"About 67k” sites are banned from submission on HN, the list is kept secret
news.ycombinator.com
news.ycombinator.com
I don’t know how many times I have to beat this drum but good communities that people want to spend time in are heavily moderated.
Free speech bros (who don’t actually really believe in it) have yet to create an attractive platform that doesn’t have moderation.
Moderation is key and what some people consider “heavy handed moderation” makes for a nice place to hang out. Without it HN would languish as people with interesting things to add are driven off by the people who think they have a right to say whatever they want anywhere they want to say it.
For example, banning someone only for not liking their views is obviously legal and permitted almost everywhere, but a site/forum doing that doesn't adhere to the principles of free speech then. Which they don't necessarily have to do, but that's what free speech advocates are fighting for - for more places to adopt the conduct of not doing that.
That's a nice phrasing but it doesn't hold up to what I've seen at all. Everyone has a different definition of what is "necessary" and anyone that gets (shadow-)banned is going to scream "Censorship!". I've moderated communities and watched this happen enough times to know.
There simply is no objective way to handle it, it's always going to subjective and there will always be false positives. The alternative is a hellscape.
HN has rules it adheres to but if someone finds a loophole or continues to walk "right up to the line" they probably aren't going to be around for long. I tried moderating a community once completely to the "letter of the law" and it turned out horribly. People abused that and drove off people who were kind and had interesting things to contribute. What was left was a few people who stuck it out and a bunch of trolls who knew they could get away with it.
When defining a rule based system, remember the problem space is enormous, potentially even unbounded. As your number of rules grow the number of conflicting rules will increase.
Then there are some things like politics that low temperature conversations are near impossible in already...
In addition, not every discussion/content belongs everywhere. I've seen "well if people upvote it then they like it and it should stay" argument made before and I've also seen it fail. Memes, jokes, or the more extreme example, porn, might get upvotes but that doesn't mean it belongs in a certain community. That's not to say any of those things are bad or don't have a place but not every place needs to cater to or allow them.
Some people want spaces to hang out that don't discuss politics and/or want to stay laser-focused on a certain topic and that's ok but some people see that and scream "censorship!". What it really comes down to is that person wants to say whatever _they_ want to say, but they certainly don't want a real "free speech zone" because that would drive them away too in the end. No, they want an exception to the rule for themselves and when they don't get it they cry foul.
Why is it automatically impossible for a set of moderation rules to be as rigorous and logically correct?
Unless you're planning to demand your users only use one particular language only a well defined subset of it.
Using a theory as a comparison is generally a pretty poor example as we have no universal theory that defines everything, instead they are targeted at only a small slice of 'something'. Language has a larger scope than that.
Can you demonstrate why this is the case?
Bad = Bad
Bad = Good
There you go, language is logically inconsistent.
I think this kind of reads like a rant, so I apologise for the wording and the formatting. My thoughts are not entirely clear and structured on the topic so I can't do any better right now.
HN is not, and they can certainly ban what they want.
That is what I kept reading from "free speech advocates", especially regarding Twitter etc. - those same people are now largely either silent or actively cheering on the same happening in regards to the other side right now. This is the fatal flaw with this definition: "not applying more censorship than what is necessary and not doing it arbitrarily" does not mean the same thing to all people, and it seems that the counter-mainstream doesn't give the mainstream more leeway. So is there some way this could be done without the pendulum just swinging fully the opposite way?
Hard disagree on the arbitrary part. What's considered "intellectual" or "curious conversation" depends entirely on dang's personal preference.
For example every time a Steve Jobs thread is posted, there inevitably are two major themes:
1. People fawning over how great a leader Steve allegedly was, despite his flaws
2. People going on about how Steve was a massive douchebag, in spite of his success with Apple
Neither of those topics are interesting, novel, or intellectually gratifying but only #2 is reliably censored by dang. CEO worship is on-topic here but criticism of those CEOs is apparently "not interesting".
If you've ever ran a site of any size you will eventually find out there are some discussions that lead to a plethora of moderative actions because the user base (or trolls in it) cannot behave and disrupt the community. And while this may be unfair to you, a completely reasonable person capable of handling polite online discussion, the unreasonable discussions are unfair to those who do not want a flame war ever 3 post, and unfair to the administrative burden the moderators must shoulder.
How are you determining dang is taking action rather than user downvotes and flags? Can you provide some examples?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles...
Noam Chomsky denying the Bosnian Genocide (among many) despite being extremely respected in academia.
It always comes back to trust and experience.
A good witch hunt will at least point out a plausible witch.
I agree, it can't be clear unless you know what's on the list. More transparency is better than less, right? We're all adults here.
I guess we'll never know, right?
well, that is under dispute. if we were, then we would not have to deal with spam.
All they have to do is to see if their posts are showing up without login (they won't).
Maybe they detect that the person is visiting from the same set of IPs and show the post even while logged out. (I strongly suspect that similar measures are in place to prevent bigco employees from mass upvoting their latest press release.)
Maybe they use browser fingerprinting somehow.
Ultimately it doesn't matter - dang et al. are going to do what seems to work for them to reduce their own workload and keep this place working as they want it to. If you don't like it there are many unmoderated forums to participate in.
Classic reddit deflection whenever moderation is questioned. I'd rather at least try to start a dialouge before moving camp yet again. That shouldn't be my first instinct whenever some ruling I disagree with arises.
Good systems are designed to work by taking into account human weaknesses. The current HN system doesn't do this.
What about the experience of using this site would be improved by that transparency? Compare those pros to the known cons and make a case.
This argument doesn't make sense in this context. Publicly providing which domains are blocked wouldn't give a bad actor any useful information that they can't already figure out by trying to submit their links.
The area where this kind of argument makes a little sense is in terms of complicated algorithms. For instance, there's an argument for not disclosing the exact formula that Google uses to rank sites because everybody will try and game that specific system and then the algorithm because less useful.
But simply knowing which sites are blocked doesn't reveal any info that bad actors don't know, and serves the public interest by allowing people to know if censorship or moderation mistakes are happening.
- I'd know what not to post and not waste my time using that source if I want to share content here.
- If it's breaking news I can find an alternative source, and if it was removed than I can argue I used an alternative source because the primary source is banned.
- If a major site is banned, peer review can at least start a dialouge to understand why that site is banned. It may not result in a change but a site that seeks to "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" should also be willing to indulge in the curiosity of how the site is run.
If we stopped doing things in fear of bad actors, the internet would have long shut down.
But forget hot-button politics for a second and lets talk about commerce. Big money makes people do dumb things. YCombinator as we all know dabbles in a lot of big businesses. How do we know that somebody here is not putting their thumb on the scale of discourse and harming their competitors? Transparency here would be great to more fully trust that the businesses that do or don't get attention here aren't getting it through bad practices.
Also, we are talking about spam list here. What would basic tenets of "intellectualism" and "curiosity" have to do with spam?
1) It should go without saying that there is nothing that prevents anybody from falsely labeling a group they don't like as "spam" even if they were not actually spamming.
2) Even if "spam" from a particular organization exists, it doesn't necessarily imply that they were the ones doing the spamming. Even in the pre-AI era it would be pretty trivial for even 1 dedicated person with too much time on their hands to try and create a bunch of fake accounts on a site and spam a particular domain in order to try and get it blocked.
I'm not personally concerned about dang, but if you want a social media platform that has its own judiciary you could try Facebook or Threads.
X is neither attractive nor is it a free-speech platform.
For numerical context, I just looked up a list of current 'unique porn domains' which numbers 53,644.
In addition, from what I understand, they seem to think that democracy is a consequence of "free speech", not the other way around.
If you include spam, well that's not speech, usually not even by humans. Spam is a form of censorship by [D]DoS.
If you include threats, well that's an action, not speech, and it's illegal, because of the action.
Here are some of the limits of free speech in the US:
> Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also an exception to free speech.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...
And here some examples from Germany (translated via DeepL):
> the protection of personal honour against insult or defamation, the disclosure of information classified as secret, the limits of morality and the protection of minors, the limits of public safety, unfair competition by discrediting the goods or services of a competitor, the unauthorised disclosure of copyrighted information, racial discrimination
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meinungsfreiheit#Grenzen_(Schr...
An XXX bro is someone who aggressively promotes XXX as a common good while actually motivated by promotion of a narrow agenda.
Often associated with individuals that know next to nothing about XXX
Someone who believes that because we can't tell some kinds of good speech from some kinds of bad speech, we should give up trying.
It makes about as much sense as eating a moldy blue cheese once, enjoying it[1], and deciding that from now on, you won't turn your nose at eating whatever putrescent, rotting garbage is put in front of you, regardless of how sick it makes you.
----
Less charitably?
Someone who can very much tell the difference between good and bad speech, but is cynically promoting bad speech, for selfish reasons.
[1] Despite a general understanding that moldy food is not suitable for eating.
(The term is newer than my formative experiences, but it's the best concise explanation of the dynamic I know.)
for his dedication and the huge body of work, he exhibits in keeping HN:
the valuable resource, that I have the privilege to be able to participate in.
I also up vote some of his posts when I see his excellent work,
whilst Dan certainly does not require Kama points, I feel that it can not hurt to remember to add to his total Kama.
The exact mechanisms by which this moderation is accomplished need not be public, that's the balance between the secret part versus the open part.
Of course HN is a target for spam.
It’s expected that the list isn’t public and 'dang has explained why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130234
Nothing surprising here really.
It’s way too easy to sign up and submit for spam to not be an issue. Of course there is a blacklist of some sort.
Instead it's "How I launched a 21x RoR Environmentally Friendly SaaS using only lye and pig fat"
Spam is annoying but it is like piracy: short of moderating every single piece of user submitted content, it is a game of cat and mouse, and the mouse has infinite time and nigh infinite resources. I don't think sacrificing honesty is a good compromise for this game.
“You can justify requiring real life credentials to ‘combat spam’”
Yes, some would indeed make such an argument. But that’s not what we’re discussing here. We’re talking about a list of banned domains. That’s very far from requiring ID for the members of HN.
If news like this bothers you, well, then stop giving HN your traffic and go use Lemmy instead :)
for a social website where so many users are privacy advocates this is surprising to me
yes you can email dang or whatever but that is like having to phone up to cancel an online subscription, dark pattern friction bs
Having said that I think it would be a much different site if comments could be freely removed. So I’m okay with the friction of having to email a human to get your stuff removed.
I know HN is not Wikipedia, but it is also not like Facebook, in the sense that one can actually learn useful things on HN.
I consider that a pretty important feature for mental health reasons.
I am doing this with ... somewhat increasing frequency.
It's probably possible to use Greasemonkey or similar to provide client-side JS for blocking users, though that would be cumbersome. Some of the alternate HN front-ends may also offer this.
this isn't the breaking point, but this and a lot of other philosophical differences and cultural issues here is putting it close.
I'm just tired of migrating. I especially don't want to think of migrating not even 6 months after I deleted my last Reddit account.
As for my own views, I think it's fine that the list isn't public, it doesn't make much difference either way. I appreciate knowing that there's a list of banned sites.
My attempt at constructive feedback would be to have some place where a transparency report on moderation activity is shared. Not everything needs to be public nor immediately updated, I trust @dang's discretion on deciding what should be shared. But maybe it would be more ideal if there was a single place where you could find out that there is a moderated domain blacklist, rather than finding out through a random comment.
Overall I'm happy with HN's moderation and wouldn't want to impose too much of a burden on the team.
We don't want this sort of meta HN-eating-its-own-tail (I'll use that metaphor instead of the more vulgar one which came to mind first) in general, which is why submissions to news.ycombinator.com itself are banned on HN. This one shouldn't have been vouched for.
It’s annoying when an interesting headline comes up but the URL points to twitter.com, so it’s not worth clicking on to discover whether the site will let me read today.
There’s Nitter but it seems to be a whack-a-mole target that only sometimes works.
We usually ban 800k domains and 220k IPs on average, just to keep a small site tolerable. =)
HN has good moderation unlike a lot of communities, Reddit included. The community has changed over the years, but it's still more tolerable than most and I'm happy with how it's moderated.
There exists no unmoderated (or barely moderated) community on the web of similar size to hacker news on which would want to spend significant time. There are no working alternatives, therefore the hypothetical possibility of a BDFL turning bad is irrelevant to my decision making.
And of course never had to moderate/care for abuse for anything more than a personal blog (and I mean, even then)
Yes I'm sure HN is worse off for not allowing half-brained spam sites or some random dude's opinion piece with 3 readers that permanently live in a basement or something
Flagged because this is just going to devolve into arguing. I doubt there's going to be much insightful conversation happening in this thread.
HN works because of the good decisions made. I wish people would stop try to destroy that.
I don't see any arguing going on here, just a healthy debate about free speech balancing while still deploying spam blocking techniques.
This is a political and a technical issue. It's a fascinating problem with no perfect solution (yet?)
I do see that other(s) have flagged it though.
>HN works because of the good decisions made.
from who's perspective?
For one, I wonder if there are certain news sites that are legit but ideals don't align.
Or are they ALL spam sites? Who knows, we can't inspect it.
Fight bad speech with more speech. Spam is the exception, but are they all just spam sites?
Please elaborate, how would they game the list?
They can already see if a submission is throttled/flagged/etc.
the only thing it really does is prevent others from seeing what's being censored.
or they may think the content itself is the problem and spend resources trying to tweak it.
I think an analogous situation would be saying if the username/email is valid when there is a failed logged in attempt. Its a very minor thing but why give someone who is trying to abuse the system any help?
A spam site knows it's a spam site. It's already tweaking domains and thats why the list is so big. It's relatively easy to buy new domains.
For the remaining 5-10% of legitimate sites I imagine HN isn't enough of a draw to care about tweaking content. They will save that level of curation for the Twitters, Facebooks, and maybe reddits in some cases.
>I think an analogous situation would be saying if the username/email is valid when there is a failed logged in attempt. Its a very minor thing but why give someone who is trying to abuse the system any help?
It does bring up the honest question of "how much do you inconvinence honest users in order to punish dishonest users"? And honestly it's a bit tiring to keep being assumed that I'm a dishonest user. If you trust me so little as to give an IQ test just to let me post a link (reducto ad absurdum), why would I bother as an honest user? Meanwhile the dishonest users will simply work around that or hire some cheap labor.
Domain ownership and the domain market, and wondering how much someone paid for a domain, is a topic that has been done over and over again here and the ownership of hackernews.com is unlikely to generate a worthwhile for the community at large insight, and someone could use a text post for that.
There is NO 'Absolute Free Speech'
Yeah, of course HN bans a ton of sites. I'm glad they do and I trust the mods to maintain that list correctly. If I feel they are banning sites unnecessarily I'll leave but so far I see no evidence of it.
The former does do this, and has for a very long time. The mods of each subreddit can ban whatever domain they want.
I agree with the stance that this is necessary though, to filter out spam and low effort/misinfo/blatantly scumbag sites from cluttering the front page.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Calling them “insightful” does not jive with what I’ve seen at all. It’s often ranting or very clear rule violations.
- New accounts (or long-dormant accounts that suddenly post). I presume there's some kind of filter they're tripping. I try to "vouch" these every time I see them, if they're contributing.
- Good comment, but when I click into their history, they have enough rightfully-flagged-to-dead comments, that it makes sense.
Very occasionally (like <1 in 1000) I'll come across a comment that is dead, and their history makes it look like they've been making good comments without realizing they're dead. I also click vouch on these.
(I suppose this one might be [dead] initially too?)
It's also ironic how other circles of the internet seem to yearn for "original" contnent, but moderation only allows content from the typical same 10 websites.
Most often it's new accounts ("greens") which have tripped an automated filter.
Many times though the comments are from banned sockpuppet profiles (repeat registrations by the same person or organisation), according to moderator responses.
(Tracking user history back to a moderator admonishment is ... difficult. In particular, it's not possible to search for comments in response to a specific user. If I could search for "by:dang in-reponse-to:banned_profile" that'd be easier. I suspect mods have better tools.)