How come this article has disappeared from HN front page ?
Posted 2 hours ago and with 649 points
This story spent 18 hours on the front page seven days ago, and attracted over 1100 upvotes and over 600 comments. It also attracted dozens of community flags, but we turned off the flags in order to give the story full visibility.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
We don't manually intervene to deemphasise content just because it's political, and indeed we often manually intervene to restore political stories to the front page when they have been automatically downweighted due to flags or flamewars.
We moderate to optimize for intellectual curiosity, nothing more.
It’s what I’m referring to when I say that I’ve never once seen a moderator once consider their own judgement when presented with feedback. It’s always the same line. Things are running exactly as intended from your point of view it would seem.
If you have an example of a moderation action that you disagreed with (E.g., a particular story about DOGE or the administration that wasn't adequately discussed on HN), please share a link or something else concrete and we'll explain it or investigate it. You can post it here or email us (we have had email threads going back years with users who want to share feedback and learn about how we think about these things [1]).
There are plenty of ways of examining the data:
- https://github.com/HackerNews/API
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563
- https://news.ycombinator.com/front
If you have concerns about any future stories being hidden, you could set up your own API listener, monitor for new stories and then see which ones are flagged or killed.
For the record, I routinely undertake practices for evaluating and improving my own judgement, and am happy to do so regarding any specific case. But you haven't provided me with any specific feedback to respond to.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
I don't necessarily know that it's moderator malfeascence so much as people abusing HN tools to bury stories that they don't like, but I do think that there should be some consideration about how those tools are being abused and how that abuse can be effectively countered.
I get the impression that an effort is being made to correct the situation, but I've given up on the front page and only visit /active now, so I might be completely wrong.
Also: any time you know of an important story that you think should be on the front page, you can email us to let us know - hn@ycombinator.com. We'll either address it or explain why we're doing something other than what you're asking for.
> Someone relying on HN as their primary news aggregator
Who are these people who look only at HN and nothing else, expecting to be fully informed about everything that's important in the world? :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43691142
It's bog standard HN moderation to remove duplicate stories.
When you are manually putting a dupe tag on a story because someone posted it a week ago I think people feel very differently about that.
This is very literally the kind of behaviour people are referring to when they make the accusation that the mods are actively interfering with what people want to talk about.
This idea that you’re here telling me and others with a straight face that everything is above board while also doing this just doesn’t pass the credibility test, the logic makes no sense.
If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.
It's nothing to do with it being political. It's simply to do with being a duplicate of a story that has already been heavily discussed, just a week ago.
It's a well established convention that a topic is only eligible for further front page exposure when there is "significant new information" (SNI) [2].
There have been many instances of SNI with respect to DOGE this year, which is why there have been (I believe) more front-page stories about it on HN than anything else [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I've noticed that a lot of the articles describing various Trump admin abuses (be it DOGE, or Trump crypto scams, or whatever) get flagged a lot. (While they're very relevant, nobody can tell me SBF crypto drama scams are relevant to HN, but Trump crypto scams are not). It's concerning that there are people on HN who prefer to silence such discussions...
Bunch of other fun links in the footer too :)
How are stories ranked?
The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
i'm inclined to think this is it. can't have the populous too rowdy - gotta settle them down.
Paul Graham (the only "thought leader" behind this website) loudly campaigns against the current U.S. administration almost every day on Twitter.
One YC-backed founder out of more than 10,000 is volunteering with DOGE.
A more thorough response to this trope can be found here:
Does he? https://x.com/paulg (maybe moderated by Musk/Twitter) only shows tweets about Gaza suffering which could be construed as criticising the current administration. On the contrary, I see multiple tweets jerking off Elon Musk (part of the current administration) and calling for compassion and personal sacrifice towards people who voted for Trump. Yes, there's "why you should vote for Kamala" tweet, but nothing critical of the current Trump regime. Let alone daily.
If you follow the logic of his essays—especially ones like “How to Make Wealth,” “Do Things that Don’t Scale,” or “Hackers and Painters”—you end up in a world where:
• The best people ignore rules that slow them down.
• Regulation is often just cargo-cult bureaucracy.
• Wealth is proof of virtue, or at least utility. Wealth + the rest = do what you want if you think you’re right and can get away with it
• Institutions should get out of the way of smart individuals.
• And the market, not the government, should determine value.
The point is, none of it has anything to do with the way we moderate HN – which of the conflicting cues would we follow?
HN has had more front-page-visible, heavily upvoted/discussed stories about DOGE than anything else this year, along with several others relating to the administration, with the overwhelming sentiment in the articles and comments being critical.
Dang has commented at length on the matter several times:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
While it's true that he has spoken against Trump many times, Garry Tan is very close to Thiel, Musk, and the MAGA movement in general. Didn't he recently show support for DOGE as well?
Of course, YC is more than its current CEO and hopefully this doesn't affect the moderation of this website :)
He's on the board of YC, which appoints the CEO [1], and he still has a lot of influence. He still has dinner with dang from time to time to talk about HN [2].
> While it's true that he has spoken against Trump many times, Garry Tan is very close to Thiel, Musk, and the MAGA movement in general. Didn't he recently show support for DOGE as well?
I don't think that's a completely accurate characterisation. Garry continues to identify as a Democrat [3]. He works with people across the political spectrum to make the playing field fair for the earliest-stage startups, which is consistent with his roles as an early-stage investor and a partner (and now CEO) of YC for over a decade. Just a couple of weeks ago he hosted the Little Tech Competition Summit [4] in DC, featuring speakers from different sides and parts of government. One of the most notable speeches was by Cory Booker, who talked at length about the importance of making entrepreneurship accessible to people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, which is a cause Garry deeply supports, given his own life experience.
> Of course, YC is more than its current CEO and hopefully this doesn't affect the moderation of this website :)
Exactly :)
If we were making moderation decisions to serve individuals or agendas that supposedly our “salary depends on”, we'd tie ourselves in knots.
Our job is to keep HN a great place for intellectual curiosity.
[1] https://www.forbes.com.au/covers/innovation/y-combinator-sta...
[2] https://x.com/paulg/status/1758191829491859607
[3] https://x.com/search?q=from%3Agarrytan%20democrat&src=typed_...
Can you elaborate on that?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's also the core principle of HN, as stated at the beginning of the guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Feel free to ask any further questions not answered in the links above!
Sure, I'll just ask directly:
Q: Do you know of any experiments of psychological or sociological nature ran on the HN platform or its participants?
Q: If you knew that such experiments take place, would you be able to confirm it publicly?
Edit: why this question, by the way?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The expression "intellectual curiosity" grabbed my attention. Whatever is happening is definitely curious from an intellectual point of view, but it feels weird.
We’re (always) trying to get better at finding and penalizing bad comments – but not everyone agrees on what constitutes a “bad” comment.
Everyone is welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com if they see any story or comment that seems off, and we’re happy to investigate or explain anything.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1745332080&dateRange=custom&...
Show me all the flagged stories from this year along side it please.