Thanks, mods.
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.
---
[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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
plural ?