HN depends on people visiting /newest and upvoting or flagging what they see.
A few minutes there each day probably does more for HN than commenting.
It’s anonymous, thankless work, like Reddit’s old “Knights of New,” but it makes a difference.
Despite that, /active is not that bad for that.
I do wonder if a new post quarantine box on the front page, marked as such, would do better than just mixing them in.
- https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/
Fortunately, the HN system has that feature called pool or second chance (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool) where mods periodically check then pick interesting submissions that were overlooked when posted and put them in the second half of the front page and see if the community finds them interesting. This happened to many of my submissions that I was surprised to see trending, sometimes after three days of submission where I totally forgot about them.
The cutoff used to be early 2008, I believe, but that may have changed in the last ~17 years :)
I posted (subjectively) high quality stuff about longevity tools that had a potential to be on front page, but the /newest just grows go so fast that no one will notice it.
Found out that they have devious schema to keep those hidden from anonymous visitor. And if you do this on a registered account, they block such perverts right away, said Gemini.
I wanted only [flagged]-content.
You can get all stuff in JSON-format, but [flagged]-content is elsewhere available only to registered users.
By saying that it feed is better you are saying that the mechanisms which promote stories, and other mechanisms like moderation, make HackerNews worse.
No apps however.
If the system doesnt work why advocate for it? We are a technical people, dont we have a technical solution?
/active, on the other hand, is the real insiders tip. It shows the most active submissions, irrespective of whether they’ve been flagged off the homepage by users who want to avoid “controversial” topics or by an algorithm trying to avoid the same.
You don’t want it to replace the homepage as the arguing will drive you mad over time but it’s worth checking in with to see what conversation is being hidden from you.
This just isn’t a site for arguing politics, if you do it too much with opinions different from the hive mind you get banned for disruptive behavior
you'd have to do additional analysis to find which accounts stopped posting after the linked warnings though. It's not usually the opinion itself that's the problem, but that users with controversial opinions have other things going on, so the controversial opinion is often delivered in a “wake up sheeple” flamebait persecution complex “in smart and everyone here is an idiot” style, which isn’t conducive to constructive debate.
My claim isn’t “nobody gets banned from HN”, it’s “nobody gets banned from HN for having unpopular opinions”.
The parallel comment has very nearly invoked Godwin’s law, so I guess I’ll concede that if your opinion is “a group of people should be killed”, then yea, expressing that opinion would likely end in a ban. We can debate how much of that ban is for the opinion vs calling for the murder of other humans.
I'd call that controversial.
If you don't have showdead on, you should.
We have a great example via the flagged reply in this comment tree, where somebody is complaining about being silenced and their example is full of rambling invective yelling at the moderator.
Basically the topics you might see in mainstream news are usually out.
Well yea, that’s officially part of the guidelines: “ Off-Topic: 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.”
I am generally very happy with HN’s moderation, but I do feel some borderline topics that have been banned or buried missed interesting discussion. I don’t fault those responsible for not wanting to deal with the potential mess though.
The part that I've always disliked is how Dang always just says "oh trust me, none of that happens here" as if that is a normal thing to insist, don't question the legitimacy of our system.
But it's not like I am ever going to get access to the kind of data to actually verify that claim. I don't exactly expect PG to give a random person like me DB access. I can't fault Dang for not wanting to give out tons of info either, as that aint their job.
HN gets millions of hits per day and is variously treated by outsiders as a special place of experts (it isn't), or internally by middle manager types who insist they are special while being unable to read at a high school level and are disconnected from reality but are still inexplicably in charge of decisions that affect the rest of us.
Are we really supposed to believe this place has never been attacked? Never been successfully attacked?
Your state's biggest newspaper comment section is rife with influence campaigns...
What else do you call such a secret in group who all have aligned financial interests and are externally anonymous?
YC sells this feature as an advantage of being funded by YC.
> There are known groups that coordinate to flag things on HN?
Your response is unrelated to my question.
Everytime i open /newest there's a lot of trash that hasn't been downvoted or flagged to oblivion yet.
Not sure it's that better.
And yet, indeed, it is up to us to weigh in for better content.