A list of Hacker News's undocumented features and behaviors
github.com
github.com
If DMs about web site bug > X then push fix lol
[1]: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/pull/6...
I really am wondering how he can read and react to so many comments quickly.
Dang, care to elaborate? Do you see a flat list of new comments, review them quickly? Do you use a moderation tool that scans the mood / tone / aggresiveness of a post? How do you do the screening and the replies? Manually?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779139
(Spoiler alert: it’s all Dan G.)
People can still see with Show Dead turned on, over the many years have never seen anything there that wasn't either inflammatory, spammy or otherwise very low quality.
HN is the only site where I even comment publicly. No warning restrictions where you don't even know if you are restricted == shadow moderarion. Probably best I simply take a hint though, i should spend my time on more productive things anyways. Although, I really do enjoy healthy discourse with people who know the subjects in question far more than I do.
HN should either have different rules for non-technical threads or avoid political/sensitive topics altogether imho.
Moderation isn't easy, and I'm only being so critical because I am personally affected. Chances are this comment I spent time composing won't go through and I would have to abandon it because of the restrictions. An unfortunate side effect of it all is others like you can't see I am restricted. Or you would reply to me and I can't reply back because of those same restrictions.
I hope we all can take a step back (especially myself) and and forge a new path where we trest others as we would like to be treated (can't ask for more).
Edit, to add: I also say ridiculous things when sober, on occasion. I didn’t mean to imply that the only time my mighty brain falters is when I’m inebriated.
My honest opinion: I have geopolitical views that tend to upset ideological people which includes...coughpowerfulcough folks and got stuck with reputation accordingly (whatever, no complaints). I normally avoid politics because in the US at least, I am too contrarian and "centrist", but on HN people do engage and correct me or educate me when I am incorrect. At least it used to be so, times are achanging. But tech people keep being political so it's hard to avoid. One particular thread about signal or something, I made a point about Silicon Valley tech types presuming things and interfering with politics in other countries (something about signal or other apps enabling one side of politics to win over the other I think), I think that comment was the last straw before the restrictions (can't be sure though, just guessing), this must have been in 2022. But as the saying goes "if a cop tails a car for 500 miles, that car is getting a ticket!", I am sure I have done plenty more that violate the rules, my only complaint is on how my "punishment" was in secret with no opportunity to self-correct. Maybe like reddit, HN is best lurked?
I hope to see better times on HN and make dang's job easier on my part at least. happy 2024!
There is definitely messed-up biased moderating on HN. That you don’t personally suffer it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
just because you link to a single comment doesn't mean it was the sole cause of your throttling.
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I commented in response because a comment downstream from what you linked felt much more caustic and may have been a bigger suspect than the first one. But by the nature of threaded comments, you will see less participation in a deeper comment. And I'm sure HN accounts for that. (-10 on a top level comment that was the first comment on the page may not be as bad as -1 on a deep comment).
If the repo is correct, these features are made to throttle comments that can cause flame wars. So, food for thought. A lot of times it's less about what you say and how you say it.
> > don't cross-examine
Something about a mirror. Or: do you think you deserve aggressive throttling now?
Honestly, some of my comments might jive less with HN’s echo chamber, but that doesn’t mean they’re not based in fact, and it doesn’t make them inciting.
Edit: I’m trying to practice taking complaints as actionable feedback, so
> So, food for thought. A lot of times it's less about what you say and how you say it.
Thanks for this. I’ll keep it it in mind!
One more guideline to keep in mind:
>Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
going around calling the community you comment in an echo chamber in order to justify your views never changed anyone's minds. And insulting others as a group nor individual doesn't make your factual statements stronger to begin with. It's the same useless fluff you complain about. If your audience truly doesn't appreciate your views, you should seek one that does.
But yes, we're doing the very thing the rules were meant to prevent, my apologies.
Edit: it looks like that rate limit was put on your account several years ago. I didn't look up what was going on at the time, but I've taken it off now.
(In the future, I think we'll probably make penalties like this expire after a while - the problem is it's not so easy to tell which accounts are still breaking the site guidelines vs. which ones are fine, short of manual review, and we don't have much capacity for more manual review. In the meantime, anyone is welcome to ask what's going on with their account and we'll always take a look and answer; and when it seems safe to remove a penalty like this, we always do.)
If I had access to a better moderated community not being actively attacked by the far right, I'd use it. But I'm not aware of any[1].
[0] Short for "Free Republic" - a conservative political forum that would ballot stuff online polls for the sake of pushing their political agenda.
[1] Note that I stopped posting to Reddit after /u/Spez decided to powertrip to kill a mod protest over third-party API clients.
With less aluminium foil: HN has an crude anti-flamewar system that roughly triggers when the ratio comments/upvotes is greater than 1, and the post is quickly deranked.
Often this means it is a controversial post, but I've seen it happen with two or three posts/Ask HN of mine where a vibrant discussion causes them to disappear from the frontpage after 1 hour because commenters were too active and triggered the anti-flamewar system, which is quite disappointing.
Please, not everything on the Internet revolves around your political issues. But if it were the case of a thread linked elsewhere and flooded, this system would trigger as well.
I do personally find HN quite uncomfortable when discussion strays into social issues. I obviously don't feel that unwelcome here as I've been here since 2009. But there is a lot of bottled-up hostility to certain groups of people that can be released when the discussion takes a certain turn. And my subjective perception is that this has got much worse over the past decade.
Extremist comments usually get flagged eventually, but lots of people have already read them by the time that happens, and you can post outrageous things here without actually getting your account banned. It's galling to be a member of group X, see an unambiguously hateful comment about group X, and then see this same account continuing to post for years afterwards.
With tech being a space that attracts everything from VC/finance/business people (usually a bit righter-wing), academics and journalists (usually more left) and hackers (who knows/free thinkers), I’m fairly surprised at the overall level of cohesion here.
One thing I’m more or less convinced of is that the tech world has changed a lot from the millennial era of “free thinker”ism and Obama-era liberal optimism. We now skew older, more conservative than 2009 (not necessarily right wing, but less “move fast and break things”), and, in some cases, more disillusioned with the trajectory of tech from a cool, nerdy backwater (pre dotcom boom) to a major cultural and economic engine.
As a side note, there are several good articles and documentaries that track cultural trends in HN, 4chan, reddit, and other online spaces in the transition from the wild-west to the walled garden. Will post links if I can dig them up.
You can really see it in any comment section that even tangentially touches upon topics like immigration.
?
> pretending there isn't a large self-labeled intersection in the furry and aspergers communities
Also, we probably shouldn't call it Aspergers, because naming something you are after the person the Nazis hired to decide whether or not you needed to be 'healed' of it[0][1] is kind of... really terrible? Like, I don't know how we let Hans Asperger get away with this shit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Asperger#World_War_II_(19...
Parts of this site were a cesspool during the pandemic. No matter your position on it, discussion was of really low quality. Certain other emotionally charged topics (anything Apple, anything politics related, Elon Musk) also attract really bad discussion.
By and large, humans suck and aren't capable of reasonable debate when emotion runs high, and this place is no exception.
Discussion here is certainly a lot better than many other places on the internet that will just straight up ban you if you post ideas the moderators consider wrongthink. Moderation here has been pretty fair. I don't generally see people getting censored here. Sometimes discussions get out of hand and dang asks people to stop reducing the quality of the site. That's absolutely fine and they're actually quite nice about it.
You can have that opinion, but I'll just point out that there's enough people who feel alienated if straight up racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, islamophobia or endorsement of terrorist organisations are tolerated. Maybe you feel that these people just shouldn't participate on this site, but I'd much rather the bigots didn't participate. Either way, it's a choice.
> Discussion here is certainly a lot better than many other places on the internet [...]
No, I disagree, it's just different. People are biased everywhere, it's just that HN users tend to have different biases than, say, certain subreddits.
Can we stop labeling everyhing you disagree with or anyone who disagrees with your world view as "far right". By doing so, you are perpetuating a false dichotonmy when there is a diverse political spectrum. Also, leftists attack forums as well
This whole thread could be full of people expressing their dissatisfaction with the way HN is being moderated and most would never know. At least everyone is safe from a healthy debate on important subjects like an objective comparison of the US health care system with comparable systems the moderators censored last week.
I have no more intentions of participating in this toxic community. It's pretty evident everyone with a brain left already.
Somehow all the disinformation that gets posted on US economic rivals gets unmoderated, while all the shit that's going on in the US or is committed by it's military (or it's sibling the Israeli military) remain completely undebated. There is literally no forum to discuss the wrongdoings of the US in Iraq that lead to the war in the first place and cost over a million people their lives. Have fun repeating your mistakes over and over and sending your children to die and kill other children. And you morons hate the Chinese and Russians more with every day and for all the propaganda that gets posted on this forum.
I can understand now how the doctors must have felt during corona, with all the idiots telling them corona isn't real or dangerous, because they read a headline on reddit/9gag/HN.
And when you call people morons you won't gain any sympathy. If you get "moderated" for this I'll be glad.
... which, anecdotally, I learned about JUST after getting a comment on there. Imagine my surprise at learning about this (in a manner totally unrelated to the post I wrote that made it to the list), and seeing my own writing as the most recent item on the list.
Truman show vibes for sure.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...
No explanation or information is given - you don't even know until HN seems broken and you go searching. dang mentioned that's something they'd like to impove, but given the slow movement of HN features, I doubt it will.
Note that none of this is meant as a slight on dang - I respect the work he does and really like the site, but it doesn't make it less frustrating. The result will be me rolling a new account (against site guidelines), as I have no other privacy preserving way of handling the issue.
0. https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...
> dang often says that he's concerned about protecting HN as a vessel. But he seems less concerned about the truthfulness of the contents of the vessel. So IMO, HN is less appropriate as a place for reasoned, free discussion, and more appropriate as a place to gauge the opinions of certain demographics.
has HN ever claimed to be a place for "free" discussion? I feel the sentiment of "free speech forums" was cracking at the seams some 18-20 years ago, and compeltely fell apart around 9-10 years ago.
If you want unfiltered opinions, you go to a place with minimal moderation. HN was never that.
It puzzles me when people say such things. We don't have a truth meter [1]; how are we supposed to decide what's true vs. false? By definition, there's zero consensus on any contentious topic. Should we pick one view and impose it? Whose would that be? my own? Even if I thought I knew the truth about everything (and I am very far from feeling that way), I can tell you how well that would go over: everyone would hate it.
There's another level too: are we supposed to ban people for being wrong? Being wrong is part of finding out the truth; of being curious. No one makes it to the truth in a single jump, nor on their own. We need to be allowed to be wrong sometimes.
And another level: HN is about intellectual curiosity and interesting conversation. Interesting conversation is not always a pure sequence of true statements. Curiosity wants to figure out the truth, of course—but optimizing for curiosity [2] is not the same thing as optimizing for truth. The latter would mean excluding speculation, for example. That would be less interesting!
When someone wants the mods to decide what is true and moderate by that, I can't fathom what they mean, unless they just want moderators to support whatever they agree with and ban whatever they disagree with. No one would put it that crudely, but no one has explained what else is being advocated. One needn't consider this for very long at the general level (i.e. the level of the entire community) to realize how it could never work.
The very people making this point about the "contents of the vessel" would be at each other's throats if one asked them to declare what the truth actually is, since the first thing they'd discover is they have wildly differing views of it. That's why this point can only be made, or agreed with, in the abstract. The moment you cross into claiming any specific truth about a contentious topic, others will immediately protest that it is not a truth at all and that the opposite is true.
Figuring out the truth is a social process—it happens by discourse, communication, exchange. This is everyone's job together, not some special power of the admins. The admins' job is to facilitate that process. This does not involve declaring what the truth is and imposing it on those who disagree, any more than it's a referee's job to decide which net the ball or the puck should go into.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I mean, you’ve detached comments from threads for “creating a risk for an inflammatory discussion” (paraphrase), without detaching the opposing view’s comments.
This might come from the good intention of keeping HNs spirit (“protecting the vessel”), but the net effect is still that you are picking sides / who’s voice gets to be heard. Either everyone gets detached or no one does, otherwise you do not get to lay a claim to neutrality.
The same happens with the rate limit crap. I’m pretty certain most people who get hit by it aren’t actually spamming or causing problems, they’re just telling facts or viewpoints that (a subsect of) HN is uneasy with.
I am very aware modding is mostly a thankless job with no reward, so I guess like in open source I don’t really get to complain unless I put up effort or money. So if you feel like ignoring me that would be completely fair.
You should find some examples where the detaching went wrong, in your estimate. Usually things get detached not for creating a risk but actually starting an unrelated flamewar or innocent swerve to a topic not strongly related to the original comment which then consumes the subthread.
If users break the site guidelines, we moderate them regardless of which side they're on, whether the comment is true or false or we agree with it or not.
Likewise as said earlier, I understand you have limited time and will. I understand having only X amount of those to spend on each decision. And with your experience, you probably have developed a good intuition for which comments need to be sussed out to preserve the peace. That’s honestly fine with me, just don’t make claims that a decision like that preserves a balanced view of a discussion. That’s where the rub lies for me.
> If users break the site guidelines
They’re written in such a way that any comment that does not sit well with the larger part of the community (or even just a thread) can be explained to violate the guidelines.
I believe you! but what I'm saying is that this had nothing to do with your particular view or with somehow endorsing the other comment as "true" and yours as "false". It would be interesting to take a look at the specific case if you can dig up the link.
> They’re written in such a way that any comment that does not sit well with the larger part of the community (or even just a thread) can be explained to violate the guidelines.
I'd say that's true up to about 30%. There's still a lot of bedrock there. That's on purpose—we want them to be general enough to apply to lots of situations, but not so vague as to apply arbitrarily to anything.
Regardless, thanks for taking the time to respond repeatedly and clarifying your perspective!
> The result will be me rolling a new account (against site guidelines), as I have no other privacy preserving way of handling the issue.
I intentionally stay anon online - it's how I was raised and how I think everyone should be. All of my various accounts have sprinkles of mistruths - nothing important enough to impact the discussion, but enough to keep it difficult to link them. I doubt dang (with good reason) would accept an email from an obviously burner address - what would be the point?
And "behaving" is the complex part. As I don't know what I was invisibly banhammered for, I'm unsure what needs correcting here.
semi-artbituarily, I'd say 2-3 months worth of distinct days making a comment or post should be enough time.
(And I'm now concerned that this comment will feel like a "me too" :) )
If people submit primarily their own stuff, our software eventually starts classifying the account as "promotional" and starts filtering the posts.
People are totally welcome to submit their own work—that's great—but to use HN as intended, they should do that as part of a diverse set of submissions on unrelated/interesting things. There are too many bloggers/marketers/writers out there that use HN merely as yet-another-channel for the content they're pushing, and that's definitely not in the curious spirit which is supposed to animate HN.
I don't know how many false positives would fans/people with narrow sharing interest make, but slight editing of the guideline might help make them less "false"
For example, if you try to submit a link to a particular Google Books page, say the one I just tried:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Albert_Einstein_Col...
the link will remain intact for a short while before losing its search parameters and turning into a link to the book itself rather than to a page in it.
If a user has 31 Karma, they can also vouch for a [dead] submission/comment. A vouched submission/comment has its rank restored (and potentially improved as the vouch can counteract the effects of flags).
Is this consistent? I recently vouched for something on the New page and it wasn't restored.
One other thing I would like to ask: I currently bookmark about 20 users whose comments I find especially insightful across a wide range of subject matter expertise. Is there another way/better way to do this?
I don't know if it still works, but I used this a few years ago for this exact reason: https://github.com/veggiedefender/hn-friends
EDIT: You can see for yourself how it's ordered here: https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc#L2611-L26...
This is the original code, which survived untouched till at least 2019 or so. I've wondered if they changed it since then.
The key is the (users) function:
https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc#L144-L145
This returns the keys of the profs* hash table (short for "profiles"). At the time, profs was populated each time the server restarts:
https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc#L88-L91
(dir profdir*) essentially returns an `ls` of the directory in which user profiles are stored. (Yes, they are (or were) stored to disk, not a database.) This was one reason it was hard to add a feature to rename users, which Dan somehow figured out.
So it takes the `ls` of that directory, giving a list in mostly random order, and loads them one by one, putting them into a hash table, whose iteration order is also random.
In modern times, profs* is populated in a lazy fashion whenever users post after a server reboot.
Arc uses "maptable" to iterate over a hash table, which under the hood used hash-table-for-each: https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/ac.scm#L1082
Nowadays in Racket, it probably uses hash-for-each: https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/hashtables.html#%28de...
It does have a "try-order?" option, which gives a deterministic ordering if set. But whenever I set it, I sometimes get strange errors, at least on MacOS. Since it's disabled by default, I doubt they set it. Even if they did, it would be ordered alphabetically, which means your topcolor wouldn't be anywhere close to the top unless someone else whose name starts with "a" also set it.
I only know all this because I've spent five years updating Arc for the modern era over at https://github.com/shawwn/sparc
Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38586832
I’m just guilty without knowing the crime.
I fired off an email to Scott, frantically telling him "I think I took down HN. If you’re scrambling to figure out what’s wrong, it’s because so-and-so story is on the front page, and you can fix it by booting it off." A minute or two later the site came back to life, so I emailed saying "oh, never mind. I guess it was something else." And to my surprise he emailed back saying you were exactly right, thanks.
Presumably they either added caching, prevented it from going to the front page, froze the list for posterity, or it’s still a ticking time bomb that can take down HN again if you happen to submit it. Either way, maybe the explanation of your missing topcolor is there somewhere.
And yes my choice is there (#ffaa33)
Granted not exactly undocumented, as it is linked on the /submit page. But I think worth including, as it is not in the Guidelines or FAQ.
My post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37956065 got no traction when I posted it and quickly disappeared from "/new" without many people noticing it. The next day, I received an email that this post was entered into the second chance pool. Then sometime later, it got picked for the front page and led to a good amount of community participation! Thanks to the second chance pool, I received several interesting demo submissions to my hobby project!
* It seems low-quality, at times almost like the Weekly World News. On HN, we sometimes replace even high-quality science writing with primary sources (when the paper is recent and the writing is just a summary).
* It's high-volume, which is problematic in that it incentivizes users to submit lots and lots of stuff from this one site; front page slots are the scarcest resource on HN and everything competes for it, so high-volume low-mid-quality sites tend to get downweighted.
* It's slathered with ads and bait-y gimmicks.
If there's something on this site that you think would make a good thread for HN, you can probably just find whatever it's blogspamming and submit that instead.
(I'd emailed mods after noting that my submission seemed to have been autokilled. They revived it, though the submission didn't see much action.)
Btw, that's not the record for how long a bug fix has taken. We get there eventually.
Edit: believe it or not, we got more complaints about this. Some people picked their top color specifically to go nicely with the orange Y! So I've reverted this change, except for the Christmas case. Users who have set their topcolor don't see the Christmas top bar anyhow, so don't have to worry.
However, there was a brief period where we were serving the transparent Y for favicons before I noticed that and corrected it; I wonder if the transparent Y somehow got into a cache? Is there a way to force-refresh?
I think the problem might be that NetNewsWire doesn't support SVG favicons (/y18.svg) and that /favicon.ico isn't available as a fallback. Were there any changes regarding these files recently?
What do I need to do to make /favicon.ico available as a fallback?
So this really did break my workflow, hah
Nice to see that some of the suggestions from there, like listing the hidden URLS (/leaders, etc.) seem to have been implemented.
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 - Oct 2022 (68 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 - Feb 2022 (64 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018-20) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 - April 2021 (255 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June 2020 (266 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25 comments)
A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (183 comments)
Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 - Feb 2018 (391 comments)
Truth be told it's probably a good thing for someone like me. HN is addictive and getting kicked out after 5 posts is essentially a better noprocrast setting. I actually thought it was the noprocrast setting at first since at the time I had just begun experimenting with it.
It's the automatic downranking of posts that hurt me. Noticed it recently. I've been trying to be more selective towards which posts I reply to but it feels pointless since any and all comments immediately sink towards the bottom of the page, unseen.
A smaller problem with this system: taking the time to write a comment, submitting it and only then being denied. I actually wasn't sure if this comment was going to go through but the timer must have reset. I hesitate to suggest some kind of indicator. It would be very helpful but it would also create a timed reward schedule not entirely dissimilar from those Skinner's box simulators they call mobile games.
The following message is returned after the 5th post:
> You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
There are so many notable tech people on HN, it would be useful to be able to recognize their posts and comments.
What is preventing vote manipulation here? Signing up is so easy without email so I think there should be something.
If the comment depth is 3 or more, reply links are withheld until the comments age a while. The amount of aging is a function of the depth. You can get around it by clicking on the comment's timestamp to go to its own page.
Is there a reason for the workaround? Like, it's a super secret way for gurus to avoid the friction?
anybody remember the significance of that date? i apparently joined five days later, and i'm guessing i was part of some wave of new signups triggered by some event.
I'd maybe suggest updating the message to include some approximate time the limit expires. 'Come back in a few hours' or something. I say this because it was unusual enough for me to hit that I'd rewrite my comments thinking it was some kind of word flag I'd tripped, then try to repost it in 5-10 minutes only to have it fail again.
It isn't a frequent issue, but putting duct tape on someone's mouth when they're talking about something they care about does not calm them down, even if it achieves the primary goal.
It's interesting because that limit has made me even more "radical" (by the unwritten standards of HN), i.e. when I know that I only have a limited amount of comments per day to make my point I use those comments in a more "push-y" manner by responding to the most provocative replies to what I had previously said, while also ignoring replying to comments that are too bland. Which means that I go by the logic of "why should I reply to this reasonable comment when there's this other more radical comment that's a lot more thorough and violent when trying to debunk what I had just written? I should use my limited number of comments by answering to the latter, not the former".
One of the many paradoxes of confrontation ("war") at work, that is if you regard many of the discussions in here as confrontation (even "war") of ideas.
I've run forums with various types of tiered systems and you don't gain much by having "ranks".
Corrections:
* These URLs aren't public - you can only see them if you're logged in as $name:
https://news.ycombinator.com/vouched?id=[name]
https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged?id=[name]
* > Moderators occasionally unkill such threads if they see it in time, although it rarely sticks
Moderators sometimes turn off the flags on posts like this, in which case the thread will usually stay on the front page.
* > Hacker News allows users to see what the front page looks like at any point in time
This wording makes me squeamish because the /front pages don't show what the front page looked like at any point in time - they're a blended average of the frontpage stories from a particular day. At no point did the front page actually look like that, but that's because you can't get a 24 hour view from any particular snapshot.
Additions:
* /next (or /prev) link on comments jumps to the next (or previous) comment at the same nesting level
* /root links (on item pages) jump to the top-level GP comment (this may be renamed to /top in the future)
* /context on a comment (when not on the original /item page) links to the comment in its place on the original /item page
* in the RSS section, could include: https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss maps the frontpage and up to 9 pages after that
* HN's software auto-edits titles to make them less linkbaity, but if it gets the edit wrong, you can change it after you submit (per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38775366)
* the bookmarklet could probably be added, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778787
Also, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779156 because that's another undocumented aspect. How to sum it up in a sentence? Maybe: "If you only use HN to submit your own stuff, the software will eventually start filtering your submissions." But then I need a second sentence: "It's fine to submit your own stuff, but it should be part of a diverse mix of unrelated/interesting things."
It would be easier (in the short run) to have personas and shit like that, but I somehow just know that (in the long run) it's not worth it.
Thanks again! :)
I run across this fairly frequently when checking on dang's comments, particularly when I'm not logged in, as moderator comments are often made following moderator actions or where members have downvoted or flagged a comment.
I'm not sure that a fix is needed, but the behaviour is slightly unexpected and confusing.
This makes sense once you understand that [dead] means "not generally visible"*, and the purpose of 'vouch' is to restore a post to general visibility.
* that is, they're visible, but only to users who have 'showdead' turned on in their profile.
Is it correct to conclude that [vouch] links only appear on [flagged] submissions that are below the flag threshhold for [dead]. Maybe three flags or something.
Are the [vouch] rules the same for both submissions and replies, i.e., comments. I inadvertently used the term "flagged comments"; I was actually curious about flagged submissions.
For instance, as I type this there is a submission in /active that's [flagged] but not [dead], but there's no [vouch] link.
Mostly yes, but there are also other (rarer) ways for a submission to end up both [flagged] and [dead].
> Are the [vouch] rules the same for both submissions and replies, i.e., comments
Yes.
> For instance, as I type this there is a submission in /active that's [flagged] but not [dead], but there's no [vouch] link.
That's expected. Vouch links only show up on [dead] posts, as I explained above.
B. [vouch] links appear on [flagged] submissions that are not [dead].
A and B appear to contradict.
It’s missing the relatively recent new list called “Classic”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Classic: Frontpage as voted by ancient accounts
(I apply those using the Stylus CSS manager browser extension.)
Seeing all this info I was unaware of laid out in front of me makes me wish there was a docs page linked in the footer, like Tildes has.
Will try to post non-FUD, high quality comments and posts (read between the lines lol).
You're just as welcome on HN as anyone else is, and if you build up a track record of using the site as intended for a while, we can definitely take a look and hopefully take the rate limit off your account.
I will assume in cases such as what you quoted, you would treat the person I replied to with the same level of non-transparent hostility? If so I will avoid defending myself, else I will just avoid using "over the line" terms like "jerk" and use more tolerable terms like "unkind".
> and if you build up a track record of using the site as intended for a while
You tolerate political topics on HN. On such threads, it seems my problem is that I do not understand what you mean by that. My expectation is either you tell me or others flag my comment if it is inappropriate. I never attack someone's character and try to focus on technical analysis of things, what you quoted there was in response to someone attacking my character (will refrain).
I will read your rules again. Perhaps I should avoid sensitive topics entirely on HN but truth be told, I make them in anticipation of a healthy discourse (which if you note on that comment thread was had). This is the only site I know of where that is actually possible these days. But I'd hate to think simply sharing my views is causing such a burden.
> You're just as welcome on HN as anyone else is
I don't think that is true. But no worries, I undersrand your perspective well enough.
At least I now know that this isn't in my head, thanks for confirming. I sincerely hope you reconsider this approach and inform others (if they exist) of your disapproval or measures instead of shadow/secret approaches. You absolutley have the right to moderate content and tell people to stop any behavior, just like this.
I'll seriously consider stopping active participation as a 2024 resolution.
Happy new years!
:/ this is sad
I always prefer to remove restrictions from accounts when people are using HN as intended, but when I looked at an account's recent history and see something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769241, it's clear that that would be premature.
The reason this is a pet peeve of mine is I often see people complaining about "the HN moderators" (e.g. "the HN mods are on a power trip and keep flagging my submissions!" or some such), where they are clearly taking this conceptual model from Reddit, and they seem to think there is a shadowy cabal of "mods" who control what gets downvoted/flagged (and, in fairness, this does and can happen in subreddits). In other words, when you see your submissions being flagged or comments being downvoted or flagged, 99.9% of the time it's not "the HN mods" who are downvoting you. It's just other, normal HN users (who have earned 501+ karma as TFA explains) who simply don't like what you have to say.
Not saying dang never blocks users/comments, but it's exceedingly rare and I've only seen it for the most obnoxiously egregious behavior after (usually multiple) warnings.
Speculation/intuition, but I figure it happens in ways specifically designed to evade the type of detection you're basing your claim on, akin to shadow banning, whereas on Reddit there's often more visible evidence like corpses of deleted comments.
This is far more control than reddit mods have. Reddit mods have one ability, an that is the ability to remove or not remove a submission, which is a very public action. HN can put its finger on the scales in a way that is much more subtle.
Your account can also be effectively shadowbanned with everything you submit going straight to the “dead” pile. Again no explanation and the only way you realize it is cause your submissions slowly die with no comments (and when you view the site in a non logged in fashion your submissions are not there)
I'm going to contact the moderation indeed, it's the first time I was seeing non-spam comments being shadow banned automatically.
The behaviour of the account holder.
There are some weird edge cases, like sometimes a banned user, once they're unbanned, will revert to posting abusively. Then we ban them again and they revert to posting good comments again. Who can fathom the psyche of homo internetus.
It's also common for an account to post both fine comments and abusive comments. It's the latter that determine whether we have to ban the account—that's how rule enforcement works. But if a banned account posts something good, there's no reason why the good post needs to remain [dead]. This is what vouching is for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.
Issuing warnings or reminding people of the guidelines (rules) is also part of being a moderator, so the moniker is perfectly cromulent to describe dang's role
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/what-does-cromulent...
The other reason I think "admin" is a much better word is that it much more clearly indicates that this is a special, privileged role. That vast majority of "moderation" on HN is done by normal users with upvotes, downvotes and flagging (and also, of course, by automated systems e.g. with spam filters/bot detection).
But again, my primary point is that I see users blaming "the mods" for why their post is downvoted or hidden, when usually it's that people just don't want to acknowledge that the community, at large, didn't think they were contributing productively to the discourse of the site.
> Hacker News currently has one full time moderator: Dan Gackle (dang), and formerly Scott Bell (sctb). Their comment replies provide a pseudo-log of Hacker News moderation.
I've never seen an anyone else besides dang comment that they are an HN admin in the past 5-ish years or so.
2) voting system works well for just users but HN is infested with corporate voting manipulation. It seems that an entity monitoring eg. brand's name is able to use just a few 501+ karma accounts to bury, or a few more to strongly boost, any post
3) based on what I learned about posts' scores (more than a grain of salt - as I mentioned - I'm still figuring things out) it seems a little out of place that sometimes a few hours-old posts (not as old to qualify for the "second chance" thing) with barely any comments and points are positioned higher on the top page than younger posts with more activity (higher score and more comments). I've noticed it more than once with substack and my assumption is that HN may be boosting YC-backed products
I don't see much evidence of voting manipulation (and a lot of evidence of HN being hair-trigger about suppressing vote manipulation).
Imagine a discussion forum for medical topics (science, research, etc.) where 1/3 the users work for companies that sell homeopathic "remedies", and how that would influence moderation there.
You mean to say that next week's Kagi thread won't be as organic and spontaneous as it purports to be? Impossible.
But I appreciate the fact the consequences for everyone are not the same, and potentially even fatal in current times.
I believe I understand why it's done in the way it's done, but also this can drive self-censorship. Which is a growing problem at large.
Without speaking out of turn, which may just create more work, they can help.
Contact hn@ycombinator.com.
I suppose it depends on one's perspective. We used to call self-censorship "decorum."
The nature of human beings didn't change when we went online, and sometimes it behooves a person to just read the room before speaking. Because of the karma system, the upvote downvote system, and the user curated flagging system, I would classify Hacker News as a "decorum-friendly" message board where a certain amount of pre-filtering is not only necessary but highly encouraged.
Actually, this is the motivation __to__ nuke. It's what I mean about the environment changing. HN is one of the big places that get scraped and everyone is scraping all data that they can these days. It's very reasonable to believe you can be de-anonymized much more easily and that it's only going to get easier. It's not unreasonable to think that someone can mimic my speech and this creates a new vulnerability. I am thinking much more about self-censorship now and being more measured now than I have in the past.
I do agree with you that self-censorship is a growing problem. But I'm not sure how to solve this when we're entering a world where it is the language you use that becomes a fingerprint. I appreciate the records because there is a lot of valuable information here but at the same time these records make us vulnerable in a way we haven't been before. And that it is in a way that not just worrying about nation states being able to do this but that we're posting these records to huggingface. The processing is just getting easier and that's about all that's needed now.
Maybe the answer is to let trusted users become polymorphic, but that defeats some of the spirit of the site.
I'll have to think more on it, get back to you.
Idk, if you have thoughts I'd love to head. I've been thinking of writing them down and posting to HN but unsure and it feels like one of those things that sounds conspiratorial until years later people will say "of course this was coming" lol
Scraping doesn’t even have to be hourly, scraping a thread or account once then `diff`ing the two between weeks or months or years would easily reveal any interventions.
Which would actually expose users who you should retroactively investigate. Canaries.
I presume you are aware of “fuzzed” users. With unassociated comments, submissions, and possibly even changing names. I only recently discovered this myself after a little digging, but you may be able to do this and continue posting.
I’ve been hesitant to mention this anywhere, as discussing how you would red team a site you like publicly might not be the best for the site.
There are other clever possibilities, such as using some combination of artificial & organic content to wash users identities. Like banned or shadowbanned accounts mixed with real users. An acid bath if you will. If you dissolved 100 people into each other, who can really say who is who?
I don't think changing usernames is a strong action either. This is because the fingerprint is your language, not the name you're associated with. See the Enron dataset and the project in Ng's intro AI course, but we'd need to scale that quite a bit (which is very hard).
I'm not aware of the fuzzed users. But I think you should mention it in the open if they are problematic.
I have thought of AI to rewrite my language but that's difficult and only fuzzing too.
There are certainly individual cases where some post might turn out to be problematic later, but that's more of an exception and can be handled by manual intervention.
I do find it annoying in some places how users can just erase their posts without a reason. Because they don't just erase their own content, they take the responses to it with them or at least make them less understandable. And those people responding did put some effort into it.
Why would this be described as “unfortunate”? For example tings like LLM:s being trained on flawed/biased data is a known real and unfortunate thing which can hurt already marginalised groups in society if used for eg. policy derisions.
> However, despite these discussions not being off-topic, they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Unfortunately.
> [...] they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless. Unfortunately.
What the author finds unfortunate is the flagging by users, not the moderator action.
> [...] they tend to be flagged to death by users regardless — unfortunately.
> 1. Placement: “Unfortunately” is typically placed at the beginning of a sentence or clause to emphasize the regrettable aspect of the situation. It sets the tone for what follows and ensures clarity in your expression.
https://thecontentauthority.com/blog/how-to-use-unfortunatel...
> Unfortunately, my time is limited.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/unfortu...
"Unfortunately." here is a sentence fragment. It's idiomatic (conversational + informal) English to modify a preceding sentence with a sentence fragment. ("We could have some iced tea. Or lemonade.") There are cases where a sentence fragment can be used to introduce a sentence ("Delicious. I ate the whole thing.") but this is never an adverb (you can say "Unbelievable. You've done it again" but not "Unbelievably. You've done it again").
If one were trying to write "Unfortunately, there has been an error" with a long pause, you would write "Unfortunately... there has been an error", never "Unfortunately. There has been an error." The latter looks like a typo.
That's why (as a native speaker/reader of American English) I don't see any possibility of interpreting the text the way you're describing. Hope that helps!
Shame I'm not in the top 50 anymore, but there just ain't a lot of good content to submit anymore and karma whoring seems like a waste of time.
(My confidence in this explanation comes in part from the fact that I'm pretty sure I had a hand in this coming to pass: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716).
The conspiracist rationale here doesn't make much sense, because the site operators also control the displayed comment count and the registration of votes.