Ask HN: Is there a better model than flagging?

You submitted two links, both to an industry group headed up by Guus Berkhout:

[quote]

  Berkhout founded the Netherlands-based organization Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL).

  Mid 2019 plans of CLINTEL and Berkhout were leaked showing that they were organizing a campaign against political commitments to net zero carbon emissions being made into law. The campaign features a number of academics and industry figures with ties to climate change sceptics groups, as well as members from oil and gas companies.

  Berkhout claimed the ideal of the organization was to provide an alternative to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

  In late September 2019 the group produced an open letter which presented a European Climate Declaration, stating that there was no climate emergency and repeating a number of claims that were inconsistent with the scientific evidence on climate.

  A fact check performed by climate scientists for Climate Feedback gave the letter an overall scientific credibility of "very low", and tagged it as "Biased, Cherry-picking, Inaccurate, Misleading".

  The analysis also added that, out of the roughly 500 signatories, only 10 self-identified as climate scientists. 

  The document was later rebranded as the World Climate Declaration.

[/quote]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guus_Berkhout

Climate Science (as laid out by the IPCC) is akin to Foucoult's Pendulum; the earth rotates, and human activity is altering the atmosphere in a measurable manner that traps more heat energy than is normally retained.

You may have a contrarian opinion about measurable facts .. but there are bars and cafes for those.

So this is exactly the perspective I’m looking for from HN.

If my post (which clearly wasn’t for or against the linked material) was not immediately flagged and killed then it would’ve been possible to actually solicit this kind of perspective.

But if my post is immediately killed then I never get to see this kind of insight.

Hence my question about whether there’s a better model than simply flagging content, as HN currently works.

Your first submission may have been flagged because you wrote (“editorialized”) the title instead of using the actual page title. As https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html says: “Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.”

(Also, the title you chose may have been seen as an attempt to attract extra attention or skew the discussion. Whatever your actual intention, there’s little patience for that.)

HN has its own mechanisms to keep trash off the homepage, those mechanisms worked as intended. Please don't litter.

I saw your submission and I think this is a case where flagging worked well.

My understanding of HN objectives is to promote new and interesting conversation. A "anthropogenic climate change is not real" article doesn't promote a good discussion, it just prompts people to rehash the same old stuff. Not to say that every new article about what Elon Musk did leads to any better conversation, but even many of those get flagged, and at least they are tracking a current event relevant to tech. There is no significant new information in sites like what you posted.

As a secondary point, but no doubt it helped getting the article flagged, it's a low-quality single agenda website that nobody has heard of and has all the hallmarks of a slightly crazy "fake news" (advertorial, whatever you want to call it) site. If an even slightly reputable real news org covered this, it might get flagged less. Though it would still probably lead to the same boring debate and ultimately get flagged anyway

How do we know that this large number of scientists actually exist? Have you met each of them and read their work? How do we know that you even submitted a link earlier?

People can vouch for your submission, nobody did.

How does that help if the post’s not alive for long enough for more than a handful of people to see it?

The headline of the site and your submission is also just plain wrong. Maybe there is no manmade climate emergency but there is most certainly a climate emergency. Also there is nothing scientific on the site only an open letter... it's just really bad content. You don't know how many people have seen or voted on it you are just believing that nobody has seen it. Multiple users need to flag your post before it becomes [flagged] and even more need to flag it for it to become [dead].

Only if there was a link so the rest of us knew what is being talked about.

Go into your profile and activate "showdead" after that click his profile and you will see his [dead] and [flagged] submissions.

I think this is the key problem. It seems you assume I have a particular position on climate change, as opposed to my actual intention of making people aware of this declaration. Those are very different positions.

Also, my second submission was a link to a specific page on the site where I copied/pasted the title verbatim, and it was flagged immediately.

This leads me to believe that my post wasn’t flagged because of an inaccurate title, but because someone really didn’t want (and didn’t want others) to see the post.

The only thing I see is unscientific content that was released by Guus Berkhout. The site was flagged 3 times before so maybe it's even autoflagged because it's been peddling bullshit since 2019 but who knows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guus_Berkhout

Don’t you think it’s at least be insightful for whoever’s submitting content to understand why it was flagged?

If it’s content a submitter’s come across for the first time, and they don’t see it discussed here on HN, so they post it, and it immediately gets suppressed without any explanation, how does that help the submitter? (e.g. if it’s been autoflagged, it’d be helpful to see a reason for that, and perhaps a link to past discussion the submitter might have missed).

It just concerns me that this mechanism could be prematurely filtering out many valuable conversations that I’d like to be aware of.

One thing to remember is that this an old debate and there’s been a ton of astroturf on behalf of the fossil fuel industry since at least the 1980s. Those operatives rely on making things sound plausible so it’s not your fault for finding it interesting - making it sound that way is quite literally these guy’s jobs - but you’ll get their accumulated bad karma as people see it, recognize the source as a bad faith actor, and don’t want to spend their time rehashing something for the dozenth time.

I’d recommend searching a bit first but also avoid the sources like that who are trying to use your credibility on behalf of their clients. They will shed no tears for the cost to your reputation, which is deplorable but also predictable.

That's your problem. If you see your content flagged immediately your first course of action is complaining about it? Why not do the rational thing and google it so you can understand why other people flag it. As I said it's not my job to make you comprehend that the content you submitted is subpar quality. It's yours.

Maybe just move on with your life and don’t engage with the content if you’re not interested?

No, I care about the communities I participate in so if I see misinformation in "new" I flag it. (I didn't flag your submissions)

They do exactly what you want: engage with you, even though you seem to have already made up your mind about the desired outcome (which you aren't going to get). And then you tell them to move on with their life? That's pretty rude.

To me this whole thread looks like a way to social engineer your way around getting your articles flagged in spite of that being the most democratic mechanism to keep HN on track.

Did you perhaps read the primary text of this submission?

It seems like everyone commenting here is totally missing the point of why I submitted this question in the first place and is so fixated on the content of the links I originally submitted that they just can’t see the actual questions I’m asking.

I’m tired of engaging with people who refuse to engage with the actual questions I asked.

But also, if there was at least a reason tagged along with the flagging, that could be helpful to submitters, don’t you think? Making people guess as to the reason for flagging seems like poor UX to me, and increases the overall hostility of the site to users.

Also, those links I posted are of far less importance to me than my actual concern in terms of how HN and other sites shape my perception of the world based on their UX design. That is the reason I posed this question. Not to complain about my posts getting flagged.

As a member of a community or site, it is important to take the time to familiarize yourself with the guidelines and frequently asked questions in order to understand how it operates. There are numerous threads available discussing user-driven moderation on this platform, some even addressing the same concerns you have raised. It seems that you have not made an effort to understand the rules and features of the site, leading to a fundamental misunderstanding and criticism that may not be warranted. It is worth noting that these rules have remained unchanged for the past decade, despite the political and global pandemic events of recent years.

Instead of contributing to the repetition of discussions on this topic, it may be more productive to seek out information and consider the possibility that the issue may lie with your own understanding and usage of the site. Additionally, making false claims about search results on a particular search engine only serves to undermine the credibility of your perspective. Alone because of the duckduckgo fib I am ending the discussion, at least for me. I hope you have a pleasant day.

As per my comment on your other thread:

> Here you go, my first page of hits on mobile: https://imgur.com/a/zSL5fVX

> Only when I got to my laptop now did the set of links differ: https://imgur.com/a/EuUt7U5

> Clearly not the same set of results for the same search.

Re: this site's guidelines, I find your comment here a little disingenuous and far too generous towards HN's "guidelines". The mere fact that such content as this exists suggests that HN's guidelines are quite opaque: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

It appears that you may have misunderstood the distinction between guidelines and their enforcement. While the guidelines themselves are public, the methods of enforcement are not made publicly available in order to prevent individuals from attempting to circumvent them.

> See that's another you problem you changed something and now your search results are distorted. Here are screenshots from 5 different VPN locations with different browsers and different user agents... https://imgur.com/a/P4zoAzf

Well now you know, dude. Take the L on this post and move on with your life.

> there is most certainly a climate emergency

For what it's worth, I'd most strongly disagree with your use of the phrase "there is most certainly" there. There's nothing objective in science that declares what an "emergency" is. Deciding whether or not any situation is an emergency can never be the result of any science experiment.

IMO, most disagreements about "science" that crop up about contentious topics aren't really science disagreements, they're subjective risk-management disagreements.

Two people can look at the objective statistics about a situation and one person might see it as an emergency and one might not. They're technically both right because this is subjective in nature.

I utilized the term in reference to the flagged submission for the sake of simplicity and ease of comprehension for the individual in question. The term 'emergency' carries connotations and should be used with caution when describing any situation.

Anyone who chose to enable the option "Show dead" (comments/submissions) in the settings can still see the title and vouch for it if they like.

This is not the default mode of browsing facilitated by HN, so the system inherently lends itself to killing contrarian perspectives long before there can be any meaningful discussion about them.

To me, there’s nothing more powerful than someone posting a contrarian perspective and there being a highly upvoted, well-reasoned/cited response as to why the contrarian perspective isn’t valid. This I would prefer over having those contrarian perspectives suppressed, and I never get to see or engage with them.