opinion. If it sides with the majority, great. No harm. But if it doesn't, then you can add your voice by upvoting them and expanding on their comment with your own color. I actually gravitate towards downvoted comments to see if there is some treasure, usually not but sometimes you do find interesting but awkwardly worded ideas.

History has taught us, many great ideas go against the grain... and some ideas demand going against the grain before people can realize its value.

Of course there are univerally bad comments (violence and deep contemptful hatred).

Everyone should browse with the "showdead" set to yes. I also would like to be able to comment on the dead posts, but I guess I'll just have to be happy with viewing them.

If you vouch for it, you may be able to bring it back to life and then comment on it. I do this for dead comments that don't seem (to me) to be reasonably dead. Often it's someone who's been shadow banned for some reason (often a good one if you go through their comment history), but I'm willing to bring back their good comments when I find them.

I’d stop short of saying “everyone should” do that, but I do, and I’ll upvote or vouch for posts that seem to me to be unfairly judged.

> not dismiss downvoted comments but independently read them and form your own opinion

You can say that about pretty much any speech, but in this age of unlimited information available to you, you need heuristics if you want to make the most of it. Dismissing dead comments is a good one on HN in my experience. I'm more concerned about false positives (comments I choose to read because I falsely thought they would be thought-provoking) than false negatives (the comments you mention).

Not sure about getting cancelled.

But I recently submitted a link containing an uncomfortable truth from Pew Research titled "U.S. has world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households".

It got 30 upvotes in one hour, and quickly reached the front page. It seemed to have gotten shadowbanned by a moderator, as it disappeared to the 5th page despite its quickly gained popularity. It was not flagged, or at least not normally as it would show "[flagged]". I suspect someone with special powers demoted it for whatever reason.

This was the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26100329

>it disappeared to the 5th page despite its quickly gained popularity

I have seen this happen many times and have wondered the same thing. It is within the within the rights of whoever runs this site, but I not sure why they believe it would be required... if that is what is happening.

Based on the number of comments (94) and upvotes (53), this may have triggered the flamewar detector. Here’s more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25584860 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25871251

If you’re curious, email hn@ and they’ll tell you what happened.

(Background: a very high ratio of comments to upvotes often means that more people want to opine than get value from the opinions. Obviously that’s not always the case, though.)

That sounds like a very plausible scenario in this case. Thanks for the info.

I suspect it triggered the flame war detector. Search for that and you'll find more information.

It can be flagged without showing "[flagged]". That tag only gets shown when something is flagged to death. Your item wasn't flagged to death because it's still active.

I suspect it's mostly that a sizeable proportion of people on the site decided that it doesn't really fit with the theme and they don't want to see things like that, so they flagged it. That, associated with the large number of comments and comparatively few upvotes caused the "flame war" penalty to apply.

No conspiracies necessary, all explained by the regular dynamics.

Yes, it triggered the flamewar detector.

There's nothing wrong with energetic conversation as long as it remains civil, but I have to guess that your experience is that the incivility comes quicker in these cases though.

It might not only be incivility but also lower SNR (people replying to each other with the same rehashed arguments) which makes the whole thread less interesting for everyone, including passive readers

That's also exactly right. Sometimes we call it the 'overheated discussion detector' for that reason—not every such low-SNR thread is a flamewar.

Yes, although the issue isn't only incivility, but also other forms of repetition. The intention is to avoid discussions that are predictable and otherwise low-information, to the extent possible.

You're quite right that energetic conversations can be really good, though, which means we have to review the list of threads that have gotten penalized by the flamewar detector and turn the penalty off for the ones that don't deserve it. We do that several times a day. It's not a perfect solution though, because sometimes a thread languishes for hours before we notice that that's happened.

Yeah I think the older HN was way more organic. These days it seems more curated, but perhaps that's OK since older HN was way less popular with the mainstream internet than today - making it attractive for gaming the algo and vulnerable to behaviors you see on sites like reddit. I'd guess it's also a challenge to keep the site on-topic versus veering off into becoming a political or populist site.

The amount of curation hasn't changed that much since I've been around, and pg used to do a lot as well. HN has always been a curated/moderated/whatever-term-you-prefer site.

And thanks for your collective work.

While criticisms of this place are common, and often deserved - it’s still one of the largest and most civil places where discussions that interest me take place.

Stopping public discourse from descending into shit flinging cesspits is a tough job, and overall I think what happens here is amazing.

Getting Cancelled doesn't seem to be a thing, from what I can tell. The reason being is that it's hard to remember usernames without photos and being able to follow people etc. The user is much less memorable than the content (which is good).

What I've noticed in the few years I've been here is that you will be downvoted for a useless comment. Whether that comment is hurtful, comedic, arrogant... if it doesn't add to the discussion, then it's kind of a useless comment and will be downvoted.

The thing with HN though is that it is rigorously moderated by users and admins to a fairly strict set of guidelines. This means that if you're posting something that doesn't align with the goals of the community, then it probably won't be liked and feel like you were shadow-banned.

Yes targeted downvoting for not following groupthink happens. Just like everywhere else on the internet that lets anonymous users vote.

But no, having your tally of meaningless internet points decrease isn’t really getting “cancelled”. If downvotes here make you sad, stop looking at them or go do something fun instead. You aren’t going to be uninvited to speak at conferences or lose you job because your HN score goes down.

>having your tally of meaningless internet points decrease

When you're flagged dead, you effectively disappear. This is wrong in my opinion.

Yeah, that sucks, but getting flagged enough to be shadowbanned seems to take a fair bit more work/arguing than a few retaliatory downvotes. Surely anybody getting close to that knows they’re doing so?

And you can always come back as bigiain2 or ratsmack2 later...

Assuming that HN/YCombinator “owes” you any points reputation is a pretty silly point of view.

I guess there probably are some cases where YC (or other) backed startups might judge people based on HN meaningless internet points, but if you care about that, perhaps your choices to argue vehemently enough against the groupthink here are nit great choices for you? You probably aren’t waging a vegan or anti surveillance capitalism war of words on your LinkedIn in that case, you might want to keep personal crusades out of your professional persona here if you are playing a profession persona here?

Or own the personal crusades, because if Facebook or Google refuse to hire me based on my privacy stance in my HN post history, or Palantir refuse to hire me based on my distrust of law enforcement? I’m totally OK with that. I will back out of arguments with Googlers or Facebookers well before things get to punitive downvoting stage though, just for my own sanity...

Even when you have evidence and links to support your own argument and it goes against the group-think, they still would rather downvote that to refute the argument.

I don’t care about this score whatsoever but what can sometimes happen is that you post something controversial which get downvoted to -4 and then other, completely unrelated comments start getting downvotes as well. It seems as if people are looking through your profile for your comments and go and downvote some more. It comes across a bit weird.

> It seems as if people are looking through your profile for your comments and go and downvote some more. It comes across a bit weird.

People will do that. It's happened to me a couple of times. Nothing you can do about it, though, and you're not allowed to complain about it. Just take your lumps in silence.

I think the reasons for not being allowed to complain are pretty fair though, it’s not going to make any positive difference (and you’ll more likely end up Streisand Effecting yourself), and it’s uninteresting for everybody else.

I see it as not so much “take your lumps”, but more like “Meh, haters gonna hate - just ignore them.” Not a perfect solution, sure, but if you wanna participate on a anonymous/pseudonymous forum, that’s kinda inevitable. What’s the alternative?

Reddit has a system where if people do that, for them it looks like downvotes but for the rest it doesn’t count.

Middle guard here. I've heard people claim it was happening, but it's never happened to me.

If someone's downvoting every post you make for days or weeks, though, that seems to me to be a clearly abusive behavior. You could email the moderators. I suspect that they have the data to be able to spot that and identify the perpetrator.

Let's just say there is a specific slant to the politics here and far too many people would rather down vote than refute an argument.

How people view the "slant to the politics here" is determined by (1) their own political slant, and (2) how intensely they hold it. This is one of the most reliable phenomena on HN; there are countless cases going both ways.

Recent post about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922311

Proposed explanation of why this mechanism is so reliable: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Past, probably too snarky, explanations by me: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Edit: here's what I mean about examples going both ways. In this corner:

"overrun by fascist trolls", "bubble of ignorance and right-wing terrorism", "mostly middle class white male libertarians", "chilling effect on discourse from leftists", "definite right-libertarian bias", "Dang has gone to great lengths to ensure that only far-right [etc.]", "Anything critical of the far-right tends to wind up flagged", "The moderation and users here definitely skew far more conservatively", "cesspool of terrible far-right ideas", "Nazism is pretty popular on HN", "HN has had a problem with bigotry and white supremacy for a long time", "a forum made up of primarily right wing users", "very CLEARLY pro white supremacist", "forbids saying anything against the R Party", "commentary which questions capitalism or america is verboten", "Non libertarian views are not tolerated", "a very specific techno-libertarian Silicon Valley type outlook", "excessively pro-capitalist and woefully dismissive of social justice", "utterly filled with alt-right scum", "overly capitalist ideological Silicon Valley moderation", "the hivemind's right-leaning, libertarian political mindset", "rampant right-wing / libertarian / crypto-fascist", "insurrection apologists in your disgusting community", "HN is a right wing cesspool", "HN as a whole has a conservative tilt", "right-libertarian-leaning HN", "leans right-wing politically, under the guise of being apolitical", "has HN ever been anything other than right-leaning?", "HN has always been pretty far to the right", "entirely filled with right-wing to far-right sheltered techbros", "You simply cannot criticize capitalism", "Can you imagine the kind of slime this forum is managed by?"

and in this corner:

"HN socialist apologia", "the mods are SJW", "socialist-leaning mods" ,"Hacker News the SJW Hole", "you can't be anti-liberal here", "radical leftists appear to have taken control", "tends to be more liberal so you will be downvoted", "a liberal echo chamber identical to all other social media", "this SJW cesspool", "it's ALWAYS the case in HN that any opinion that's not 100% politically correct && strictly SJW standard compliant is suppressed", "HN in turn, are left leaning, socialist Democrats", "you fucking insane sjw", "leftist filter bubbles", "left-wing propaganda", "leftist totalitarianism prevalent on HN", "anti-western and extremely anti-capitalist", "Dang is a totalitarian liberal thought policeman", "banned every single prominent right winger", "extremely left-winged", "most people on HN are liberals", "socialist hell-hole", "this site leans left", "leftist bots", "always politically left", "skews quite left", "Obviously this website is rigged for the liberal agenda", "the level of wokeness is just absurd", "leftist ideological echo chamber", "run by radical leftists, so no surprise", "You aren't allowed to go against the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party", "ideas here are ignored, down voted, flagged, shadow banned if they question the left ideology", "a very anti-libertarian echo chamber", "a heavy socialist lean, you are not allowed to have a differing perspective", "only liberals are allowed to express their political opinions on HN", "capitalism bad", "flaaaaaming, communist level liberal", "shows how much of a leftist website this is", "dang is an SJW cunt"

Links available on request. Quote quality 100% guaranteed, or your clicks back!

Thanks for the link to your essay from eight months ago; I hadn't seen that before.

I think this issue could use more widespread awareness!

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098, thanks! I haven't gotten much feedback on it and it's as close to the heart of the dynamic here that I've yet been able to get.

Good (added) examples. Most of those verge on personal attacks and definitely don't add anything to the conversation.

I've heard opposite complaints about what that slant is (I think entirely from people making their claims in good faith). And of course, both could be correct: there could be a particular mainstream and everyone whose views are outside of it in any direction might find a somewhat chilly reception.

> far too many people would rather down vote than refute an argument

Another challenge is that there's not always a consensus about what downvoting is appropriate for. (Disagreement, tone, bad faith, personal attacks, poor logic, off-topic, etc.? Or just "too controversial and not likely to lead to a good discussion, even though it might well be correct"? For that matter, people can't quite agree on what is or isn't on-topic here.)

I sometimes wish HN had downvote reason metadata so that people could understand more about what was prompting other people to downvote them. You can see that people are often genuinely confused about it, but the site rules discourage people from complaining about it, and it's hard to distinguish a confused question from a complaining question when people ask why they were downvoted. But we don't really have any challenge for people to say "I was offended by your view" vs. "I think you treated someone else in the conversation disrespectfully" vs. "I don't think HN is the right place for this argument", etc.

I generally reserve down votes for personal attacks and comments that are excessively off topic.

That's fine, but it's not a norm here. HN explicitly allows downvoting disagreement; a downvote is less noisy and disruptive than the "I disagree with this" comments that we'd get if you couldn't.

I tend to downvote lazy arguments or loaded questions which can be easily answered in 10 seconds by looking them up and have regularly appeared on HN, devoid of new content.

It's fine not to know something, but the threshold to comment should be slightly higher than that; a quick Internet search shouldn't already answer your question / remark.

If I'm not careful I start writing an answer to these, only to realize that I've already done so for the same remark several times already. At that point I just dismiss my comment and downvote instead.

I think we're kind of missing a HN FAQ which we could assume is common knowledge. Obviously I'm talking about technical topic where there is a clear answer.

I was being stalked for a while.. weeks, maybe? I suspected someone (or a few) with multiple shadow accounts operated by bots

We don't allow that kind of thing on HN, and if you or anyone else thinks it's happening, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.

Hellbanned IP and hidden users are a thing.

Sure. But clearly some of those are deserved. I don’t have a feel for how often that’s done incorrectly, but I’d guess it’s very rare? Do you know of many cases where accounts are shadowbanned or hellbanned without quite obviously pushing way past polite consideration of the guidelines? The only times I’ve ever investigated dead users it’s been pretty obvious that they repeatedly and flagrantly refused to back down on expected polite behaviour...

Yep!

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