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Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally I think that moderation has been a lot more lenient when it comes to political content in the last year than in years prior. I have no hard evidence that this is actually the case, but I think especially pre-2020 I'd see very little political content on HN and now I see much more. It's also probably true that both liberals and conservatives have become even more polarized, leading to bad-faith flagging and downvoting, but I'm actually not sure what could be done about that, seems similar to anti-botting protections which is an arms race

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I'm late to this, but I'm doubtful that that perception is correct. It's true there are fluctuations, as with anything on HN, but the baseline is pretty stable. But the perception that HN has gotten-more-political-lately is about as old as the site itself. In fact, it's so common that about 8 years ago I took a couple hours to track down the history of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

Any thoughts about the issues raised up thread? This article being flagged looks to me to be a clear indication of abuse of the HN flagging system. Or do you think there are justifiable reasons why this article shouldn't be linked on HN?

My thoughts are just the usual ones about this: flags of stories like this on HN are a kind of coalition between some flaggers who are agenda-motivated (which is an abuse of flagging) and other flaggers who simply don't want to see repetitive and/or flamebaity material on the site (which is a correct use of flagging, and is not agenda driven because this sort of material comes at us from all angles). When we see flaggers who are consistently doing the first kind of flagging, we take away their flagging privileges.

I don't know, I just searched "Grok" on HN and the 3 most popular stories of the last week have all been flagged killed while having 75+ points and 30+ comments. I can't imagine there are many single world searches that would return that result.

I understand why you gave the general answer you gave rather than addressing this specific example, but I'll just say this story would be a good place to look for those potential "agenda-motivated" flaggers.

I think it is a perception that is grounded in reality because the world itself is changing and HN reflects that change.

Yes in the sense that HN can't be immune from macro trends: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... But we can also make counter-adjustments, so from my perspective this falls into the category of fluctuation.

Give it time ;)

The wild thing is that this article isn't even a political issue!

"Major Silicon Valley Company's Product Creates and Publishes Child Porn" has nothing to do with politics. It's not "political content." It is relevant tech news when someone investigates and points out wrongdoing that tech companies are up to. If another tech company's product was doing this, it would be all over HN and there would be pretty much no flagging.

When these stories get flagged, it's because people don't want bad news to get out about the company--it's not about avoiding politics out of principle.

Free speech on the internet is the nerdiest of political issues, and this definitely plays to it.

I'm not saying you're wrong about it being brigaded by PR bots, I'm saying it's still political. Hell, everything's political.

I don't think this is really about free speech - the problem is the artificial speech being out of control.

I've been using https://news.ycombinator.com/active a lot more the last year, because so many important discussions (related to tech, but including politics or prominent figures like Musk) gets pushed out from the front page quickly. I don't think it's moderators doing it, but mass-flagging by users, (or perhaps some automagic if the discussion is too intense like num comments or downvotes). Of course, it might be the will of the community to flag these, but it does feel a bit abused in the way certain topics gets killed quickly.

I just found out about this recently and like this page a lot. Dang has a hard job to balance this. I think newcomers might be more comfortable with the frontpage and if you end up learning about the other pages you can find more controversial discussions. Can't be mad about the moderation hiding these by default. Although I think CSAM-Bad should not be controversial.

I have /active bookmarked and treat it as the real HN frontpage, maybe it should be at least linked at the top with the other views.

I think that would be bad for HN overall, it's really angry relative to the front page.

I also recommend enabling showdead. You will see a lot of vile commentary, but you will also see threads like this when they inevitably get flagged.

You can also email hn@ycombinator.com to ask "why was this thing removed?", and they answer the first few, then killfile your sending address.

Even a year ago, when Trump was posting claims that he was a king, etc. these things got removed, even though there were obvious implications on the tech industry. (Cybersecurity alone makes more political assumptions than it does on the hardness of the discrete logarithm, for example.)

I (and others) were arguing that the Trump administration is probably, and unfortunately, the most relevant topic to the tech industry on most any given day. This is because computer is mostly made out of people. The message that these political stories intersect deeply with technology (as is seen here) seems to have successfully gotten through.

I wish the most relevant tech story of every day were, say, some cool new operating system, or something cool and curiosity-inspiring like "you can sort in linear time" or "python is an operating system" or "i made X rewritten in Y" or whatever.

I think in most things, creation is much harder than destruction, but software and software systems are an exception where one individual can generally do more creation than destruction. So, it's particularly interesting (and jarring) when a few individuals are able to make decisions that cause widespread destruction.

We should collectively be proud that we have a culture where creation is easier than destruction. But it's also why the top stories of any given day will be "Trump did X" or "us-east-1 / cloudflare / crowdstrike is down" or "software widely used in {phones / servers} has a big scary backdoor".

I think HN should just add another tab: Politics. That way the need for flagging goes down and everybody gets what they want. The main reason why you would want to keep politics off HN is because it turns would be friends, collaborators and people that respect each other into opposing factions (just like religion does). But in the end IRL that would come out anyway so better to have it up front. So I don't think it makes a difference in the long run.

Agreed. I've been treated with much more lenient hands here over the last 12 months. Possibly through obscurity.

Now that you mention it - I've noticed the same on Youtube ... I used to get suspended every 5 minutes on there.

This story belongs on this site regardless of politics. It is specifically about both AI and social media. Downvoting/flagging this story is much more politically motivated than posting/upvoting it.

I agree with that. But one, it is on the site, and two, how can the moderation team reasonably stop bad actors from downvoting it? They can (and probably do) unflag things that have merit or put it in the 2nd chance queue.

> But one, it is on the site, and two, how can the moderation team reasonably stop bad actors from downvoting it?

In 2020, Dang said [1]

> Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years: [...]

> I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this, as well as tracking down voting rings of every imaginable sort. I'd never claim that our software catches everything, but I can tell you that it catches so much that I often go through the lists to find examples of good projects that people were trying ineptly to promote, and invite them to do it again in a way that is more likely to gain community interest.

Of course this sort of thing is inherently heuristic; presumably bots throw up a smokescreen of benign activity, and sophisticated bots could present a very realistic, human-like smokescreen.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761897

> how can the moderation team reasonably stop bad actors from downvoting it

There are all sorts of approaches that a moderation team could take if they actually believed this was a problem. For example, identify the users who regularly downvote/flag stories like this that end up being cleared by the moderation team for unflagging or the 2nd chance queue and devalue their downvotes/flags in the future.

Accounts are free to make, so bad actors will just create and "season/age" accounts until they have the ability to flag, then rinse and repeat.

I think the biggest thing HN could do to stop this problem is to not make flagging affect an article's ranking until after a human mod reviews the flags and determines them to be appropriate. Right now, all bad actors apparently have to do is be quick on the draw, and get their flagging ring in action ASAP. I'm sure any company's PR team (or motivated Elon worshiper) can buy "100 HN flags on an article" on the dark web right now if they wanted to.

Why would a company like any one of Musk's need to buy these flags? Why wouldn't they just push a button and have their own bots get to work? Plausible deniability?

Who knows whether or not both happen? Ultimately, only the HN admins, and they don't disclose data, so we can only speculate and look for publicly visible patterns.

You can judge their trustworthiness by evaluating their employer's president/CEO, who dictates behavioral requirements regardless of the personal character of each employee

That already happens. I got my flagging powers removed after over-using flag in the past. (I eventually wrote an email to the mods pledging to behave more judiciously and asked for the power back). As a user you won't see any change in the UI when this happens; the flags just stop having any effect on the back end.

There is one subtle clue. If your account has flagging enabled, then whenever you flag something there is a chance that your flag pushes it over the threshold to flagged state. If your account has flagging disabled, this never happens. This is what hinted me to ask dang if I'd been shadowbanned from flagging.

I would be money that already happens, for flagging in particular, since it's right in the line of the moderation queue. For downvotes, it sounds like significant infra would be needed for a product that generates no revenue. Agree that I would like the problem to be solved as well however!

>it sounds like significant infra would be needed for a product that generates no revenue

This just describes HN as a whole, so if this is the concern, might as well shut the site down.

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