Hacker News Reader

Comment by mutant_glofish | Hacker News Reader

I think that HN itself also shadow flags submissions from a list of domains it doesn't like.

Try submitting a URL from the following domains, and it will be automatically flagged (but you can't see it's flagged unless you log out):

  - archive.is
  - watcher.guru
  - stacker.news
  - zerohedge.com
  - freebeacon.com
  - thefederalist.com
  - breitbart.com

View on HN

Well, yes, many sites are banned on HN. Others are penalized (see e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). None of this is secret, though we don't publish the lists themselves.

Edit: about 67k sites are banned on HN. Here's a random selection of 10 of them:

  vodlockertv.com
  biggboss.org
  infoocode.com
  newyorkpersonalinjuryattorneyblog.com
  moringajuice.wordpress.com
  surrogacymumbai.com
  maximizedlivingdrlabrecque.com
  radio.com
  gossipcare.com
  tecteem.com

And you don't see that as censorship?

This forum never said they’re a free speech haven.

That's true, but it's a bit of an interesting question because "free speech" has different meanings. The thing to understand about HN is that we're trying to optimize for one thing: intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Given that, we're not "free speech" in the sense of "post anything about anything" - we have to moderate spam, flamewar, lame comments like "ok boomer", etc., because those detract from curious discussion.

On the other hand, no single political or ideological position has a monopoly on intellectual curiosity either—so by the same principle, HN can't be moderated for political or ideological position.

It's tricky because working this way conflicts with how everyone's mind works. When people see a politically charged post X that they don't like, or when they see a politically charged post Y that they do like, but which we've moderated, it's basically irresistible to jump to the conclusion "the mods are biased". This is because what we see in the first place is conditioned by our preferences - we're more likely to notice and to put weight on things we dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). People with opposite preferences notice opposite data points and therefore "see" opposite biases. It's the same mechanism either way.

In reality, we're just trying to solve an optimization problem: how can you operate a public internet forum to maximize intellectual curiosity? That's basically it. It's not so easy to solve though.

I personally think you guys have it mostly figured out. Kudos.

The word censorship has so many meanings that I have to ask what you mean by it before I can say whether I see it that way.

Is it censorship that the rules of chess say you can't poke someone's queen off the board? We're trying to play a particular game here.

> The word censorship has so many meanings that I have to ask what you mean by it before I can say whether I see it that way.

Perhaps its one of those things that are hard to define. [1] But that doesn't mean clear cases don't exist.

> Is it censorship that the rules of chess say you can't poke someone's queen off the board? We're trying to play a particular game here.

No, but it is clearly political censorship if you only apply the unwritten and secret "rules" of the game to a particular political faction. Also, banning entire domain names is definitely heavy-handed.

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

> political faction

I remember some words that succinctly express something I often observe. To paraphrase:

> Left-wing and Right-wing are terms which make a lot of people falsely believe that they disagree with each other.

It is worth trying to find common ground with people “on the other side”.

> censorship if you only apply the unwritten and secret "rules"

I mostly agree. I argued in an article [1] that it's only censorship if the author of the content is not told about the action taken against the content.

These days though, mods and platforms will generally argue that they're being transparent by telling you that it happens. When it happens is another story altogether that is often not shared.

[1] https://www.removednews.com/p/twitters-throttling-of-what-is...

that is a very interesting way of communicating that point. thank you filing that away :)

Censorship has a very defined meaning. To take the chess analogy, it would be like allowing one side to poke the queen off the board, and not allow the other. This is very much like what happens at HN today.

You're dang right, trying to play a particular [rigged] game here.

What side do you feel is not allowed to play here?

What is the "very defined meaning" that you're thinking of?

The one that I think makes the most clear sense is "censorship" by a state power. But you must be thinking of something different, because HN is not a state power.

Would be nice if the lists were published though with a link to the list from the submission form.

The problem is that if you publish the lists it leads to more abuses. For example if spammers find out which sites are banned then they just post other ones.

> For example if spammers find out which sites are banned then they just post other ones.

I don't think that makes sense. The supposed spammers can just try looking up whether their submissions show up or not when not logged in.

That also requires additional effort on the spammers’ part. Increasing cost of attacks is an effective defense strategy.

Increasing cost of attacks is effective against good faith people, not spammers.

Even Cory Doctorow made this case in "Como is Infosec" [1].

The only problem with Cory's argument is, he points people to the SC Principles [2]. The SCP contain exceptions for not notifying about "spam, phishing or malware." But anything can be considered spam, and transparency-with-exceptions has always been platforms' position. They've always argued they can secretly remove content when it amounts to "spam." Nobody has challenged them on that point. The reality is, platforms that use secretive moderation lend themselves to spammers.

[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

[2] https://santaclaraprinciples.org/

platforms that use secretive moderation lend themselves to spammers

how is that? i can understand it not being useful, but how would it help spammers?

Spammers game the system while good-faith users get edged out. Spammers are determined actors who perceive threats everywhere, whereas good-faith users never imagine that a platform would secretly remove their content. Today, you see low quality content on social media, not because the world is dumb, but because the people who get their message out know the secret tricks.

Secret suppression is extremely common [1].

Many of today's content moderators say exceptions for shadowbans are needed [2]. They think lying to users promotes reality. That's bologna.

[1] https://www.removednews.com/p/hate-online-censorship-its-way...

[2] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1689887293002379264

so to spammers shadowbanning makes no difference, but good-faith users somehow get discouraged even if they don't know they are shadowbanned just because they get no reaction to their posts? how is an explicit ban any less discouraging?

i can't see how shadowbanning makes things worse for good-faith users. and evidently it does work against spammers here on HN (though we don't know if it is the shadow or the banning that makes it effective, but i'll believe dang when he says that it does help)

> how is an explicit ban any less discouraging?

It's about whose messages are sidelined, not who gets discouraged.

With shadow removals, good-faith users' content is elbowed out without their knowledge. Since they don't know about it, they don't adjust behavior and do not bring their comments elsewhere.

Over 50% of Reddit users have removed content they don't know about. Just look at what people say when they find out [1].

> and evidently it does work against spammers here on HN

It doesn't. It benefits people who know how to work the system. The more secret it is, the more special knowledge you need.

[1] https://www.reveddit.com/#say

In my experience, increasing cost or delay even a little bit cuts out a disproportionate amount of bad stuff.

I once had the domain 'moronsinahurry' registered, though not with this group in mind...

In your experience where?

No research has been done about whether shadow moderation is good or bad for discourse. It was simply adopted by the entire internet because it's perceived as "easier." Indeed, for platforms and advertisers, it certainly is an easier way to control messaging. It fools good-faith users all the time. I've shared examples of that elsewhere in this thread.

I think that you are reading this too narrowly. SPAMers etc are often in a hurry. For example, simply avoiding responding for a second or two to an inbound SMTP connection drops a whole group of bad email attempts on the floor while no one else even notices.[0] Another example: manually delaying admitting new users to a forum (and in the process checking for bad activity from their IP/email etc) seems to shed another bunch of unwanteds, and raising the cost a little with some simple questions on the way in, also. This point about small extra delay and effort deterring disproportionately bad behaviour is quite broad.

[0] https://deer-run.com/users/hal/sysadmin/greet_pause.html

In your cost/benefit analysis, you overlook the harms created by secretive actions. That's why I asked for details about your experience.

The internet has run on secrets for 40 years. That doesn't make it right. Now that everyone and their mother is online, it's time to consider the harms that secrets create.

There are bad actors, and many of them are lazy/stupid. Their activity imposes a tax / harms on the rest of us. One way to minimise that harm to the good actors includes some mildly covert measures. The sendmail GreetPause is hardly a secret for example: it catches a common deliberate malicious protocol violation and is publicly documented. This is not unique to the Internet nor new; see also banking and personal security and so on.

This subthread started with a discussion about how "HN itself also shadow flags submissions" [1]. That's a slightly different form of moderation than the t.co delays.

Another commenter argued "Increasing cost of attacks is an effective defense strategy."

I argued it is not, and you said adding a delay can cut out bad stuff. Delays are certainly relevant to the main post, but that's not what I was referring to. And I certainly don't argue against using secrets for personal security! Securitizing public discourse, however, is another matter.

Can you elaborate on GreetPause? Was it to prevent a DDOS? I don't understand why bad requests couldn't just be rejected.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130143

Here's another reasonable summary:

https://www.revsys.com/tidbits/greet_pause-a-new-anti-spam-f...

I get several thousand SPAM attempts per day: I estimate that this one technique kills a large fraction of them. And look how old the feature is...

Okay, so the requests do get rejected, it just uses a delay to make that decision.

I don't consider GreetPause to be a form of shadow moderation because the sender knows the commands were rejected. The issue with shadow moderation on platforms is that the system shows you one thing while showing others something else.

Legally speaking, I have no problem with shadow moderation. I only argue it's morally wrong and bad for discourse. It discourages trust and encourages the growth of echo chambers and black-and-white thinking.

How do you view the rest of typical SPAM filtering, where the mail is apparently accepted for delivery but then silently thrown away? For simplicity assume a system such as mine where I control the MTA and client, so no one is making decisions hidden from me as the end user who wants to get the ham and see no SPAM. (I get tens of ham per day and many many thousands of SPAM attempts.)

With spam email, the recipient has a chance to recover the mail by looking in their spam folder.

No such spam folder is provided to the public on social media.

Note that in the GreetPause case the SPAMmer will not see the rejection errors since they don't look at the response to their hit and run (ie no one gets to see any error, neither sender nor target), and a legitimate sender should never get the error, so even this may be messy by your criteria I think!

> even this may be messy by your criteria I think!

Only if the recipient sent a false response.

If the response were misrepresented then I would object to the technique. But it doesn't sound like that's what happens.

OK, thanks!

You're correct again. Spammers and bots are the most determined actors, so these secretive measures don't impact them.

In fact, such secrecy benefits spammers. Good-faith users never imagine that platforms would secretly action content. So when you look at overall trends, bots, spammers and trolls are winning while genuine users are being pushed aside.

I argued that secrecy benefits trolls in a blog post, but I don't want to spam links to my posts in the comments.

Most spammers aren’t that competent. Hiding their posts without telling them used to be very effective on Reddit (now Reddit tells them). I guess it’s the same on HN.

Spammers are more competent than genuine users. They are advertisers, so they are more likely to be tracking metrics.

If that were right, then HN would be overrun by spam.

So you think secretive measures more often defeat spammers than trusting users? I'd argue HN's content could be a lot better than it currently is.

Content curation is necessary, but shadow moderation is not helping. When a forum removes visible consequences, it does not prepare its users to learn from their mistakes.

I'll admit, I find HN to be more transparently moderated than Reddit and Twitter, but let's not pretend people have stopped trying to game the system. The more secret the rules (and how they are applied), the more a system serves a handful of people who have learned the secret tricks.

Meanwhile, regular users who are not platform experts trust these systems to be transparent. Trustful users spend more time innovating elsewhere, and they are all disrupted by unexpected secretive tricks.

> So you think secretive measures more often defeat spammers than trusting users?

Yes. And it's really not a close question.

"Regular users" don't have to be platform experts and learn tricks and stuff. They just post normal links and comments and never run into moderation at all.

> They just post normal links and comments and never run into moderation at all.

On the contrary, secret suppression is extremely common. Every social media user has probably been moderated at some point without their knowledge.

Look up a random reddit user. Chances are they have a removed comment in their recent history, e.g. [1].

All comment removals on Reddit are shadow removals. If you use Reddit with any frequency, you'll know that mods almost never go out of their way to notify users about comment removals.

[1] https://www.reveddit.com/y/Sariel007/

archive: https://archive.is/GNudB

I'm talking specifically about HN, not reddit.

It has made sense since the internet was invented, spammers need everything thrown at them because they will abuse every nook and cranny of your system to get paid 1 cent more

I think there are two different types of sites you are blocking: (1) those which are just pure spam; (2) news/opinion/etc websites that you’ve decided are not suitable for HN for various reasons (such as being low quality and tending to produce more ideological flame-wars than curiosity), for example Breitbart

I agree that publishing case (1) causes harm (spammers will just use a different domain if they know you’ve blocked theirs.) But case (2) is rather different. I don’t think the same justification for lack of transparency exists in this case. And I think shadow-banning the submission in case (2) is not very user-friendly. It would be better to just display an error, e.g. “submissions from this site are blocked because we do not believe it is suitable for HN” (or whatever). A new user might post stuff like (2) out of misunderstanding what the site is about rather than malevolence, so better to directly educate them than potentially leave them ignorant. Also, while Breitbart is rather obviously garbage, since we don’t know everything in category (2) on the list, maybe there are some sites on it whose suitability is more debatable or mixed, and its inappropriateness may be less obvious to someone than Breitbart’s (hopefully) is

That's a good argument and subtle enough that I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree.

[flagged]

Well, unless surrogacymumbai.com is where we post right-wing news from, that's hardly a problem, eh?

I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131212 before noticing that you'd already made the same argument - sorry! But I have to leave it up because penispowerworldwide.com makes me laugh.

I like to think this is the parent company for Prestige Worldwide.

Finally pens are no longer constrained to just one island.

You don’t have to apply both sides logic to everything in life.

That's what "random 10 out of 67k sites" gives you. Your set was cherry-picked, dang's wasn't.

That said, dailykos.com seems to be banned. Happy now?

> Your set was cherry-picked

Not exactly cherry-picked, these were from things I submitted myself and noticed that were shadow flagged.

> That said, dailykos.com seems to be banned. Happy now?

No, I'd be happy when archive.is, Federalist and the rest of the non-spammy ones are unbanned. (Also, even if "balanced" censorship was the desired goal, having a single unreliable left-wing source banned vs a ton of right-wing ones doesn't really achieve that.)

> Not exactly cherry-picked, these were from things I submitted myself and noticed that were shadow flagged.

Definitely not random, in any case.

> Also, even if "balanced" censorship was the desired goal,

Nobody claimed that. You merely stated that "I don't see a single left-wing new source in there." and I offered a counter-point.

> having one left-wing source vs a ton of right-wing one doesn't achieve that

I didn't do an exhaustive search for "left-wing domains" that are banned to present you a complete list, this was attempt 1 of 1.

Following your model, I could claim that 100% of left-wing domains are banned, but I won't.

Have you considered that may speak more to your biases than the site's? How many far left-wing news sites do you regular?

Turn on show dead, browse https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and take the affirmative community moderation steps of vouching for those that are good.

Archive.is shouldn't ever need to be the primary site. Post a link to the original and then a comment to the archive site if there's the possibility of take down or issues with paywalls.

It is likely that people were using archive.is for trying to avoid posting the original domain and masking the content that it presented.

By that logic, the fact that penispowerworldwide.com is banned on HN* means we're biased against your politics.

Of the 67k sites banned on HN I would guess that fewer than 0.1% are "news sources", left- or right- or any wing. Why would you expect them to show up in a random sample of 10?

* which it is! I've unkilled https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1236054 for the occasion.

It is a secret if the system does not inform the poster it's been penalized.

What is it if the information is freely available, to anyone asking, for a single domain they are trying to post at that time?

It’s not secret, because they’ll be provided an answer if they email the mod team.

It’s not free as in open source, because it isn’t available for anyone to download and study in full.

So, since it’s not secret, is it public, or private? Since it’s not published in full but any query of LIMIT 1 is answered, is that open, closed, or other?

Restrictions to publication don’t necessarily equate to secrecy, but the best I’ve got is “available upon request”, which isn’t quite right either. Suggestions welcome.

Content moderation systems often hide mod actions from the content author [1]. That's a secret.

The opposite would be to show the author of the content some indicator that it's been removed, and I would call that transparent or disclosed moderation.

Interestingly, your comment first appeared to me as "* * *" with no author [2]. I wonder if that is some kind of ban.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e6BIkKBZpg

[2] https://i.imgur.com/oGnXc6W.png

edit I know you commented again but it's got that "* * *" thing again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130675

https://archive.is/Eov7z

There’s a protection system in place that can result in that; I don’t have the details at hand (since I’m not associated with HN/YC) but I remember seeing it once before on a highly contentious post, and an email to the mods helped explain/correct whatever was up.

It's not a ban. It appears when the user has 'delay' in their profile set to N minutes and N minutes haven't elapsed yet. We should probably make this more explicit.

Re the 'delay' setting see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

> Suggestions welcome

"This domain is not allowed on HN" as an error message upon submission.

That’s not going to work, because now that’s an API for spammers to bulk process against a domain list. The only available API must be human communication to the mod team, or the spammers will overcome it with automation.

Spammers can already do that API call and see if the domain shows up. This only puts human users at the same level of consideration as spammer automation.

Seriously dedicated spammers can, yes! But antispam is about reducing the noise threshold, and eliminating low-effort spam opportunities that can be done to a single HTTP endpoint with a bash script is a big win. Simply having to access two pages is already too much to bother with for the vast majority.

That's trivial to figure out.

It's quite possible the reason the list isn't public is because it would give away information about what thought is allowed and what thought isn't.

> That’s trivial to figure out.

Elaborate.

That encourages switching to another domain for spammy submissions.

There's a lot of user hostile moderation practices that occur on this site, manual and automatic. They're not often, or really at all, discussed. Some of them don't work well, and haven't for as long as they've existed.

I don't want us to be user hostile. Can you link to some examples?

I would consider any moderation action that isn't visible to users to be user hostile.

If you're going to censor someone, you owe it to them to be honest about what you're doing to them.

You possibly haven't experienced how devious and determined and dishonest and unpleasant some bad actors are, including SPAMmers.

(Even when doing the RightThing(TM) would probably be easier...)

And, BTW, I occasionally get blocked by the mechanisms here, even though not doing anything bad, but understand that there is a trade-off.

I am fully aware of the issue.

That's one of the costs with having a public website.

The HN moderation policies are clearly effective, because the site is mostly full of useful information that attracts a wide audience of readers.

I really like this take on moderation:

"The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience."

From Nilay Patel in https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

We may not all be fans of Musk at the moment, but one of his observations about PayPal was that its job was not especially about payments because that bit was easy, it was about preventing fraud. And as the ex-director of a small payments system (e-money issuer), I agree. The bit which everyone outside the system doesn't realise is the hard bit is dealing with all the bad actors.

I agree with you both. The only thing I'd add is that it's a tradeoff - if we do it this way, it's only because the alternative would be even more user-hostile.

Does HN ever show a user that their comment was submitted, but the comment is not visible for anyone else? Or it’s not visible for most people? Without having the flagged tag

Indirectly: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137757>

I suppose a sufficiently motivated spammer might incorporate that as a submission workflow check.

And that cost is so high that over the ~25Y+* that I have been running my own sites I have not had UGC on any of them, other then a very brief experiment, which showed me what utter relentless turds the bad actors can be.

Operators of public sites should NOT have to pay that tax. So you are best are not fully aware of the actual cost, IMHO.

Congrats to HN for striking a reasonable pragmatic balance.

*I had some of the first live (non-academic) Internet connectivity in the UK, and the very very first packets were hacking attempts...

>If you're going to censor someone

unless HN is suddenly the government what you've misnomered is moderation, not censorship. Calling censorship just exaggerates your opinion and makes you look unhinged. It's a private website not national news.

Censorship is not limited to who does it.

So please explain the difference between censorship and moderation.

public versus privately owned forum.

In my head, censorship is the removal of an idea that is offensive to a particular ideology but isn’t objectively harmful.

Moderation is the removal of content that objectively doesn’t belong in context, eg spam

Obviously that moderation definition is nuanced bc some could argue that Marxist ideas don’t belong in the context of a site with a foundation in startups. And indeed Marxist ideas often get flagged here

I like Scott Alexander's definition[1]. Quoting directly:

> Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product. If a customer doesn’t want to receive harassing messages, or to be exposed to disinformation, then a business can provide them the service of a harassment-and-disinformation-free platform.

> Censorship is the abnormal activity of ensuring that people in power approve of the information on your platform, regardless of what your customers want. If the sender wants to send a message and the receiver wants to receive it, but some third party bans the exchange of information, that’s censorship.

Censorship is somewhat subjective, something that you might find offensive and want moderated might not be considered so by others. Therefore, Alexander further argues that the simplest mechanism that turns censorship into moderation is a switch that, when enabled, lets you see the banned content, which is exactly what HN does. Alexander further argues that there are kinds of censorship that aren't necessarily bad, by this definition, disallowing pedophiles from sharing child porn with each other is censorship, but it's something that we should still do.

[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moderation-is-differen...

Is deleting spam censorship?

If it's visible, it can be worked around.

Blame the trolls that prevent us from having nice things.

Shadow banning is one of the most effective ways to fight spam and harassment. Not being "honest" with spammers and harassers can often be a good thing.

I've twice had some "user hostile moderation practice" used against me on HN. Both times an email to the right person cleared it up - and one of those times in fact I had crossed a boundary that I shouldn't have crossed. Any long-time community member here knows what to do.

HN operates, based on a number of reasons, on numerous dynamics of friction and nudges. Mostly for the better. I've had my disagreements about things in the past, though as I watch the site and have studied it (particularly over the past few months, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36843900>) I mostly agree with it.

The parts that don't work especially well, most particularly discussion of difficult-but-important topics (in my view) ... have also been acknowledged by its creator pg (Paul Graham) and mods (publicly, dang, though there are a few others).

In general: if you submit a story and it doesn't go well, drop a note to the moderators: hn@ycombinator.com. They typically reply within a few hours, perhaps a day or if things are busy or for complex.

You can verify that a submission did or didn't go through by checking on the link from an unauthenticated (logged-out) session.

> if you submit a story and it doesn't go well, drop a note to the moderators

> You can verify that a submission did or didn't go through by checking on the link from an unauthenticated (logged-out) session.

Trustful users do not think to do this, and it would not be necessary if the system did not keep the mod action secret.

Trustful souls may not.

Those who have been advised to do so, through the Guidelines, FAQ, comments, or moderator notes, do, to their advantage.

(I'd had a submission shadowbanned as it came from the notoriously flameworthy site LinkedIn a month or few back. I noticed this, emailed the mods, and got that post un-banned. Just to note that the process is in place, and does work.)

You don't see the harm of elbowing out trustful people from the public square?

What we do is try to educate them and loop them back in.

I've done this on multiple occasions, e.g.: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191005>

As I commented above, HN operates through indirect and oblique means. Ultimately it is is a social site managed through culture. And the way that this culture is expressed and communicated is largely through various communications --- the site FAQ and guidelines, dang's very, very, very many moderation comments. Searching for his comments with "please" is a good way to find those, though you can simply browse his comment history:

- "please" by dang: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...>

- dang's comment history: <https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang>

Yes, it means that people's feelings get hurt. I started off here (a dozen years ago) feeling somewhat the outsider. I've come to understand and appreciate the site. It's maintained both operation and quality for some sixteen years, which is an amazing run. If you go back through history, say, a decade ago, quality and topicality of both posts and discussions are remarkably stable: <https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-08-14>.

If you do have further concerns, raise them with dang via email: <hn@ycombinator.com> He does respond, he's quite patient, might take a day or two for a more complex issue, but it will happen.

And yes, it's slow, inefficient, and lossy. But, again as the site's history shows, it mostly just works, and changing that would be a glaring case of Chesterton's Fence: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=chesterton%27s+fence>.

> What we do is try to educate them and loop them back in.

But that's selective education. You don't do it for every shadow moderated comment. The trend is still that shadow moderation more often disadvantages trustful users. Will you acknowledge that harm?

Over 50% of Reddit users have a removed comment in their recent history that they likely were not told about. When shadow moderation is in play, abuse runs rampant among both mods and users. Both find more and more reasons to distrust each other.

What alternative(s) do you propose?

How do you think spammers and abusers will exploit those options?

Again: HN works in general, and the historical record strongly confirms this, especially as compared with alternative platforms, Reddit included, which seems to be suffering its own failure modes presently.

> What alternative(s) do you propose?

A forum should not do things that elbow out trustful people.

That means, don't lie to authors about their actioned content. Forums should show authors the same view that moderators get. If a post has been removed, de-amplified, or otherwise altered in the view for other users, then the forum should indicate that to the post's author.

> How do you think spammers and abusers will exploit those options?

Spammers already get around and exploit all of Reddit's secretive measures. Mods regularly post to r/ModSupport about how users have circumvented bans. Now they're asking forums to require ID [1].

Once shadow moderation exists on a forum, spammers can then create their own popular groups that remove truthful content.

Forums that implement shadow moderation are not belling cats. They sharpen cats' claws.

[1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1689887293002379264

Your first three points are blind assertions without supporting justification or basis. All have been 1) identified as known issues for spammers (e.g., HN used to publish its block list, it no longer does, based on observed response, which mirrors experiences at many other sites), and 2) the workarounds given. You don't accept either the fact of the first or the utility of the 2nd, however you're on parlous ground in doing so.

The fact that some spammers overcome some countermeasures in no way demonstrates that:

- All spammers overcome all countermeasures.

- That spam wouldn't be far worse without those countermeasures.[1]

- That removing such blocks and practices would improve overall site quality.

I've long experience online (going on 40 years), I've designed content moderation systems, served in ops roles on multi-million-member social networks, and done analysis of several extant networks (Google+, Ello, and Hacker News, amongst them), as well as observed what happens, and does and doesn't work, across many others.

Your quest may be well-intentioned, but it's exceedingly poorly conceived.

________________________________

Notes:

1. This is the eternal conflict of preventive measures and demonstrating efficacy. Proving that adverse circumstances would have occurred in the absence of prophilactic action is of necessity proving a counterfactual. Absent some testing regime (and even then) there's little evidence to provide. The fire that didn't happen, the deaths that didn't occur, the thefts that weren't realised, etc. HN could publish information on total submissions and automated rejections. There's the inherent problem as well of classifying submitters. Even long-lived accounts get banned (search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>). Content moderation isn't a comic-book superhero saga where orientation of the good guys and bad guys is obvious. (Great comment on this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619006>).

Real life is complicated. People are shades of grey, not black or white. They change over time: "Die a hero or live long enough to become a villian." Credentials get co-opted. And for most accounts, courtesy of long-tail distributions, data are exceedingly thin: about half of all HN front-page stories come from accounts with only one submission in the Front Page archive, based on my own analysis of same. They may have a broader submission history, yes, but the same distribution applies there where many, and almost always most submissions come from people with painfully thin history on which to judge them. And that's assuming that the tools for doing said judging are developed.

> Your first three points are blind assertions without supporting justification or basis.

You asked me for an alternative and I gave one.

You yourself have expressed concern over HN silently re-weighting topics [1].

You don't see transparent moderation as a solution to that?

> The fact that some spammers overcome some countermeasures in no way demonstrates that...

Once a spammer knows the system he can create infinite amounts of content. When a forum keeps mod actions secret, that benefits a handful of people.

We already established that secrecy elbows out trustful people, right? Or, do you dispute that? I've answered many of your questions. Please answer this one of mine.

> That removing such blocks and practices would improve overall site quality.

To clarify my own shade of grey, I do not support shadow moderation. I support transparent-to-the-author content moderation. I also support the legal right for forums to implement shadow moderation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312

SEO optimized domains, so 2010 :-)

radio.com looks legit, what is wrong with it?

I just get 'This site isn't currently available in the EU'

We probably banned it because https://web.archive.org/web/20201027012245/https://kroq.radi... (posted to HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18253701) was spam.

I haven't dug into the logs, but most probably we saw that https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=thebottomline was spamming HN and banned the sites that they were spamming.

Edit: if you (i.e. anyone) click on those links and don't see anything, it's because we killed the posts. You can turn on 'showdead' in your profile to see killed posts. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.) Just please don't forget that you turned it on, because it's basically signing up to see the worst that the internet has to offer, and sometimes people forget that they turned it on and then email us complaining about what they see on HN.

I have the same question

Well that explains why all those links I posted to maximizedlivingdrlabrecque.com never got any traction…

I can't believe you all fell for the whataboutism.

Why not publish the list? Users would know what not to submit in that case. Except maybe you’re worried about the list being heavily curated a certain way…

> Why not publish the list? Users would know what not to submit in that case. Except maybe you’re worried about the list being heavily curated a certain way…

The "certain way" is the experience of moderating HN. Publishing the list would help spammers know how to better circumvent it.

That's a lot of domains! Did you source that from some other list, or is that a result of 67k individual entries? Either way, I appreciate it.

Out of curiosity, what's the rationale for blocking archive.is? Legal reasons I assume?

> That's a lot of domains!

Not really. 67k/350m=0.02%

And 0.02% is really a lot.

Is it?

0.02% of a big number ... is still a big number

0.02% of 10,000 is 2 - pretty small

0.02% of 1,000,000,000 is 200,000 ... kinda big :)

In my opinion, absolute value is not important here, what matters is the fraction. I consider 0.02% to be large by itself for the given context.

What would be small?

This is subjective, but for me here a small fraction would be a few orders of magnitude less than that - few ten-millionths or less.

Exactly, it is subjective, 0.02% is small in my opinion. Yet I'm getting downvoted and told that isn't small. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What's important here is the negative impact of the blacklist on communication. Probably some downvoters mean that the blacklist is big enough that the impact is important, and disagree with your supposed implication that it isn't.

Agreed, you're probably right about that.

It's unavailable a lot ("Tell HN: Archive.* Is Unavailable" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35749833 "Ask HN: Archive.is Captcha Problems Lately?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37077049) so discussions tend to end up being about archive.is instead of the content.

It's not sourced from any other list, it's just what mod actions and software filters have accumulated over the years.

Re archive.is - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130177

Maybe "major media" should include tech media like The Register, Ars Technica, Tech Dirt, etc.. Unlike with media like the NYT, Bloomberg or Reuters, I've never seen a story for which these sites were the best source and much of what they publish is blogspam summarizing stories that have already been posted on HN, usually with a votebait title.

This is mad take. Also, putting junk that nyt writes together with Reuters is just wrong.

Yes, those sites are all downweighted. Whether they count as "major media" or not, they're classified the same way by HN's software, for more or less the same reason: they produce a lot of derivative and/or sensational and/or otherwise not-great-for-HN content, and they also produce substantive articles that are good for HN.

Do you have get-out-of-jail or N-strikes-and-you're-out policies? What if someone's legitimate website gets caught in this? I've also long wondered about user specific shadow bans. Can you please shed light on this?

There's no automatic unban. That would require writing code that knows how to tell a good (for HN) site apart from a bad one, and if we could write such code, we wouldn't need to keep a list of banned sites in the first place. However, we're always happy to unban a site when we notice that it's actually fine for HN, or when someone points this out to us.

Re shadowbanning (i.e. banning a user without telling them), see the past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and let me know if you still have questions. The short version is that when an account has an established history, we tell them we're banning them and why. We only shadowban when it's a spammer or a new account that we have reason to guess is a serial abuser.

You forgot to mention that you are also shadowbanning the ability of users to upvote or downvote things when you dislike their upvotes or downvotes—instances that you perceive as not contributing to the discussion or that are escalating the conversation.

I didn't forget to mention that - it's simply not what the word shadowban means, as I've always understood and used it.

This is a big problem with trying to explain these things - people mean very different things by the same words, and it leads to misunderstanding.

Which other word do you think would be suitable here? In my view, 'shadowban' aligns with the definition in this context, as you aren't notifying people about it (hence 'shadow') and their actions of upvoting or downvoting have no impact (so same as shadowbanning comments or submissions etc).

I use the term "shadow moderation".

I would call it either a penalty or a loss of voting privileges, depending on the specific case. It's not a ban because the account is not excluded from participating in other ways. In the same way, downweighted or penalized sites aren't the same as banned sites.

Well, it seems wikipedia has different definition than yours, it matches to what I wrote before.

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

> Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.

This part matches shadow banning voting and is basically the same what I wrote in my previous comment just using different words:

> partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user

And this part, which contradicts what you wrote in your last comment:

> More recently, the term has come to apply to alternative measures, particularly visibility measures like delisting and downranking.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Is it also true that users with certain karma count or special permissions have more significant - and potentially lasting - downvoting weight that impacts to the downvoted party's long term reputation?

I'm afraid I don't understand your question but here are the basics: HN has downvotes (on comments, not submissions). The ability to downvote requires > 500 karma. When a comment gets downvoted, both its point score and the commenter's karma go down (in most cases - it's more complicated than that but this is the principle). Does that help?

I'm interpreting your question as "are there privileged HN members with supervotes", excluding moderators, and who can single-handedly kill submissions or comments.

So far as I'm aware, no, and there are comments from dang and pg going back through the site history which argue strongly against distinguishing groups of profiles in any way.

The one possible exception is that YC founder's handles appear orange to one another at one point in time (pg discusses this in January 2013: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5025168>). The feature was disabled for performance reasons.

Dang mentions the feature still being active as of a year ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31727636>

I seem to recall a pg or dang discussion where showing this publicly created a social tension on the site, as in, one set of people distinguished from another.

dang discusses the (general lack of) secret superpowers here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767204>, which reiterates what's in the FAQ:

HN gives three features to YC: job ads (see above) and startup launches get placed on the front page, and YC founder names are displayed to other YC alumni in orange.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

Top-100 karma lands you on the leaderboard: <https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>. That's currently 41,815+ karma. There are also no special privileges here other than occasionally being contacted by someone. (I've had inquiries about dealing with the head-trip of being on the leaderboard, and a couple of requests to boost submissions, which I forward to the moderation team).

Thank you, dredmorbius, for this very helpful response. dang has mentioned a procedure or system that involves making guesses for the purpose of shadowbanning. I wonder if downvotes (edit: or post flags) from special users like the ones you mention are used as strong signals in that guess-making?

I don't know about that, but emails to mods count a fair bit.

(I'll occasionally note an egregiously-behaving account that doesn't seem to have been already banned.)

So, is there an algorithm to be features in the front page? —other than upvotes. If a site can be banned, can another one be promoted?

I could be wrong, but I was always under the impression that companies that are in ycombinator get an inital boast in the jobs posts but also quickly fall off as such links don't allow comments.

Sorry, but I don't understand your question.

Understandable, but I think there should be some discriminating system for another class of sites, the "you can submit but not discuss" ones.

For example, a recent submission (of mine):

"Luis Buñuel: The Master of Film Surrealism"

it had no discussion space because (I guess) it comes from fairobserver.com . Now, I understand that fairobserver.com may had been an hive of dubious publishing historically, but it makes little sense we cannot discuss Buñuel...

Maybe a rough discriminator (function approximator, Bayesian etc.) could try and decide (based at least on the title) whether a submission from "weak editorial board" sites seems to be material to allow posts or not.

Oh I agree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36924205 was a fine submission. Can you please email hn@ycombinator.com so I can send you a repost invite for it?

That domain is a borderline case. Sometimes the leopard really changes its spots, i.e. a site goes from offtopic or spam to one that at least occasionally produces good-for-HN articles. In such cases we simply unban it. Other times, the general content is still so bad for HN that we have to rely on users to vouch for the occasional good submission, or to email us and get us to restore it. I can't quite tell where fairobserver.com is on this spectrum because the most recent submission (yours) is good, the previous one (from 7 months ago) is borderline, and before that it was definitely not good. But I've unbanned it now and moved it into the downweighted category, i.e. one notch less penalized.

I have just spent a little time checking the Fair Observer, most recent articles.

I would say that it contains chiefly a political part and a cultural part. Some of the pieces in the political part can be apparently well done, informative and interesting, while some others are determined in just blurting out partisan views - arguments not included.

Incidentally: such "polarized literature" seems abundant in today's "globalized" world (where, owing to "strong differences", the sieve of acceptability can have very large gaps). It is also occasionally found here in posts on HN (one of the latest instances just a few browsed pages ago): the occasional post that just states "A is B" with no justification, no foundation for the statement, without realizing that were we interested in personal opinions there are ten billion sources available. And if we had to check them, unranked in filing, an image like Borges' La Biblioteca de Babel could appear: any opinion could be found in some point of the library.

Yes, I have (now) noticed a few contributors (some very prolific) in the Fair Observer are substantially propaganda writers.

But the cultural part, https://www.fairobserver.com/category/culture/ , seems to more consistently contain quality material, with some articles potentially especially interesting. In this area, I have probably seen more bias on some mainstream news outlets.

I think that revolution that is showing valid for journalism today includes this one magazine: the model of The Economist, of having a strong prestigious and selective editorial board (hence its traditional anonymity of the contributors), is now the exception, so you do not read the Magazine but the Journalist. The Magazine will today often publish articles from just anyone; the Reader has today the burden to select the Journalists and follow them.

I will write you in a few hours for the repost, thank you.

Incidentally: I just saw a new piece, on a publication that at least in its UK version (which the USA version partially embeds) offers, in spite of frequent expression of biased views, a few remarkable articles. (Some say, "at least they are on average excellently written".)

It was an article about Eileen O’Shaughnessy - George Orwell's wife (I suppose this could raise interest, possibly also yours).

I have seen in that text unneeded references to Orwell's most private matters - as if spying in Mr. Blair's rooms.

And this should tell us how hints ("Well, it was published there"), while valuable to have at least some tentative initial ranking, are unfortunately not useful for reliable discrimination.

pg posted an early version of the list back in March 2009 when it include only 2096 sites:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910>

That grew fairly rapidly, it was at 38,719 by 30 Dec 2012:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4984095> (a random 50 are listed).

I suspect that overwhelmingly the list continues to reflect the characteristics of its early incarnations.

hosts file aggregator last updated: August 17 2023 : https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

  current 'unique porn domains' = 53,644

  current adware, malware, tracking, etc. = 210,425 unique domains

The difference is that HN is explicitly heavily moderated while Twitter pretends to be an equitable free speech platform.

Unless you disagree with Elon

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/15/elon-musk-once-again-tri...

Good.

Hacker News isn't an open-ended political site for people to post weird propaganda.

How's archive.is "weird propaganda"?

Did you read the rest of your own post?

It isn't banned in comments - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., etc.

We probably banned it for submissions because we want original sources at the top level.

And how was the decision made to ban Federalist, but not say Guardian or The Daily Beast? Do you have any process in place to ensure that your political biases don't influence the list, or you don't care about that?

I'm guessing it's reactive, and Federalist links tended to be garbage often enough to convince someone they should hit the ban button, whereas the others didn't rise up with trash often enough to matter?

Why do you assume the Federalist is blocked because of its political leanings?

We don't have "processes" at HN. The idea makes my skin crawl.

Plenty of both left- and right-wing sites are banned and/or downweighted on HN. When a site is primarily about political battle, we either ban it or downweight it. Which of the two we choose depends on how likely the site is to produce the occasional interesting article (in HN's sense of the word "interesting"). That's why The Federalist and World Workers Daily (or whatever it's called) are banned, while National Review and Jacobin are merely downweighted. Both the Guardian and Daily Beast are downweighted, btw, as are most major media sites.

If you or anyone thinks that HN moderation is unfairly ideologically biased, I'm open to the critique, but you guys need to first look at the site as it actually is, and not just look at your own pre-existing perceptions. Every data point becomes a Convincing Proof when you do the latter.

People think that when their team gets moderated, the mods are OMG obviously on the other side. The Other Side feels exactly the same way. This "they're against me" perception is the most reliable phenomenon I've observed on HN. Leftists feel it, rightists feel it, Go programmers feel it, even Rust programmers feel it. Literally the very-most-popular topic on HN at any moment is perceived by someone as Viciously Suppressed because of this perception. Stop and think about that—it's kind of amazing. Someone should write a PhD thesis.

>If you or anyone thinks that HN moderation is unfairly ideologically biased, I'm open to the critique, but you guys need to first look at the site as it actually is, and not just look at your own pre-existing perceptions.

Since when has moderation actions and relevant data been made available to the lay public here? We cannot look at the site as it actually is. We either have to trust you or pound sand.

>Stop and think about that—it's kind of amazing. Someone should write a PhD thesis about it.

Just because (you think) everyone feels persecuted doesn't mean you're doing a good job keeping things level. It's a common joke to make but it's just a joke. Similarly, if both a rampant nazi, and a fierce tankie hate you, that doesn't make you a bastion of democracy. "Fairness" doesn't mean pissing off everyone equally, and that is neither a necessary or sufficient condition.

These are just minor notes, don't take them too seriously

Re your first paragraph: there's more than enough information in the public data. Usually it only takes a little time with HN Search to find information that clarifies such questions.

We don't publish a moderation log for reasons I've explained over the years- if you or anyone wants to know more, see the past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and let me know if you still have questions.

Not publishing a mod log doesn't mean that we don't want to be transparent, it means that there's a tradeoff between transparency and other concerns. Our resolution of the tradeoff is to answer questions when we get asked. That's not absolute transparency but it's not nothing. Sometimes people say "well but why should we trust that", but they would say that about a moderation log as well.

Re your second paragraph: I agree! and I don't think I've claimed otherwise. In fact, the lazy centrist argument is a pet peeve (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

It's true that the way I post about these things ("both sides hate us") gets mistaken for the obvious bad argument ("therefore we must be in the happy middle", or as Scott Thompson put it years ago, "we're the porridge that Goldilocks ate!"), but that's because the actual argument is harder to lay out and I'm not sure that anybody cares.

> [/]even[/] Rust programmers feel it

> Someone should write a PhD thesis about it

In a perspective it could be related to Multi-Agent Systems (maybe with reference also to Minsky and H. Simon), as a consequence of the narrow view of the single agent, and/or an intrinsic fault of resource optimization.

> you guys need to first look at the site as it actually is, and not just look at your own pre-existing perceptions.

How can one see the site "as it actually is" when the decisions are kept secret from submitters?

> People think that when their team gets moderated, the mods are OMG obviously on the other side. The Other Side feels exactly the same way.

This will always be a thing. But it's also true that society is more divided now than it was 20 years ago. We find ourselves unable to communicate across ideological divides and we resort to shouting or in some cases violence. Some effort must be made to improve communication, and transparency for content authors is a minimal step towards that.

Would you be open to publishing the down-weighting values if they're based on politics not spam?

This is the murkiest part to me since it's not just a binary flag.

It's really not that interesting and I don't remember exactly. It's just a penalty that means the post has to get moderately more upvotes (maybe 30%? I'm not sure because that code is a bit rube-goldbergery) to rise to the same level vis-a-vis an unpenalized site.

For sites in this category (i.e. not banned, but downweighted) we don't distinguish between political sites, major media sites, sensational bloggy sites and so on. They're all in the same bucket.

What do you mean, "even" Rust programmers feel it? Rust programmers feel it the most. This site is hopelessly biased against Go programmers and towards Rust programmers!

The important thing is to read it to the tune/voice of Peter Tosh doing this bit in Legalize it -

Doctors smoke it

Nurses smoke it

Judges smoke it

Even lawyer too

> We probably banned it for submissions because we want original sources at the top level.

Then why web.archive.org isn't also banned? [1] And what about things which aren't available from the original source anymore?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130420

> Then why web.archive.org isn't also banned?

Because web.archive.org is generally used for...

... things which aren't available from the original source anymore.

While archive.is is generally used to bypass paywalls. These 2 websites have 2 very distinct missions and use-cases.

Whilst I agree with your characterisation as regards usage on HN, I will note that Archive Today actually is a quite useful archival tool, and often works on sites which the Internet Archive behaves poorly on.

I'd run across an instance of this when the Diaspora* pod I was on (the original public node, as it happens) ceased operations. I found myself wanting to archive my own posts, and was caught in something of a dilemma:

- The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has a highly-scriptable method for submitting sites, in the form of a URL (see below). Once you have a list of pages you want to archive, you can chunk through those using your scripting tool of choice (for me, bash, and curl or wget typically). But it doesn't capture the comments on Diaspora* discussions.... E.g., <https://web.archive.org/web/20220111031247/https://joindiasp...>

- Archive.Today does not have a mass-submission tool, and somewhat aggressively imposes CAPTCHAs at times. So the remaining option is manual submissions, though those can be run off a pre-generated list of URLs which somewhat streamlines the process. And it does capture the comments. E.g., <https://archive.is/9t61g>

So, if you are looking to archive material, Archive Today is useful, if somewhat tedious at bulk.

(Which is probably why the Internet Archive is the far more comprehensive Web archive.)

That's a good question. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and dredmorbius's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37138346 re archive.org.

As for "why archive.org and not archive.is" - that's a bit of a borderline call, but gouggoug pointed out some of it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130890. The set of articles which (a) are no longer on the web, (b) are not on archive.org, but (c) are on archive.is, isn't that big. Paywall workarounds are a different thing, because the original URLs are still on the web (albeit paywalled). For those, we want the original URL at the top level, because it's important for the domain to appear beside the title.

You're apparently in the middle of editing this as I'm replying, but I suspect I'm close to the mark here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37138346>

Yup!

The Internet Archive is permitted when the original site or content is unavailable.

Otherwise, HN's rule is to "submit the original source": <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

I suppose that might be clarified as "most original or canonical", but Because Reasons HN's guidelines are written loosely and interpreted according to HN's Prime Directive: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508153>.

Try submitting a URL from the following domains, and it will be automatically flagged (but you can't see its flagged unless you log out): - archive.is

I can assure you that is Not the case with HN: on posting archive.is URL's, proof?

Look at my comment postings : https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=archo

Is it possible you have been shadow-banned for poor compliance to the [1]Guidelines & [2]FAQ's?

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

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

> I can assure you that is Not the case with HN: on posting archive.is URL's, proof?

It's not banned in comments, but it is banned in submissions. @dang (HN's moderator) confirms that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130177

Covered in the Guidelines;

>Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

And explained on numerous occasions by dang.

The assertion is about submissions, not comments.

I must admit that I've never really delved into the rules on what/how to post on HN.

For example, I've linked to my work, but it never occurred to me to use "Show HN".

Maybe this is no big deal? Or perhaps for new signups, it would be good to “soft force” them to read the FAQ?

Isn't blocking Stacker.news a petty move?

It's basically HN, but you can earn small tips for submissions and comments.

It could be because they saw they were getting low quality links from there. In any case, since HN prefers original sources, it’s less likely that a news aggregator would be a good source (the occasional Reddit comment notwithstanding)

Unless the link is to a "show SN" article, it is indeed simply an aggregator, and not a link to the source.

What I mean to say is: I do see the logic of downgrading links to SN, because it is not usually an original source.

> It's basically HN, but you can earn small tips for submissions and comments.

Guesses it's crypto bullshit

goes to website

Yep, exactly as expected. Karma alone can mess with incentives, I cannot imagine that adding monetary incentive does anything but make it worse. Also crypto has the reverse-midas-touch from everything I've experienced first-hand or read so adding that into the mix is just another black mark.

Yeah. HN bans your favorite white supremacist blogs. I don’t see a problem with that.

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things." -- @dril

There are other domains that, while not algorighmically banned, have an army of obsessive people who will flag any story from them if they see it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com