Hacker News Reader

Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

There are stories on this list that deserved to be seen, were popular, were important, and were not in fact dumpster fires in the comments - but a particular crowd with a particular bias decided to flag them.

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.

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> all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed

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...

I addressed the big ICJ thread below. The suppressed threads were posted much earlier, and showed clear signs of being flagged as soon as they were visible.

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.

There's a certain element that doesn't want to discuss politics at all, so I imagine these ran afoul of that crowd. This is a tech-oriented site, and we're not going to come up with a Middle East peace plan in the comments.

> This is a tech-oriented site

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 are legally bound as a nation"

"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.

> "We" ain't all americans.

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...

The basic metric this site optimizes for is: "interesting discussion". So yes, sometimes there can be interesting discussion about political topics. But most of the times - not so much. And what you apparently want is activism, not discussion. Not to say your activism is bad - but this site is simply not made for activism of any kind. Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.

> what you apparently want is activism, not discussion

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.

"and non toxic discussions"

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.

> Have you seen one discussion about Gaza free of that? I haven't.

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.

"I linked them as examples above."

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?

There are important differences between

(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.

Your comment was fine until the end, but that last sentence crosses into personal attack. Please don't do that—it just makes everything worse, and you can make your substantive points without it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

None of the is on-topic for HN.

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.

The ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has "international significance". It's by far the most significant development in months.

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.

>ICJ is the world's highest court, and genocide cases are very rare. Their verdict, without any question, has "international significance". It's by far the most significant development in months

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043

The linked deleted thread was 90 minutes older than the thread that 'survived'.

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.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311933

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144931

>Doesn't quite line up with your presumption.

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 some major newspapers are 'downvoted' by default, as so many off-topic articles from them are posted.

I think I read this from a comment from dang.

Yes, nearly all major media sites have a mild downweight, as do most of the tech sites that mostly recycle the same stories.

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.

While those stories may be important, they are all off-topic for Hacker News. This is not a general news/discussion site, and there are other places on the internet to discuss those things. HN is explicitly set up to discourage stories which would incur flame-war-like political arguments.

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.

I don’t think these things, or even a lot or the other political topics are uninteresting. I’ll often still flag them, however, since I’m really very uninterested in what the HN crowd who responds to these sort of things have to say about it.

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.

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