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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Edit: ok you guys, all your responses have convinced me that I misread the room, and I'm going to reverse the title edit now.

-- original reply: --

I did those title edits to (marginally) reduce the flamebait effect of the title, in keeping with standard moderation practice (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Titles have by far the biggest impact on discussion quality, so this is a big deal. Especially when the topic is divisive.

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The entire endeavor was orchestrated by Israel - that’s kinda the point here. Meta didn’t act on its own, as the edited title would imply.

I know, but for HN purposes, the point I made about titles is the higher-order bit.

Threads like this, at best, waver on the edge of a hell pit. If it plummets in, the discussion won't stay on HN's front page anyhow. Title de-baiting is a way to support having a discussion that doesn't completely suck, to the extent that this is doable.

Thank you for your efforts to preserve the qualities of one of the few bastions of organic discussion on the Internet.

Its meta's website. Its entirely in their control as to how they respond to a takedown request.

I think in this instance the perpetrator is central to the story/article

speaking as someone who gets a lot of their posts flagged (to the annoyance of dang), a less-inflammatory headline can be less satisfying but a post that isn't flagged will get a lot more traffic than one that is flagged

I totally understand the contention around this topic but you're altering the keypoint of what the article is about. Why remove one country name and keep the other? The article is not about Meta, but how their platform is being manipulated by one country against the other. Your edit shows a strong evidence you're not taking a partisan position and have a preference. I am not sure you should be editing contenious posts when you don't hold a partisan position. Your edit is in the same realm as what the post is talking about. I understand moderation is tricky, but this goes way beyond moderation.

> this goes way beyond moderation

I'm sorry, but that's not true—quite the opposite.

If you guys had any idea how next-to-impossible it is to host substantive discussions about a topic like this, you should recognize that you're getting what you want (frontpage attention for this story) instead of complaining about a secondary detail (the title edit).

A title edit like that is not making a statement about the underlying story, and certainly not trying to suppress any aspect of it. The article is one click away for people to read and make up their own minds about. This thread is filled with comments about the detail that I took out of the title; no one is missing it.

Rather, what I did was bog standard HN moderation, the sort of thing we've done thousands of times on hundreds of topics over 15+ years, purely for the purpose of supporting a substantive discussion of the article that you (I don't mean you personally, but the set of commenters who have been complaining about this) want to be discussed in the first place. From my point of view, that amounts to demanding 100% instead of saying yes to the 90% that you're getting in this case. That's not a realistic assessment of the tradeoffs with a thread like this.

Edit: I'm sorry if that sounded tetchy—I certainly understand the feeling you're expressing and why it feels that way.

I'll try to explain myself better. What triggered my response was that the edit is not different from NYT/CNN publishing an article titled '20 people died when a building collapsed on their head' instead of '<entity> launched a missile on a civilian building'. What's the criteria we are using here to keep or remove '<entity>'? The article involves 3 entities and dropping anyone of them changes the narattive.

I have been hanging out on HN since 2009 and I truely appreciate your dedication to keep this site civil and it definitely is one of the very few that did not degenerate over time. That's the main reason why HN is in my bookmark bar. I appologize if my comment triggered you, and I totally understand where you are coming from as well. If it was my decision, I would keep politics out of HN as I never saw anything fruitful come out of these posts and stresses out moderators as they have to police the thread and find themselves in the way of fire.

At this point, is it feasible to implement user-submitted or generated tags for submissions that can subsequently be concealed?

Our focus is shifting towards the news aspect rather than the hacking aspect, which is the primary reason for my presence here.

There are fluctuations, such as a swing towards current affairs stories during turbulent times, but the basic mix has been stable for years and the baseline isn't likely to change. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 for how far back this question goes...

Not that it helps, necessarily, but the people who have the opposite preference to yours are complaining loudly about how much they feel the current affairs stories are being suppressed on HN.

Re tags: I've always resisted the idea of adding it to the core HN site, but I do think we can do more to support alternate front-ends to HN. With any luck, we can publish the next version of the API this year, which should make that a lot easier.

Least favorite anecdote: Reddit. After an introduction, a friend said, “Why are you on the front page like a new person?” I am auto-subscribed to the front page content channels when I want to be in my subscriptions. However, I miss relevant content because others overwhelm the front pages.

I appreciate your response and the work you continue on the front ends. I obtain political news content from other sources, so my cumulative content feed contains a significant amount of duplicate content.

FWIW I support this. It's more relevant to HN to talk about Meta, the big tech company, doing something wrong than a nation, regardless of where you stand on this issue.

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