Ask HN: Are posts critical of Google getting flagged shortly after submission? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are posts critical of Google getting flagged shortly after submission?

25 pointsnomilk23 comments

An anecdotal suspicion only (sample size = 3); I don't have any data as evidence except what's stored in my own memory.

The submission YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally [1] from half an hour ago rocketed to ~34 points within 30 minutes, then mysteriously stalled and got zero new upvotes from minutes 30 - 40. (I totally get that could happen to absolutely any post or purely by chance, but just seems sus).

Two other posts I noticed this happen to were YouTube deletes LTT video for teaching people how to live without Google [2] and Google removed 'number of results' default setting for some users [3].

Both got large numbers of upvotes in the first 30-90 minutes but either got slammed by downvotes or flags shortly afterward.

Perhaps something for @Dang to investigate.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41626035

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41466182

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41466138

I've seen so many posts critical of Google here on HN that it would be surprising if there was any such suppression going on.

The one post got 79 comments in under an hour.

Probably tripped the overheated discussion detector.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> overheated discussion detector

First time hearing of this - it might explain (at least part of) what had been observed.

IMO that detector keeps too much actually good content off the front page. Your post needs to be engaging enough for folks to upvote but not too engaging for folks to comment otherwise it leaves the front page.

Yep, anything too controversial or exciting get buried. It's like to polar opposite of the Facebook ranking algorithm.

Seems ripe for manipulation, you could go start arguments in whatever threads you want to see downranked.

YCombinator naturally doesn't want divisive content on the front page as it hurts their brand.

It's not about "brand", it's about the mandate of the site. Intellectual curiosity and internet inflammation are at odds with each other.

That's why I usually check out both default front page and "Most active current discussions" (https://news.ycombinator.com/active).

Perhaps something for @Dang to investigate

You can email such suspicions to hn@ycombinator.com.

FYI, this post was ranking fairly high on the front page, then it just vanished.

Users flagged it. Correctly of course.

I believe there's a certain degree of "reputation management" happening with HN, and it seems unfair that we're not allowed to even talk about it.

That being said, I can understand why you don't want to see the comments degenerate into people accusing each other of being shills and bots.

I'd be happy to answer whatever you want to know about how we run HN but you'll have to explain to me what "reputation management" means. It sounds gross though.

It's often talked about here on HN, sometimes goes by the name ORM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_management

You can easily hire people to manipulate websites.

Can you explain why it should be flagged? At least ostensibly, it seems earnest, introspective (at the site level), and of interest to the community.

(My best guess is perhaps HN doesn’t allow posts about HN. Or perhaps posts based on speculation.)

> perhaps HN doesn’t allow posts about HN

We don't disallow them, but meta is the crack of internet forums, so the bar for those to be on topic is high. The current post doesn't come close to clearing the bar.

Why? Because such perceptions are extremely common and nearly always bogus. You've fallen into the trap (<-- I don't mean to pick on you personally! it's extremely common, as I say) of arriving at an overgeneralization based on a small handful of datapoints that you happened to personally notice. The reality is that HN hosts tons of negative threads about Google. A couple minutes with HN Search is sufficient to establish this. There are also neutral threads about Google and positive threads about Google, of course—it's a big company—but the negative probably dominates.

Hypergeneralization-about-HN-based-on-tiny-set-of-datapoints-that-coalesce-into-perception-that-feels-convincing-but-in-fact-is--bogus-and-which-has-strong-inflammatory-qualities-that-fit-other-peoples-priors-perfectly-and-get-them-going is just about the most common phenomenon that exists on this site and is definitely not the basis for an on-topic submission!

Easily testable hypothesis, at its simplest we could do:

  flagged ~ google_in_title + title_sentiment + upvotes + num_comments + some_time_var

> Perhaps something for @Dang to investigate.

Then email dang? Why bother asking us? We don't have any of this data.

One of those is flagged, the other two are not. (At least as of right now.) You cannot downvote posts, so that isn't a concern.

So sure, there may be some people flagging things... but if the post is not deserving of such treatment, other people typically vouch for it. And it is always possible that HN is doing something more behind the scenes, but odds are it is just the community doing their own self-moderation, with all the pros and cons that come with self-moderation.

AIUI vouching is harder to do/fewer people can do it vs flagging, which IMO enables some at times questionable censorship.

There should be a 1:1 vouch/flag capability or do away with it entirely and just use score like slashdot.

One of the remaining two posts also likely triggered the heated discussion detected, since the one known criteria is if a post has more comments than upvotes, it gets algorithmically pushed down.

[flagged]

Critical posts are often downvoted andor flagged to extinction. It's not unique to Google. If your post is not on board with the "SV moneymaking at all costs" mantra, ethics be danged, you'll likely find it disappear.

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