Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time
github.com
github.com
Thanks, mods.
The answer to OP’s first question, but there was a second one:
> How big is his team? What kind of tools are they using?
Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds
https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/
Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost
https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html
(Perhaps that last one could be renamed to be less hyperbolic, but the content was still an interesting opinion piece)
I don't think this is being done by the mods, by the way. It's more likely some spam filter with false positives, report brigading, or an anti upvote ring mechanism.
At this point he's indistinguishable from a bitcoin advocate or a tv preacher.
I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.
It's vital to HN that user flags and/or software like the flamewar detector clear most such submissions off the front page. They tend to attract a lot of upvotes because that's what sensational (and especially indignant-sensational) stories do. Without countervailing mechanisms, HN would be completely taken over by those stories.
His statement wasn't even hyperbolic or fearmongering.....?
He just extrapolated based on current amounts of compute and estimated a possible model size that could be equivalent to AGI (based on current architecture).
Training a model of that size would require too much electricity.
That was his point.
... that is a hard question, something akin to topic amalgamation or cosine similarity on the bulletpoints?
could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are both sufficiently simultaneous about baz?
.... is there any dataset one might be able to play around with on this topic?
[0] there's like 3 good mods left online and you are one of them, so thanks for that.
Yup. We played with that years ago and dropped it as much too big of a potato. Another HN user spent a lot of time working on it and eventually gave up too. Someone should have a go using the newer AI tools though.
> could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are
Also yup - building support for the community to take care of this is how we plan to do it, whenever we get to working on it. I think this could work well because people care about this problem.
I suspect that it has been flagged for that reason by multiple people.
It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.
There are a billion forums with less stringent moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN good and not so game-able like most sites
What people maybe don't realize is how many constraints there are on HN's system. There aren't many degrees of freedom for us to change things that wouldn't lead to a massively different site, and most of those outcomes would be worse, because most of them would be closer to internet default.
It's easy imagine "HN, but without the things that I personally find annoying". But try to generalize that for a moment and the problem quickly becomes intractable.
The reason I say we definitely don't is that we'd have to write code to do that, and I'd remember writing such code.
Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387
Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost (flagged)
IIRC: Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on the front page.
That's a big change?
How can you tell? Those are from a week and a half ago. The OP's definition of 'removed' is (if I understand correctly) 'dropped from the top-30 to below the top-90 in 1 minute'.
All from only one day:
* Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-scr...
* Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germany about a far-right planning meeting): https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-...
* Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development: https://vxdev.pages.dev/
* Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds: https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/
Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's overblown.
I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people because they're tired of LLM stories (as repeatedly attested in this thread).
Based on the ratio of comments to upvotes, I suspect the Open Source Builds and Ford discussions ran afoul of the overheated discussion detector. Usually when the ratio gets too lopsided the software automatically drops the post off the front page, because that's an indicator that a lot of people are arguing in the thread without actually reading or enjoying the article.
Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in successful community moderation, but you have to wonder 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost entirely at the behest of big tech.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(In many places there, obviously a lot of that is about Meta the company).
Periodic threads like this one are, I think, allowed as a sort of escape valve for pent up meta energy. Emph. on "periodic".
If you want a site that makes the opposite call here, Lobsters has a public mod log. You might like that system better!
If Company A makes a killer product announcement, rival Company B could simply get its employees to spam down votes on and flag that post. Company A gets less visibility, and dang won't be able to come on time to stop it.
This is an easily plausible hypothetical, which may already be happening.
Does that mean stories about LLMs or by LLMs?
Serious question.
I am one of the (few? many?) people (devs) who haven't look into LLMs or even tried out ChatGPT yet :), except to make jokes about it here once in a while.
>Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not as if the internet is lacking in places where this can be discussed freely.
[1]: As in you have to click the link to see what it is about, and to decide if it is interesting or relevant to read.
There's a reason it's a big deal in German politics and already had some fallout (and thankfully multiple dozens of counter-demonstration of ten of thousands of people all over Germany.)
We sometimes turn flags off on such submissions, assuming that the article is substantive enough to have a chance at supporting a thoughtful discussion; and also assuming that the topic hasn't been discussed recently. But neither of those particular submissions was likely to be such a solid foundation.
It doesn't look like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00169862231175831, the paper, has been submitted yet. That one might work, if you or someone wants to try submitting it.
Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39089599 - Jan 2024 (78 comments)
Secret Plan Against Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39092116 - Jan 2024 (5 comments)
Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39091819 - Jan 2024 (34 comments)
Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387 - Jan 2024 (68 comments)
Of those 4, the Ford one and the open-source builds one set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector); the Germany one was flagged; and the Show HN one got moderated down. Let's look at what happened in that order.
The Ford one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is easy to understand: hatred for modern car UIs is one of the most popular topics on HN these days and always gets people going (me too! but never mind)...which no doubt is one reason why the media sites keep playing it up. We wouldn't turn the penalty off in such a case. The discussion might not have been a flamewar but it was nearly entirely generic - for example the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090622. Given how over-discussed this topic already is, I'd say this is a case of HN's software working as intended.
The open-source one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is also unsurprising as open source stuff is also highly discussed and also gets people going. In this case I could make a case for turning off the penalty, but in the end would probably decide against it, because the article isn't very deep, the discussion is rather generic, HN has a surplus of such discussion already, and nothing here really clears the quality bar. But it's more of a borderline call; I can see how others could interpret it differently.
"Secret plan against Germany" was flagged by users. That's a political story with a baity title, so the default would be for it to get flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on such stories but I don't know that this one clears the bar. It's more current-events than deeply-interesting, the ideological material is inflammatory and nobody is going to approach it with curiosity. The thread was already showing clear signs of turning into a flamewar. Even then, we might still turn off the flags, but only if the story were intrinsically of great significance—the sort of thing it just wouldn't make sense not to discuss at all. I doubt this clears that bar.
The Show HN, we moderated down because "star for free trial" is not a valid thing to do in a Show HN and is something the community here would strongly oppose (see the top comment). Here's what I emailed the submitter: "We downweighted the post after getting complaints from users. 'Star repo for free trial' is way too much of a hard sales tactic for HN, and even more so for Show HN, which implies that users can try out the product (see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Asking them to star your repo first may be an ok tactic in other communities, but in the HN context it comes across as manipulative and is not in your interest at all."
---
I guess the summary here is that this list is a mix of clear calls and borderline calls, but defensible ones. Anyone is free to disagree of course! No two readers, including mods, would ever make all the same calls. But if you do disagree, please keep two things in mind:
(1) You have to take each decision in larger context. A perfectly good story can be a bad fit for HN's front page if, for example, the story has already had a lot of discussion; and
(2) If we moderated cases like the above ones differently, the consequence would be letting a lot more stories onto the front page that are more repetitive and/or sensational than the median front page story is today. I doubt that most readers would want that. You can't think of this in terms of isolated submissions or topics; there would need to be some principle by which the decisions would be made differently. HN's mandate is intellectual curiosity. If there's a way to serve that better, I'd certainly like to know what it is; but given the mandate, that's the only kind of change it would make sense to implement.
I have/had no objection to the moderation on these posts. In fact, if I were monarch of HN and the Internet, I'd want an order of magnitude higher standard for the quality of posts, comments, and conduct. I want to spend my time and on the actual very best intellectual content and discussion possible - it would probably be mostly the very best books and papers from journals if I had my way. (Not that I think HN should serve my personal preference, I'm just demonstrating that I am far away from criticizing the moderation.)
My GP comment and my other one that you responded to [0] were trying to recenter at least part of the discusson on a factual basis, which I find much more interesting than the (completely unintersting) conspiracy theory aspect. That is, if we explore it factually, objectively, intelligently, how does it work? how does it work out? For example, I imagine there are some interesting emergent properties which would tell us about the HN population, emergent properties of algorithms, and the interaction between them.
Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of people's questions.
edit: oh duh. thanks all, answer was 'right under my nose'!
Thanks _kst_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232594
Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 for a longer answer; and also krapp's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232795, which makes a similar point.
Just some feedback that I've found a number of articles fall off the FP due to the flamewar detector that I've felt were good articles/discussions. In fact, I think some of the more valuable discussions tend to have a lot of back and forth discussions relative to the votes.
But I also recognize that flamewars can also look a lot like that.
So I'm wondering if it may be worth revisiting the algorithm for this, and maybe having it factor in a few other things vs. simply the vote:comment ratio (which is what I'm understanding it currently is, but correct me if I'm wrong).
I don't think it necessarily needs to be a lot more complex, maybe simply add to it some standard deviation of upvotes/downvotes (or just a simple ratio), if that's not already part of it.
But I've seen some discussions fall off that I don't remember seeing a particularly toxic discussion happening (e.g. relatively little to no downvoted comments).
Again, happy to see flamewars fall off, but just hoping to see some more interesting/helpful discussions not get caught in the crossfire.
So the highest quality 'flame wars' can remain untouched, but downranking everything else below that bar probably makes sense.
The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a go—and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd certainly like to see it. As would the entire community I'm sure!
You can probably put a big dent in the number of low-quality comments by just showing a “hey, are you really sure you want to post this?” confirmation prompt and display the site guidelines when you detect a low-quality comment. That way you can have a much more relaxed threshold and stop worrying about false positives. Sure, some people will ignore the gentle reminder, but then you can be more decisive with flags and followup behaviour because anything low quality that has been posted will by definition already have had one warning.
I don't think a confirmation prompt will help because people tune such things out after they've seen them a few times.
You get better intent assessment than with NLP/ regex/whatever.
Plus HN is entirely in English, so you never have to worry about lexical resource gaps.
There is no off the shelf solution - afaik. In addition I have no idea how expensive running costs will be.
But something serviceable can be built.
Source: mod /t&s person dealing with these things
"Ring will no longer allow police to request users' doorbell camera footage" (npr.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138423
I posted an on-topic supporting quote to explain why this item was newsworthy and got one unhelpful one-word response and my comment got inexplicably flagged (not the commenter) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138481
How did that slip past detection? How do I get the abusive flag on my comment reversed? This behavior seems to have managed to push an important story off the frontpage quickly. (yes there was a badly-worded dupe headline, but that's a separate thing)
(1) the story was downranked off the front page because the topic had already been discussed a bunch—for example in these threads, two days earlier:
Amazon's Ring to stop letting police request doorbell video from users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39119387 - Jan 2024 (141 comments)
Ring steps back from sharing video with police – mostly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39120892 - Jan 2024 (15 comments)
Culling repetition from the front page is one of the most important things HN's systems need to do. Actually, it's probably the single most important thing. Certainly it's best if we can link to the previous discussions so people can know where to find them—but we can only do that some of the time. Users help out a ton by posting links to earlier threads. Ultimately we need better software support for dealing with this, but that's not done yet.
(2) Your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138481 was flagged by users. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I'm pretty sure I know why: comments that do nothing but quote from the article, or post a summary of it, are considered too formulaic by readers here. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but please do it in your own words and share your own thinking. To simply paste a quote from the article is too superficial. On HN the convention is to assume that readers are smart enough to evaluate an article for themselves.
Edit: I'm going to copy the above paragraph into a reply below, so I can link to it in the future when this comes up, without the rest of the post.
(3) The reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138536, which only said "and?", was definitely an unsubstantive comment that deserved to be flagged (and killed) even more than yours did. The reason it escaped detection was simple, albeit unsatisfying: pure randomness. We don't come close to reading everything that gets posted here—there's far too much. I've flagged it now.
(I copied this from the parent comment so I can link to it when this comes up in the future).
To me, "flag" means "this is a serious violation that requires moderator attention". Something I'd want you to see and deal with because it's bigoted, illegal, spam, etc. I wouldn't flag something simply because I didn't think HN was the right audience, or because I personally dislike the topic. You seem to be encouraging me to use it simply as a downvote.
I'm not going to start flagging things, nor do I feel that strongly about the lack of a downvote, but if flags are effectively downvotes behind the scenes, and if that's how users are treating flags (which they obviously are, from other comments on this thread), I think the UI should have a downvote button.
I assume there's been discussion about this before and I'm curious about the thought process behind the decision. I don't find the FAQ to be informative about this.
He must have been thinking something though, because Reddit was originally his conception and he was an influence on the earliest development of Reddit as well (edit: and Reddit does have story downvoting - forgot to mention that bit).
I never flag anything because it's recorded on my profile, and I don't want stuff recorded on my profile that isn't useful to me. I only upvote submissions and comments that I intend to refer back to in the future. Upvotes are simply bookmarks to me, so my only tool for voting on the quality of conversation is downvotes. Which, apparently, I can't do for articles without spamming up my profile.
Actually I just checked my profile and saw several flags that must have appeared on a mis-click, just like how sometimes upvotes appear on a mis-click. Fortunately, unlike mis-clicked upvotes, you can still remove these.
Thank you for your tireless work. HN is a breath of fresh air compared with the rest of the internet thanks to it.
The one exception is if some group organizes to upvote something that fits their agenda / business plan. But in this case it's generally something worth flagging and it gets flagged?
Here's how I look at it: if trust is present, then we don't need to publish a full log, as long as we answer questions when people ask them. That degree of transparency has been available here for many years. If, on the other hand, trust isn't present, a moderation log won't create it. It will just generate more data for distrust to work with—and distrust always finds something.
Thus our focus is on building trust with the community and maintaining it. That happens through lots of individual and group interactions, answering questions whenever we get them, in the threads or by email. That's what I spend most of my time doing.
We're never going to take the community's trust for granted because it's what gives HN the only real value it has, and it would be all too easy to lose. But I would tentatively say that this approach has proven to work well for most of the community. If people learn they can always get a question answered, that's a powerful trust-building factor.
Equally clear is that it does not work for everybody; but that's always going to be the case no matter what we do. I don't mean that we dismiss such users' concerns—quite the contrary, I make extra efforts to answer them. I'm just not under any illusion that we can satisfy everybody. It's satisfying enough if a few people can occasionally be won over in this way—which does happen sometimes!
I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change (unless forced), but just wanted to point out that your argument against transparency is a cop-out and that you're on the wrong side of history here.
It could be fun to look into it together, but the fun stops at "I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change". Why dance if someone wants to kick you in the shins?
It's one thing for private communities to set their own rules, but it's quite another to publicly tout these restrictions as universally fair when they're essentially projections of biased viewpoints coming from human-beings in positions of power. Actual transparency permits genuine openness and dialogue, rather than masking personal ideologies as righteous principles.
In the first set, the stakes are far higher, which is why the collection of objective data is legally mandated in the first place.
In the second set, you have only the subjective opinions of people who have an explicit goal to cultivate a specific variety of community. As members of that community, we select into the cultivation regime under which we participate. Not everyone will share the same preferences, and that's OK.
Hence my interest in debating @dang's straw-man response....and nowadays, using throwaway accounts is often the only way others even see opposing viewpoints on topics like this.
But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war detection.
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078 - Jan 2024 (62 comments)
I can make an argument either way there. The argument in favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this much-discussed topic; its title was flamebait and arguably misleading as well since the article seems more about async in general; and generally it was more of a drama submission on a classic flamewar topic than an interesting technical piece. I'm not saying all that is fair but it's easy to imagine good-faith users flagging for such reasons.
I checked the flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases where a user had previously flagged a different article about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4] below. A few of those might be borderline calls but I don't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags are legit if the story has had a large amount of discussion recently. Otherwise HN would consist of the same few discussions over and over, and we have enough of that as it is!
> Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
There are some software protections in place against that, but like all such protections, they don't catch all the bad cases and they have false positives as well.
We review the flags and turn flags off sometimes. I would not say it's perfect because although we try to look over all the flagged stories, it has to be done hastily (or one wouldn't get much else done). That makes it easy to miss things. However, users often email us at hn@ycombinator.com when they think a story has been unfairly flagged, and in those cases we always take a closer look. I don't know what percentage of the time we turn flags off in such cases, but it's not a low number. So if we include "users sending emails" as part of "the system", then yes, there's a system for monitoring flag abuse.
Last point: this is a pretty typical case. I'd say it's borderline but in the end I probably agree with the flaggers. If the topic of Rust (and async Rust in particular) weren't already so thoroughly covered, and/or if the flamewar aspect hadn't been there, then I'd probably disagree with the flaggers.
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[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061839 - the word 'async' appears over 200 times in that thread!
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] You Don't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 - Feb 2024 (21 comments)
Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 - Jan 2024 (151 comments)
New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire wear shocks some drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 - Jan 2024 (64 comments)
Google layoffs: Tech giant to cut down 30k jobs, says report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791297 - Dec 2023 (6 comments)
Code will make me rich and famous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336699 - Nov 2023 (2 comments)
The NSA Invented Bitcoin? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37599194 - Sept 2023 (61 comments)
Leaving the Web3 cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803267 - July 2023 (47 comments)
How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105 - June 2023 (97 comments)
Alphabet plans to announce its new general-use LLM called PaLM 2 at Google I/O - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866435 - May 2023 (5 comments)
Is your husband/ boyfriend gay? LGBTQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 - April 2023 (0 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39203106
a tame story that got some discussion, but was marked as a dupe. But I didn't see any other posts linked in the comments as expected. I search for other submissions and see two other posts... with 0 comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190710
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39186297
I don't really have a critique or solution here, I imagine false negatives are an inevitability. Just sharing.
In this case, you can see from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... that there had been a lot of submissions, and from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... the ones that got comments.
Of those, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165981 had been just a few days earlier. And it turns out that there actually was a link to it in the later thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39204186, but this comment was flagkilled, probably because of the personal swipe in it. (You can still see it but only if you turn on 'showdead' in your profile.)
I could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
> could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
Yeah, i imagine if I went down every tiny rabbit hole it'd be a full time job. I'll leave that to the professionals haha.
https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-500-million...
In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738, it just set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. We sometimes turn that penalty off, but in a case like this we wouldn't do that because "$Celebrity says $thing about $common-subject" is almost never a substantial story. It's essential to HN to clear such stories off the front page in order to make room for more interesting, less sensational things. If we didn't, the front page would consist of little else.
Really? A NASA report, on the official .gov site? Maybe the comments were horrible but that seems right in the middle of what HN is interested in.
NASA System Predicts Impact of a Small Asteroid over Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39126705 - Jan 2024 (18 comments)
It was downweighted because it was a dupe (or quasidupe) of this:
Scientists discover near-Earth asteroid hours before it exploded over Berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103412 - Jan 2024 (46 comments)
That's the system functioning as intended. We work hard to try to prevent repetition from taking over the site, because repetition is the enemy of curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
One thing I've learned today, after 11 hours of posting in this thread, is that it's easy to look at an article in isolation and say "Really? That got moderated?" - when in fact if you know the larger context there's nearly always a straightforward explanation.
One can certainly argue that 86 points and 46 comments is too low a threshold to treat the repost as a dupe, but that's a different question, no?
The effort is appreciated by some if not most.
When I get tired I start to complain. It's a bad habit.
I posted detailed explanations in those other threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39224560
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210947
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045
If you (or anyone) read those explanations and still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is. These practices have been in place for many years and haven't changed.
One questions I do have–I would guess posts critical of HN/YC are going to get a log of flags and have not the best discussion. This has a side affect of biasing the home page to not have posts critical of HN/YC. Do you see this as a problem?
And it creates a very visible feedback loop, as users start to think that this is what HN is supposed to be. They're probably the biggest quality problem of HN.
You can take this with a grain of salt as I'm obviously not the most neutral observer, but from everything I've seen (which at least is a lot!), yes they get a lot of flags, but they get even more upvotes. It's hard to say which side wins out in the tug-of-war. The tendency towards negativity that jsnell's comment describes is very real, and it's on the upvote side in these cases.
Most probably the tug of war goes one way some of the time and the other way the rest of the time. The funny thing is that as mods, we have to have a regulating influence either way. What I mean is that if a rage story hits the top of the front page, we'll downweight it (though not necessarily all the way off the front page); but if a rage story about YC gets too many flags, we'll reduce those or remove them altogether. The recent shitfest is a good example; let me dig up some links for you... Edit: oh wait, I already mentioned those links in the GP. Sorry, I'm getting a bit tired here!
Did I answer your question?
@dang You did–thank you. I hope my question didn't come across as accusatory. This is a hard problem and, unfortunately for you, many of us enjoy discussion of difficult problems. What many of us may not see is you having to have the _same_ conversation over and over. Thanks again for your work. I don't envy your position.
It's pretty clear to me that any online forum needs good moderation to be healthy long term. HN has been good about this with a strong community providing upvotes/downvotes and a moderation team that seems pretty light handed but not afraid to say no when necessary. Please keep doing what you're doing.
However, I do see a few decent posts in this list that probably warrant a second chance.
plural ?
That told me all I needed to know about the moderation of this site.
Thankfully someone captured a screenshot: https://merveilles.town/@cancel/111834048502040552
huppeldepup's comment in the screenshot is collapsed on p2 of the comments (after it was no longer relevant) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39157010&p=2, and is also accessible as the parent of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39170137.
I mean yeah it probably was just a mistake but what do you expect somebody to say?
I'm sure there's a model in which lying some of the time but not too often has marginally higher expected value, but it's also going to have significantly higher risk and that's not worth it, plus you have to be disciplined enough to actually apply such a strategy. One slip and you're dead! I'm too lazy for that.
Btw the more accurate reason why we don't do things like that is that we don't want to because it would feel bad. It's not who we want to be. However, the actual reason doesn't always have much persuasive power and when I'm sensing that's the case, I use the cynical argument ("not in our interests", basically), because it's also true. But as the cynical argument isn't persuading you, maybe I should switch back!
This site is a marketing campaign for a VC company. If you see it the same way, I’d be shocked.
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
In that case you drew a general conclusion from a freak accident so rare that I doubt it had happened in the 17 years this site has been around. (Edit: 17 years this month in fact! https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...)
If what you require from an internet forum is that the moderators under no circumstances will ever commit a copy/paste error, HN is definitely below your standards.
Edit: the mods would like to share that they weren't drunk when they made that mistake, just rushed and watching a rather gripping tennis final.
That prompted me to check other dates in the archive: apparently the "Startup News" title lasted for around six months before changing to "Hacker News". I was pretty sure the change was before I made my account, but I didn't realize the "Startup News" period had been so short.
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
Edit: here's the last copy of Startup News that archive.org has—from 2007-07-13:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070713212949/http://news.ycomb...
and here's the first copy of Hacker News they have, from 2007-08-30:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070830111558/http://news.ycomb...
I guess they missed 6 weeks there, but bless them for having anything at all—who among us preserves our own history?
Another way to look at this is that the mods have the same biases you do. Depending on how you’re feeling on a given day, you could call that an echo chamber.
That's wrong. Both the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector) and user flags do that, and there are other software mechanisms that do it too. For example, if a story has been on the front page for more than (IIRC) 18 hours, it gets an automatic downweight unless we manually override it.
Also, keep in mind that user flags affect a submission's rank long before the [flagged] marker appears.
What kinds of user flags are there and why are they not public? People should know. Shadowbanning belongs in the 2010s.
Meaning if someone were to theoretically get a real time feed of HN submissions, and flagged articles that they didn't want seen as well as messaging a group of friends to do the same thing. Do you have protections for this type of behavior that would prevent this person from having undue influence on what can and cannot have a chance at being seen by others?
I'm sure you're already thinking of ways to bypass that, and yes what you're thinking will probably work, it's a game of cat and mouse and no one technique will be sufficient or work forever. (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing) )
However, it's important to correct inaccuracies like the one mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537. Robin89, can you please fix the text? I know it was just a mistaken good-faith assumption but it's super wrong.
Also, it would make it easier for me to respond to the questions here if you'd link the HN IDs on your page to the actual HN threads. Currently they link to social-protocols.org. Obviously you can link to whatever you want but I'm having trouble tracing the questions here. Everyone has their own list of "what happened to story X, Y, Z, and what about W and V and J too" and while I'm happy to answer all those in principle, there are physical limits on how many I can work through.
I'm going to be in meetings for most of the next few hours but I'll try to answer questions in this thread later, assuming I don't drown in it.
How can he/we verify it's wrong? The down-weighting you describe is not visible to users. Even OP won't know.
You can say that down-weighting happens, but we're asking to see where down-weighting happens.
But today's forums frequently do not disclose moderation to submitting users, and that is why we are now seeing major court cases over 230, government-led censorship, etc.
You can, however, always get a question answered. That's basically our implicit contract with the community.
On HN, my understanding is that you (moderators) can penalize stories without the submitter's knowledge. But if HN instead disclosed that penalty to the story's submitter, that would help this community communicate better.
As for how it works elsewhere, if a YouTube channel removes your comment, you won't know [1]. Same thing on Reddit, Facebook, and X. So while HN is relatively small, the practice of withholding content moderation decisions from submitters/commenters is widespread.
Every submitter thinks their story deserves to make HN's front page, if not #1. Actually, that's not entirely true—the cleverest and most tasteful submitters are often the most humble. We have to go out of our way to try to find what they post because they're the last people who would ever send an email demanding attention.
But I can tell you from experience (81,556 emails and counting) that there are far more people who think their blog post ought to be #1 on HN than I could ever answer, and I can tell you what happens if one tries: many come back with a list of objections that is 3x longer than the entire conversation so far. The problem grows the more you feed it.
I want people to be able to get answers to their questions. No one would love it more than me if we could find some automated way of reducing that load while still answering people's questions. But so far every suggestion of how to do this sets off so many alarms in my body that I wonder if I'll sleep that night.
I'm afraid that might come across dismissive and I apologize if it does. It's just that the status quo already involves so much pressure that if I try to explain, I come across as a deranged beach ball that's been pinned deep underwater for 10 years.
(1) You wouldn't want someone to secretly remove or demote your own commentary. But secretive content moderation is extremely common on today's major platforms. In order to be heard there, you would need to fight back against the practice, and you cannot effectively do that while keeping secrets yourself.
(2) Undisclosed content moderation does not express any kind of message, and therefore the platforms' use of it may not even be protected by the first amendment.
#2 is currently under discussion in a few cases before the Supreme Court:
Re: #2
How is it a free speech issue when someone kicks you off their property? It has nothing to do with speech so why would the first amendment be involved?
See the linked tweet for a more lawyerly argument in defense of shadow banning. The question before the court may hinge upon whether or not shadow banning expresses a message.
(I am not commenting in this message on whether an HN issue may exist or should be let go. On those matters, I am still reading.)
I’ve seen it happen when I’ve flagged stories so either there is a vast conspiracy of moderators that receive pages when I flag things so they can downrank… or maybe dang isn’t lying about something that should be super obvious as a community self policing mechanism.
It's discussed in the link, and elsewhere [1]. Some mod actions on HN are transparent, some are not. You should not assume that, just because you see marks of some form of moderation, that you can see them all.
Undisclosed content moderation is like directly modifying your production database. It's faster, but always more troublesome. Nobody else knows what changed or why, etc.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...
[3] https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...
Which are they? It's important to include links so that (a) we can say what's going on, and (b) so readers can make up their own minds.
You might be talking about stories that went in to the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), which get a random placement on HN's front page.
I have heard that sometimes the submission time is reset, such as when returning from the second chance pool. This could also create an unnatural ranking order, so the original time before the reset should be listed as well.
Yes, the timestamp munging is an artifact of HN's re-upping system, described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and links back from there. About the timestamps, there are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
The original times are always available because the modified time is used only on the frontpage and the article's /item page. If you find the article on /from or /submitted, for example, the timestamp will be the original. The two timestamps converge over time.
Demanding transparency is fine but you’ve got to provide proof with your claims. If there are stories which feel manipulated to you link them and let the audience see, maybe you’re right.
I am, so you can believe it. But: I don't flag things that I'm tired of.
Crypto was mostly scams or pie in the sky ideas that will never work. It will stick around for money laundering & buying drugs but that's about it.
The people who made coins and tokens bad for society are doing the same thing with GenAI...
Both are useful and both come with huge problems. Neither one is some panacea or a sustainable get-rich-quick scheme (obviously, both people in "crypto" and in "GenAI" are getting rich, but neither are going to lead to some sort of great societal good).
But that's not the sense under discussion. "Crypto"=cryptography lost the language war and was completely supplanted by "crypto"=cryptocurrency. I really wish the word could regain its original and useful meaning, but it's too late now.
Ironically, "I work in crypto" went from meaning something useful to society to meaning being a parasite on society, and you'd best not accidentally use the phrase expecting people to understand it to mean the original thing (cryptography).
(Yes, not all uses of cryptocurrency are a parasitic detriment. But if you happen to be working on actually useful stuff and we meet socially, then please be very quick about saying that you work at doing something with cryptocurrency or blockchain that is intended to provide actual benefit. If you just say "I work in crypto", I will excuse myself at the first opportunity.)
On the timescale of the past 4-5 years, you are correct about the popular usage.
However, if cryptocurrency continues to recede from the public eye, then in another 4-5 years I think "crypto" will no longer mean "cryptocurrency".
Understanding both the current lexicon and the "archaic" and "recently archaic" uses of the term I hold is both useful and pertinent to being able to communicate effectively. Which is why I immediately clarified, I'm talking about the 40+ year definition of the term, not the current whimsical linguistic fad.
At least it made it easy to figure out who I didn't need to talk to.
It's also why I don't like the "free speech at all costs" meme that gets thrown around when $corporation bans $person_i_like. Every community needs moderation and it's often a thankless job that feels like nothing is being done at all when it's being done right.
For sure many are. This happens with every Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) and LLMs are way beyond a MOT [1]. The hivemind tires of repetition extremely quickly [2]. The trick is to try to separate wheat from chaff, where 'wheat' means the stories that bring Significant New Information (SNI) [3] and 'chaff' means the follow-up and copycat stories, which are legion [4].
It's important to understand are that there's a wide spectrum of opinion about this stuff. If you imagine a slider with "allow zero posts about $TOPIC" at one end, and "allow all posts about $TOPIC" at the other end, pretty much every user would slide it to a different position. This is true for every $TOPIC and especially for the biggest ones.
Frontpage space is the scarcest resource HN has [5] and every reader has a different 'signature' of preferences that they would like to see (or not see) there. This means not only that it's impossible to satisfy everybody, but that it's impossible to fully satisfy anybody—because nobody's 'signature' is perfectly matched on the front page, and (lest any of you be thinking of this quick riposte) certainly not the mods'!
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You seem to have developed these concepts pretty extensively. Seeing you break down this terminology whets my appetite to hear from you in long form.
I think I've only ever flagged one or two instances of spam personally.
And also pretty much any article about inflation.
I am the biggest local ML advocate you will find. My 3090 is either running Yi 34B queries or other experiments all day, my job is with local LLMS... But I am totally OK with heavy handed AI-related moderation. I dont want the sea of AI grifters to have a single second on the HN front page.
I think the answer to this is... go set up your our LLM News web site and build a community. I really love HN but I wanted more retro computing and gaming news so I created by own site (https://twostopbits.com/) using the HN source code. It's not hard. Go build the thing you want and moderate it.
I've been in various online communities for over 35 years and I can tell you that by far the best moderated and longest successfully running community is HN (for a while The Well was amazing).
Does the source code include moderating tools, or is it just a bare bones aggregator with a default ranking algo?
I modified the default source to have a concept of tags on a story because I wanted people to be able to filter stories by their areas of interest (e.g. everything Commodore 64: https://twostopbits.com/tag?q=c64). All my changes are open and here: https://github.com/jgrahamc/twostopbits
It's cool that you set up your own instance, but do you see no problem with covertly altering the score of a story?
Such secrecy leads to oversized, over-trusted forums, and is what this post seeks to address.
The HN source base is a monolithic Arc program and Arc is in Racket/Scheme. To use Workers I would have had to get Racket working on Wasm which I simply haven't tried. Also news.arc does a bunch of file system access and I'd have to rewrite that to use Workers KV or something. So, I decided to use lots of Cloudflare and run the Arc code on a VPS I've had for many years. The whole thing is running in a screen session which I can hop into and be in the REPL when I want.
Surprise! Yes, We are!
Edit: I’m not asking a rhetorical question. There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page. Can anyone attest to this?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
You're right that user flags do more than mods do, just because the numbers work that way: there are many orders of magnitude more users flagging things than there are mods.
Edit: 5 orders of magnitude more, in fact!
> We didn't flag the post; users did. When it comes to submissions, that's nearly always the case - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
Example 1: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39142094
Example 2: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39130652
Example 3: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39214844
Does this crowd think it's cool and normal that all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed, based on the opinion of a dedicated minority?
US tech giants are heavily implicated in this, so no one can seriously argue the topic isn't relevant. A World War could come from these "plausibly genocidal" actions, which are enabled in various ways by US tech giants.
Exactly. Big tech has been staggeringly complicit in these oh-so documented war crimes. For example, AI is being used to 'target' people, even in refugee camps and residential areas; even when hundreds of civilian casualties are predicted. This has been admitted - even boasted about.
As tech people, we can't just stick our heads in the sand and expect this not to come back on us. We're enabling this destruction in myriad ways, from funding to coercion to suppression of discussion [cough].
Genocide isn't just politics. We are legally bound as a nation, and morally obligated as humans, to prevent it. Instead, the US and many its tech companies are complicit.
If we can't even discuss the ICJ ruling that this may well be in fact a genocide, even when people are behaving and upvoting without breaking guidelines, then imo something very important has been broken.
"We" ain't all americans. There are people here coming from opposing sides in various wars. And there are more wars and slaughtering going on, than in the middle east. And "we" are just tech people. Not better or worse by principle, which shows off very easily as there can be religious flame wars about software already. So it would be good, if we could debate all this in a nice way. But apparently we cannot. This is why many people want NO politics here at all. As there is usually nothing coming out of it, except more of the usual - and not interesting discussions.
The vast majority of English speaking countries signed the Genocide Convention, if not all [0]
> This is why many people want NO politics here at all.
They're not a majority, far from it. And the rules don't say "NO politics"; that would be absurd. Tech and politics overlap often - as they do here.
0 - https://www.statista.com/chart/22194/countries-that-havent-r...
I'd call the flaggers colluding to spike stories with lively and non toxic discussions the 'activists'.
> Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.
So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options. Suppressing anything with a whiff of controversy doesn't result in positive outcomes.
Besides; freedom of speech, and free exchange of ideas, are both decidedly in the "good hacker" wheelhouse.
Have you seen one discussion about Gaza free of that? I haven't. (My main account is rate limited, because of a recent Gaza debate btw. Because I like heated discussions from time to time. But I can respect that it is not wanted here)
"So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options."
So one of those options are, you start your own forum, where you can have all that, instead of demanding that other people and places change to your liking. Just a suggestion.
I have. I linked them as examples above.
> demanding that other people and places change to your liking
I haven't made any demands. I've said what I'd like to see improved.
On the whole I like this community, and I try to contribute to it positively. Making suggestions on how it could be run with less censorship and suppression is not an unreasonable thing to do, and it's odd you think it is tbh.
In my opinion they were not free of that.
"ICJ orders Israel to stop genocide in Gaza"
And this one is really bad, as the ICJ did not do such a thing. The ICJ has not made any ruling, whether what happens in Gaza is genocide or not, so what good can come out of such a manipulative headline?
The initial invasion was allowed due to the international significance, but to discuss subsequent events head to Reddit.
This is in the FAQ linked in the footer.
Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar will be on topic.
From the submission guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
People here were clearly finding those stories interesting, as measured by upvotes and comments.
> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
US mainstream TV mostly declined to air South Africa's side of the case, as well as the actual verdict; opting instead to only air Israel's defense.
> Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar will be on topic.
"Something with drones" = on topic, but a plausible genocide verdict from the ICJ is not of "international significance" and therefore off topic... This isn't computing for me, sorry.
The verdict had a thread with over fifteen hundred comments and was on the front page most of the day. Others were presumably down ranked as they were dupes.
Also, it was removed within a minute of hitting the front page (if I'm reading the graphs right). Doesn't quite line up with your presumption.
Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?
Besides - the point is this: Not all the stories that are in OP's list are spam, or unsuitable. Some topics hit a third rail.
They are easily removed by a small group of users, and then Daniel can come by months later and say, well, users flagged it [ie, 0]. It even happens to PG [1]. This isn't ideal, and pretending it isn't happening is uncool.
I'm not saying Dang doesn't do a great job. But there are some topics that are verboten, despite their impact/relevance on the tech community and our general interest. And this particular topic is too important to allow for such narrative control by a tiny group of flaggers.
Presumably users flagged both posts almost immediately, and by the time mods decided that the topic was worth discussion the second thread had more engagement. The first thread was still a dupe despite being posted earlier.
>Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?
While the verdict was a major event like you said, The Guardian's story was not. Users flagged it, like all posts on the topic, and the mods decided it was not different enough from previous discussions to justify a new flame war.
The ongoing wars are topics worthy of discussions, and they get discussed here. They don't need daily discussions. If you want daily discussions, there are plenty of places you can go to do that.
I think I read this from a comment from dang.
We don't ban these sites, because all of them occasionally produce solid original articles. But we downrank them because if we didn't, the frontpage would consist of little else—and many readers still feel they're over-represented, even with the downranking.
Per the guidelines:
>What to Submit
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The latter two stories are not new phenomenon (the war has been ongoing), and the former, literally being a decision by a political body, falls squarely under "politics", and is highly likely to lead to nonproductive flamewars.
(1) These stories feel incredibly important to me now!
-and-
(2) Complete strangers, all over the internet, and with no official duties or obligations regarding the subjects of these stories, should be required to pay attention to them!
The first one is fine. The second one suggests a somewhat immature worldview, or limited social skills.
Part of this is because I’m European, and the whole “red vs blue” team sort or politics a lot of Americans seem to do these days is just silly, and often hateful. But part of it is also that we’re a bunch of people who know tech and business, but not international politics. I guess I could just ignore them, but I’d frankly rather they were kept to other places on the internet.
HN had an enormous thread about the ICJ decision:
ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043 - Jan 2024 (1397 comments)
The question here isn't whether the topic has been suppressed; it's how much of it HN can handle. We're willing to turn off flags from time to time, but HN is not designed for frequent repetition, especially of flamewar topics—it's designed for the opposite. That makes the question of how to handle a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) a tricky one. HN has a reasonably well-defined approach to this, which has been stable for many years:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Which is the point - a small crowd of partisans can flag third rail topics here, no matter how much interest or how much positive discussion is happening.
I remember, in particular, the time all the posts about a lead torturer from Abu Ghraib were suppressed. Although she destroyed Congressional evidence, she was promoted to a top position at at a top tech hirer. We should be able to talk about things like that.
Your response then was the same as now; to deflect responsibility to 'users'. I don't buy it. The same happened with Annie Altman's claims about her brother. The same has happened with quite a few Zionism related threads, recently and historically. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37953737, which clearly is squarely in our domain.
There is room for improvement here. A minority of strongly biased participants, on any issue, shouldn't be able to completely disappear whole sides of the story, as has been happening.
But there are other ways besides flags for stories to fall suddenly off the front page: software penalties (e.g. the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector, various abuse detection systems, etc.) and moderation downweights. Users don't do either of those.
These points are covered in the FAQ although necessarily tersely. See "How are stories ranked?" and "What does [flagged] mean?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.
Yes, there is dang, the single admin who posts publicly, and I guess it's possible/probable there are other HN admins who assist him. But 99.9% of the time when I hear people complaining about "the mods" or "power tripping mods" or "censorship", it's basically that other users saw what you had to say, and we just don't want to see it here.
It's also weird that occasionally people think there is some sort of "rule" about what can be flagged. There are obviously guidelines, but as this power is held by any normal user, it's basically whatever they want it to mean. For example, I frequently flag stories where I think the topic and article is totally valid, but where every single time I've seen the topic debated on HN it becomes a useless flamewar or is filled with the lowest quality commentary. At least for me, flagging isn't a value judgment on the "worthiness" of an article, it's simply about stuff I don't want to see on HN.
Partially, but I think these are all symptoms for a more fundamental root cause: HN is just comprised of too many emotional, passionate users with fundamentally differing beliefs.
The usual song and dance with flagging goes something like the following with cryptocurrency:
1. User posts cryptocurrency article
2. People who passionately hate cryptocurrency start adding in emotional comments about how they hate it.
3. People who want to fight this passionate hate respond in kind.
4. The thread turns into a giant argument where nobody is willing to concede anything and everyone is just shouting at each other.
5. Either the flamewar detector kicks in (as it should) or everyone not in the thread tires of the shouting and flags it.
That's fine but regrettable when limited to some topics like crypto. But it's happening with social media company earnings reports, layoff posts, RTO discussions, posts about Musk, autonomous vehicles, and on and on.
dang (and the mod team?) are doing great work, but this is despite the feeling I have that HN is barely being held together into a cohesive community, and I'm struggling to even use the word "community" here. I feel the temperature of discussions has gotten a lot hotter here than it used to be and some basic work I've done with sentiment classifiers on comments here mirrors my perspective.
I just don't think a single community can handle so many passionate, opposed groups. It bubbles up by proxy in these sorts of flagging wars where so many articles get bumped off the page due to the inability of the community to discuss it well. Maybe the solution is to just discuss software as some people really want, but even then you get massive flamewars over things like Rust async. Even with interesting topics like VR posts, the overall temperature of the comments here is high enough that I've stopped bothering to comment as much as I used to.
An interesting heuristic I've seen play out a few times now across different communities (and that HN is starting to suffer from now on more contentious topics) is that too many comments on a post means that it's low quality. A handful of comments on an old post means there's not a lot to say about a topic; too many comments means that there's not a lot to change your mind about
> In the case of the second, the Story was in third place on the Front Page, less than an hour after the submission. In this case it was simply removed from the Front Page.
With repeatedly getting flagged articles like this, at some point you have to begin to wonder if you are not simply spamming the community by trying to promote your links.
I get that people want to promote their stuff but the community has preferences too. The community can get tired of LLM articles reaching the front page everyday! The community can refuse to be spammed and the community can flag articles!
> While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
Denial? Why is it so hard to believe that HN users would get tired LLM-related news. I get tired of it myself but I don't have flagging privilege. I find it very believable that HN users who have the flagging privilege might want to flag LLM-related news.
Looks like you should? Is https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re... wrong? You need to be on a comment's page; click its timestamp to get there.
If you can't fathom people being tired of LLM-related news, have I got an NFT for you!
I'm not sure this is a valid assumption. https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39094387 looks to be a story that dropped to the thirties pretty quickly. Maybe due to other suddenly popular content?
Looking at the 13 stories listed for Monday, January 22, 2024 only 3 seem to have been removed from HN. The other 10 stories still exist.
The HP story, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39087776, was likely kicked from the front page due to being a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39060793
The Ford story, https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39089599, seems to be incorrectly detected.
Honestly only 3 or 4 out of 13 look like possible moderation to me. And they don't seem bad. Does a story about razor wire in Texas belong on hacker news? I'm in Texas so the story is of interest to me but I'd expect to hear about it elsewhere, not on HN.
Overall it just makes me think HN is doing a good job at moderation.
Perhaps in TX you don't realize it, but it's a big national story, implicating the Constitution, federal authority, even the Civil War.
It's political, for sure; but it's not local.
If it gets algorithmically deranked for user flags, but but not hidden, is that explicit?
I assume "explicit" means manual moderator intervention, but I don't really see anything that suggests that.
Because there is no visible indication when moderator intervention happens. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
I consider myself very optimistic and often naive, but even I would not be surprised by this kind of HN user reaction :D
I am. Completely sick of it! Thanks dang for your diligent moderation.
There’s a wealth of great blogposts that show up there which don’t always make it to the front page (understandable; we only have so much attention to give).
What I will say is that there is a ton of cruft that spams the board. Thinking of spammed blog posts from one or more accounts, sensationalist news, etc which wouldn’t provide much value here.
Flagging really helps on /new IME. It’s worth spending time there if you haven’t tried HN other than via the front page
I know there are already a handful of comments about this line, but wow! It bears repeating: My eyebrows almost shot off the top of my head when I read this. What kinds of things does the author find easy to believe??
This is obviously harder, because vote totals aren't publicly available for comment sections, but it is much more important as a tool. What topics are on the front page is much more clearly the legitimate domain of moderation than what commentary is made about them, especially when moderation of those comments contradicts the vote mechanism.
(1) if the top comment is indignantly rhetorical or generic, downweight it; otherwise go look at another thread;
(2) refresh the page;
(3) goto (1).
If I'm feeling diligent, I might do this for the top few subthreads, but that's about it.
This simple intervention turns out to be the highest-leverage thing we've figured out in recent years:
ttps://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20highest%20leverage&sort=byDate&type=comment
I would rather see the highest voted comments, and I'm pretty happy to just scroll down myself if I find the top comment to be useless.
I don't know about everyone else, but I sure am, and I work on them for my PhD.
Thanks.
Maybe this is a consequence of Hacker News not having a way to downvote stories?
I only flag stories that are blatant violation of HN's guidelines: SPAM, politics, racist... Otherwise, if I don't like a story I don't do anything.
Maybe I'll start flagging stories that I don't like?
If as many people thoughtfully vouched as maliciously flagged it may be less of an issue.
For dead stories in the "new" queue, I see a "vouch" option already without going to the story's own page.
I also pretty regularly vouch.
looks like you didn't feel free.
http://web.archive.org/web/20221110043732/https://old.reddit...
How can you complain about your submissions getting hundreds of upvotes and a bunch of discussion over the last 4 months only. That's a decent amount of eyeballs.
Other than the blatant offtopic/spam ones, most of them are just ones that have drifted away and are old news, or flagged, or dupes. It's driven by the flow of the site and its users.
i feel like yes of course there are many things i disagree with on this site. but ultimately i value the information shared and the discussion enough to keep coming back. any relationship where people always agree there is probably only one person doing the actual thinking.
i have learned so much about tech here, i have learned about many best practices and projects that i would have never heard of, i have made no bones about my thoughts on various subjects that could easily be classified as touchy, i have really enjoyed the discourse. for the time being i definitely plan and hope to continue doing so.
(so while this site is an interesting artifact, and maybe it is good that someone is taking a look and keeping a record, i personally won't bother unless/until i see a pressing need. at which point i will maybe just move on instead tbh.)
Half the comments on Reddit really do seem to be made by bots, you can easily tell when you look at their post history.
The OP's hypothesis is that, if rank drops from top-30 to below top-90 (I think "higher than 90" is a typo?), in less than a minute, then it must be due to moderator action.
Is that true?
How to do this? One idea is to write an appropriate prompt for GPT-4. Something along the lines of “if you were HN moderator or HN community, would you censor this story? Please give numerical score.” Then post a much smaller list with top scores. That would be useful I think.
So what did you learn ??
If you see examples you're welcome to ask us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Which is true?
[1] - Notably the majority of the "removed" stories have pretty tiny number of upvotes, so if flags are weighted proportionately it wouldn't take many.
Not everyone wants to discuss political topics on HN. They say there are other places to discuss such topics. I like to hear the opinions of the HN audience on a wide variety of topics. Maybe this tool will help those of us who value the HN community in this way by facilitating discussions on topics deemed inappropriate for the official front page.
For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39219568 was just a dupe. Maybe that's the case for some of the more technical stories that are removed.
It's interesting to see the comments sometimes, but since part of the reason these things get removed is because of the flamewar detector, I feel like I can't be that surprised or edified when I open the bag labeled "manure" to find it is full of shit.
For example, is it more commonplace lately to comment without upvoting, than it used to be? (Upvoting the post and/or the parent comment.)
And how has the comments-to-pageviews ratio changed over time?
just trying to see what makes the moderation good :)
If there are specific examples I haven't addressed yet, post links and I'll take a look!
He could have phrased it a little better but the people calling for his removal from YC are just plain silly.
What is criteria to remove some of these.
I've read the 'terms' for submitting. sometimes the removed ones don't appear to violate anything.
All kinds of tools related to HN content generate front page interest even for days but then once that passes things that cost money or use unreliable free resources start to disappear at an ever more rapid pace.
When they don't, the UI can become unmanageable... I'm not sure how this content will be organized over time but updating the README won't be tenable for long!
While the above is me joking, I appreciate the extreme transparency that showing code and explaining methodology provides. This adds more credibility than any other single thing the author could have done.
https://github.com/calibas/hacker-newd/blob/main/hacker-newd...
There are companies who if you submit a negative post about, within short order the post is pushed out of view of the top pages.
This is just another way of saying that a critical numeric threshold of users didn't like something. Framing the opinions/actions of groups of people on the internet as conspiring or dog-piling is a fallacy. E.g. if a person Tweets something that a million people read and a hundred of them reply to disagree, you'll often see that person follow up with something like, "wow, now all these people are attacking me", even though everybody acted in complete isolation and did nothing strange or harmful individually. Nobody rang a bell in the town square and handed out pitchforks. The internet breaks human psychology.
I'm not denying your premise that yes sometimes independent people with no coordination, all flag an article. That is how the system should work. But there are also articles that will quickly get flagged through coordination of interested parties.
Hacker News has a lot more power than many think in terms of tastemaking in the tech industry. So there is a lot of motivation and benefit for people to manipulate its functionality to either boost or protect their business.
1. "Breathing 101" is an uninformative headline. I correctly guessed that it was literally referring to the human act of breathing, but it's still a bad title (I know it's not your title, and that HN encourages using the original source's title; it just sucks).
2. You submitted the link with no comment or context about what the article was or why it might be interesting. If a headline grabs my eye, I always click on the "N comments" link and the article link to open two tabs, and I look for additional descriptive text from the submitter, or a comment from them about what they found interesting. Sometimes I read the actual article first, but if the title is ambiguous or the topic is contentious, I'll usually start with the comments tab and see if I'm going to be wasting my time before I read an article. This alone wouldn't be a reason to downvote, but if I was leaning that way, it would factor in.
3. The word "wellness" in the link's domain is a huge red flag. To me it means "this is going to be a bunch of hippie crap". Not a primary factor, but seeing that would be enough to make me dig farther and find evidence so that I could Angry Downvote something I don't want to see on HN ever, if we could downvote. Yes, this is petty.
4. The very top of the linked article says "Click here to make an appointment". This indicates spam.
5. The article is just bad. There's not much information. It's not scientific. It touches lightly on some potentially interesting things but doesn't dive into them at all, or link to better sources, and it ends with what appears to be advice and encouragement to incorporate breathing exercises, but without much information about how or what the benefit is.
It looks like spam. It's the kind of clickbait that floods my Facebook feed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240203104237/https://news.ycom...
https://hnrankings.info/39073285/
It just disappeared from HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Some of the opinion sections get extra downweight - that might be helping a little.
You may or may not agree with the conclusions of the post, but its a technical topic with at least some specific exploration of the (performance/code writing) issues, that links to quite a few further topics for exploration.
https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html
That said, I noted more than a few typos in the article, so I wonder if there is generally a spell check filter for article quality.
https://trunk.io/blog/git-commit-messages-are-useless
I also found this one interesting. I don't agree with the article, but its an interesting viewpoint and I learned a bit about what some people are doing with git. I couldn't tell you why it dropped (unpopular)?
Which is where its possible that this (new) tool falls short, it can't actually tell what was censored, just what wasn't popular.
Unpopular things sometimes are so because they fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but aren't actually wrong or invaluable, which might be the real value of this tool.
It is really not. It is a rant that produced no good discussion anywhere else on the internet. It has no novel insight and is dressed up in a really ugly way. I'm not saying HN should have removed it, but I don't mind that it got flagged.
I wonder if a useful application for these "AI"s could be to pull interesting - to someone - stories from what the hive minds rejected ;)
Just to be clear, this is stories that got completely removed off the front page and does not include whatever is still available 4 pages behind but got overtaken by other stuff?
Sometimes I see an interesting heading but skip it, and when i reload it's gone. I doubt they were all flagged into oblivion.
The flagging system is a great utility, but certain things (e.g. anything pro-Musk) get mass flagged for emotional reasons.
Unfortunately those stories often turn into flamewars. That's probably why people are flagging them.
I don't think it's wise to draw so many inferences about why people vote the way they do. Frequently I see comments where someone makes a reasonable point, but also drops a bunch of flamebait, and when they're inevitably flagged they edit their comment to claim that the flags prove their point and that the problem who disagree with them are overly sensitive and censorious. But in reality a lot of the people flagging them probably agree with them, but don't want them to start a flamewars. I flag a lot of comments like that, even when I am agree with their overall point. (I actually did that with a comment just now.)
It's a form of self fulfilling prophecy and further entrenches you into your position, which is antithetical to curious discussion.
Lots of Musk stuff, including positive stuff, on the front page. Yesterday there was a story about petabytes of data on the Starlink laser network, based only on Starlink PR afaict.
If you believe that HN is a hive mind and all users must believe in the exact same things, then yes, this is probably hard to believe.
I however, am tired of LLM news, but I just simply ignore them as I'm well aware that many people here are very much interested in them. So at least an anecdotal response of one that some HN users are tired of LLM related news.
You might also be surprised that not all HN users like social media while some do. Some are very privacy conscious while others will freely post all of their everythings to anywhere. You might find it hard to believe that some lean left while others lean right with some even landing straight in the middle. Why you would think anything is hard to believe in this day and age is very strange to me.
And then you get those of us who are simultaneously left-of-left and right-of-right...
It would be ultra-cool to have rough topic filters here, so I could just go to settings and hit a checkbox to ignore all the LLM-this and AI-that articles. Easier said than done, I'm sure.
Replace "HN users" with "most HN users" (it's common to use general language when one's intention is to point out a trend in a population) and, as another person tired of AI/LLM news, I would also be surprised given how much popularity (upvotes, comments) HN users tended to give to those stories.
You find it hard to believe that users are fatigued by a subject that is posted ad nauseam? People have been tired for over a year.
I don't understand why this story was removed: "It turns out the six-feet social-distancing rule had no scientific basis", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200511
On a forum with an overwhelmingly science-minded audience, it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.
Maybe you should Submit it again with the original title, and see what happens.
That top comment complains that the HN title is WSJ's informative subheading instead of its clickbaity headline.
If there's no possible title to use for a submission that won't get it flagged, then clearly it's not a great article to be submitting.
And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules. (The paywall doesn't help its viability as an HN submission, either.)
What do you mean: "not an accurate characterization of the content of the article"? The title pretty accurately describes an admission by the former NIAID director in a House Select Subcommittee, according to the WSJ. That admission is the topic of the article.
> And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules.
From HN's rules:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait;
I think using the clickbaity original title ("Anthony Fauci Fesses Up") would be flouting HN's rules.
I also think this sort of thing invites flag brigades. Or better yet, a small batch of bad actor can easily start brigading and forcefully associate such flamewar expectations with any subject they don't like to drive it off HN.
Maybe worth reconsidering how you flag? You might be getting played. Or not, I really don't know. No obvious answers.
HN does not have to be a space for conversations about every important story. It is enough for it to be good at the conversations it is good at. There's a whole wide internet out there for the rest of the important conversations to take place on. Moreover: that has always been the premise of HN; it's not a principle we just sort of slipped into accidentally.
HN is a single place on the internet with clear moderation guidelines[1]. It doesn't have to cater to every form of speech. In fact, actively not doing so is probably the reason why HN's level of discourse is comparatively high.
People who want Reddit should go to Reddit, not drag HN with them through the mud.
But this attitude explains a lot of the abusive flagging that goes on here. Stories get flagged because they make people feel ick, and they feel ick because they previously took positions that were wrong. So they flag. And when asked, why do you flag, they say "I don't know, I just don't like it", forgetting that the site exists supposedly to help drive intellectual curiousity. You may not like these stories, but other people do find them useful and you should not interfere with them.
Concrete examples from your comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32104731
"Given the weak sourcing, it feels like this article, in particular, flunks the "divisive subjects require more thought and substance" test."
(on a Bari Weiss article arguing that health authorities weren't really driven by science, something they now admit themselves was true).
In other comments you asserted that COVID vaccines can't possibly be dangerous but also said, "Convincing suspicious vaccine-skeptics of the value of vaccines is not the goal here. We're not a public health service; we're a forum for curious conversation. Tedious rehashes of antivax arguments aren't curious; they're just tedious."
If you don't like such discussions, ignore them! Nobody forces you to click through to the comments section. But this tactic of trying to define disagreement with your very strong opinions as not "curious" enough is tiresome. Other people do in fact want curious conversation, which will sometimes mean conversations about topics that you don't like. I'll say it again: leave those discussions alone. Stay away by all means, but don't interfere with other people's curiousity.
Check this out. It's barely on the front page, and has just 3 comments right now. How great is this post? How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235484
My son is a biochemist (interviewing for grad school slots right now, as in this actual evening, I'm living vicariously through him, wish him luck). I've been for years paying attention to bio/chem/biotech experts on HN, because I'm a biochem dad. We have lots of expertise about COVID here. None of it is on these COVID threads because all of them would apparently rather eat a bug than "truth it out" with people paraphrasing Bari Weiss. The verdict is in. You're on the wrong side of it!
But these have been useful data points for me, and I appreciate you offering them up. Have a great weekend!
Surely his middle school biology teachers had something to do with it. You should pay them a visit. Maybe ask them how many genders there are and see their faces contort in horror.
Please note that on this, covid, and whatever other such... things.. I offer no opinions of my own. I don't actually care very much about those topics and also, perhaps similarly to you, am put off by the far-(right|left) fanatics obsessed with them.
My peeve is with what it did to good public discourse and good people.
Perhaps if you see it on the faces of your sons teachers, who no doubt have had a rather increasingly stressful job in the not so many years since he left them, and to whom he owes at least a modicum of his no doubt bright future - you will understand my objection to your behavior of drumming out people in this fashion.
> How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more
So do so! Nobody forces you to click on the Bari Weiss stuff. There is no doubt an evil twilight zone tptacek who flags the other way. And you both think you're great sheriffs clearing the joint from scum.
How much would I rather the thread you linked on daunting papers. How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than "you-are-wrong-about-my-sacred-cow, flagged!" remarks.
In my opinion you should just let people be wrong (see, no snarky air quotes from me! I hope you understand my tone and where I'm coming from) in the covid threads, leave each other alone and it won't boil over to more interesting threads. It's weird adults teach this in kindergarten but on a fancy I so smart forum we can't bring ourselves to rise above.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
An editorial that clearly does not embody that spirit is a poor starting point if you want the discussion to trend towards sanity.
Especially when the title itself violates—and ensures further violations of—this rule:
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.
There are communities that are good for that kind of discussion, but that’s not what we come here to do. And for this place to stay good at what it does do, it can’t afford to drown out the signal with the noise of emotive bickering.
The site guidelines do, I think, an incredible job of articulating what sustains the tenor here.
But at the end of the day, how best to capture “the vibes” about whether we collectively think a topic is tired or doesn’t fit here? It seems like HN does it just like a good dinner party host would: Change the subject when your guests—that is, the people with a strong track record of positive contributions—indicate that they’re weary of it. After all, we’ve got plenty of things to talk about that we do agree would be fruitful.
The expertise on HN is indeed unrivaled.
If I want to learn about the quirks of a variational autoencoder in some neural network, I read the discussion between experts here on HN [1].
If I want to learn about protein folding, I can find relevant domain experts answering questions here on HN [2].
But why do you and so many others think that there is a covid-shaped hole in the expertise on HN? Do you really believe that out of all domain experts, the covid ones decided to stay away from here?
This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is. That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.
I hardly see any covid threads here. I happened to see the one of this week. It got 8 comments before being flagged into oblivion.
>That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.
You cannot have it both ways. Either you flag covid threads preemptively [1] along with a bunch of other users [2], or you try to learn from domain experts in these threads.
But making assumptions about what these experts would have thought of these threads, had they not been flagged down prematurely, is a weird leap of reasoning.
In plain English, not enough people actually know what they are talking about to create an informative and educational discussion. So they all just end up as a pointless exercise in all the worst aspects of forum flame wars.
HN is at its best when people with lots of relevant experience and knowledge come into the discussion. Then the rest of us can learn new facts, tools, perspectives, etc.
There’s a long list of topics where that is just not available in the existing audience. So there are a lot of topics that, while interesting, are just not a good investment of everyone’s time here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29532676
That thread actually changed my mind on the issue. You say "We should be able as a community to discuss conterversial subjects somehow." Well, guess what, we're not, or at least we're not without a great amount of care. Stories like the submitted one, which may be factually accurate but clearly have a political axe to grind are absolutely not going to lead to anything but a shitstorm of useless discussion.
IMHO story submissions should be judged based upon their own merits. Toxic commenters can be downvoted/banned but the story submitter shouldn't be punished for the misbehavior of others.
> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
You mean purely based on the expected awfulness of imagined future comments, instead of the actual comments? If so, with a precrime mindset like that, you're fanning the flames of controversy.
There's not enough space on the front page for all the good things we want to read. I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation. The people most invested in these kinds of stories seem to be almost the least invested in HN's rubric of curious conversation.
I don't call any of the shots around here, but I think I speak for a bunch of different users who flag this way.
I didn't ask you to expend effort in rescuing stories. I took issue with the way you expend effort in burying stories, even before the comment section turns out to go sideways:
> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.
Remember though: we're not having this conversation so you can persuade me to change how I use the site. I'm just one doofus here. Wha ye need tae worry about are the t'ousand doofuses standing behind me. (_The Devil's Own_, 1997, starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford).
If you demand precise scientific rigor in all aspects of everyday life, public health is probably not the career field for you.
Put a water hose on mist and spray someone with it. Then put a cloth over the nozzle and try to spray them. It's self evident yet people just could not grasp it.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abs...
When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless. Also keep in the mind that the primary reason for studies showing masks not working is that people don't wear it correctly or at all.
That's just one RCT. The Cochrane meta-analysis looked at a bunch of them.
>When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless.
You're putting the cart before the horse. In an ideal world, guidelines for the medical field are based on scientific evidence. But there's always a delay.
You better consult the scientific evidence to make up your mind.
When it comes to covid and masking, policymakers will wait as long as possible before aknowledging the evidence, because they know the public hasn't forgotten the draconian masking of school kids yet.
It is an extraordinary claim that wearing a mask properly does not reduce transmission of viral particles. You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously. Then you can point to studies whose results are explained by that hypothesis.
I'm not trying to prove anything. I just rely on the judgement of domain experts.
In this thread I cited Cochrane, The Lancet, SciAm and Science Magazine. If you have more reputable sources, please share them here.
>You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously.
It's only unintuitive if you stick to the droplet model. SARS-CoV-2 however spreads like smoke through the air, as I documented already extensively in this post:
However, because there's a right wing cult around Donald Trump, whose fortunes were hurt by the pandemic, the six foot rule and masking and vaccines are set up as straw men and attacked by a gigantic and well funded and organized horde of proxies, including the #1 media network in the US. It goes something like this: because a particular individual got COVID, that's proof that vaccines are not 100% effective and so They Lied To Us For Nefarious Purposes. Or because this particular individual stood 6 feet away and still got COVID, that's evidence that Fauci Is In A Conspiracy With The Chinese. Or because this particular individual survived COVID, it's just a cold. Or because masks are not 100% effective when not worn securely, they are not effective. And on and on.
So it's not unreasonable or unlikely that you heard a thing about bad science and six feet of social distance or whatever. But hearing a thing, and the thing being true from foundational motivations of actual science, are very different right now.
You can't just make up the beneficial effects of something as you go. Can you cite some randomized controlled trials that support your claim?
>Just like forced masking up probably saved tens of thousands of lives.
One year ago, a huge Cochrane meta-analysis of the available RCTs regarding masking has put that idea to bed: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
"Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
Example very large study published in a reputable journal: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069?cookieSe...
Yes. To their credit, they only looked at randomized controlled trials.
>"Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."
In other words: the RCTs don't show an effect to a significant degree.
1. I think for anyone that has been on HN throughout pandemic knows it is extremely unlikely for topics like this to produce any sort of valuable discussion. I almost never see any sort of humility on the topic (to be clear, from many/all sides) that admits that people (individuals, experts, literally everyone) were doing what they thought best with the information they had available at the time. It always devolves into portraying the other side as evil. I'm tired of it, I don't want to see it on HN, there are literally pages and pages and pages of place on the Internet where you can have that debate if you're so inclined.
2. Are you honestly purporting that specific article is well tailored to "an overwhelmingly science-minded audience", as opposed to just having a particular political axe to grind, given the title is "Anthony Fauci Fesses Up"? Honestly, if the article was written with an intent to encourage an actual understanding about where the 6-foot rule came from, and about whether the evidence for it was lacking, I probably wouldn't have flagged it.
> it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.
I think the mistake you are making there is thinking because a particular article is flagged by a lot of users that "an important topic like that is deemed untouchable." I can't speak for others, but for me that is absolutely not what I think, and it's not why I flagged this particular submission.
But you also say that making it undiscussable is also not about making the topic untouchable. That's just playing with words, isn't it? It's exactly what you're trying to do and exactly why you're flagging it.
This particular case is really egregious. Fauci has said this draconian policy "just sort of appeared", yet you damn anyone questioning his competence or motives as lacking humility? What would it take for you to allow criticism of this guy?
I could respond to some of your other sentences, but you've exactly proven my point, so thank you.
The subthread your comment generated here already answers your question. (<-- not a criticism! just an observation.) People are flaming each other about the inverse square law, droplets vs. aerosols, who is refusing to face reality, and sundry other nastinesses in the comments below. It demonstrates what a shitshow a frontpage thread would have been.
It's not that the topic itself is "untouchable". HN had quite a few threads about the lab leak hypothesis for example. But these things are sensitive to initial conditions, and something about the way that headline frames the story feels doomed to me, from an HN point of view. The sweet spot for HN is substantive, thoughtful conversation driven by intellectual curiosity. That's what the site is for. We don't always get there by any means, but I only want to turn off user flags when the odds give us a fighting chance. I remember seeing that story get flagged and thinking: it'll never work.
Another aspect of this: like it or not, curiosity and repetition have an inverse relationship. After the mind has been hammered with the same hammer enough times, curiosity gets sick of it and goes "ugh, not that again". That means that on a topic like all-things-covid, which we all got hammered with, the majority of the audience, who don't care that much, check out at first mention of the topic. Who does that leave? The ones whose motive is more intense than mere curiosity.
From an HN point of view, that's a ticket to hell. Curiosity can only operate within a certain range of nervous system activation. If the needle sinks too low, the topic is 'bleh' and nobody cares; but if the needle goes into the red, people will care—my god will they care—but they'll no longer be functioning out of curiosity. That's a failure mode for HN.
When it comes to divisive, heavily-covered topics like that one, the thing to watch for is some kind of interesting new information that isn't entirely reducible to existing battle lines. The same forces driving the thread into flamewar will still be present—but at least you'll have some current running the other way.
Like someone above pointed out, a rule of moderation on HN literally is, that stories about HN or ycombinator companies itself are moderated less [0].
[0] - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I think this is the beginning of HN becoming irrelevant in its old age. It starts to ignore realities it doesn’t like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_bla...