Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by kens | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

kens

Author here. I don't know why this popped up 13 years later, but hi :-)

View on HN

Would you say it is still roughly the same?

> It's unclear if these penalties result from HN administrators or from flagged articles.

Any answers or insights on this within the last 13 years?

The mods are much more sensitive now to anything they consider flame-bait, flame-baiting, or controversial. Much quicker to intimidate/threaten, de-emphasize posts, flag-kill, etc. I presume because HN may be influencing/affecting some billion dollar bottom lines now and they can't afford a bad look

> intimidate/threaten

Links to examples?

I see “please stop fulminating” “we’ve asked you not to do this [guideline violating behavior] and we’ll have to ban you if you keep it up”, which is gentler than [shadow]banning even with the ‘threat’ of punitive action. Assuming you’ve seen mod comments I’ve missed.

why would you think they would make that publicly visible?

>The mods are much … quicker to intimidate/threaten

They’re doing this privately? Normally you shouldn’t screenshot emails/DMs/texts sure, but please do in this case. I have showdead on in Settings, so I should see it if you’re worried about censorship. If someone’s posted this before and it was deleted and not just killed, raise your hand and I’ll add my email to my profile.

Offer open to all. Obviously I’m doubting these guys are threatening people…

I've never heard anybody claim that they got a threatening email from dang before though. The moderators could easily block any such story from appearing on HN, but there are plenty of other sites where they could post it, and I suspect that a credible claim would become popular quickly.

So I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that if it did happen, we probably would have all heard about it by now.

Ding ding, right!

Obviously, the move is to continuously put your finger on the scale rather than doing something blatantly potentially illegal (depending on the threat).

There would have to be some meat on the bone, some unilateral NDA kind of thing…

We all should’ve heard of it by now. From Lobsters, Mastodon, blogs…

they aren't gonna send a threatening email, they just ghostban you.

We were responding to your insinuation that they would do the intimidation nonpublicly. Perhaps it was misinterpreted.

Yes that is what I mean. It's an intimidation couched in gentle language ("don't say things like that or else") and the threat is banning. Examples are in my past comment threads and some to my email years ago. I've gotten it for comments that weren't even controversial, it seemed the mods just disagreed with the opinion and decided to come down hard just because. I've seen it on others' comments too and had to defend them.

Of course there are some crazy extremist comments, but I'm talking about both comments about programming, and content has been echoed by the UN general assembly or human rights organizations. Those comments are now apparently out of line. This forum has crossed into the realm of censorship normally reserved for generic corporations who remove anything that might affect ad sales.

In my experience, if someone is going to be contrarian or pivot the topic to something else or move a conversation from primarily non-political into political, they have the burden of explaining the connection to the main topic and to be exceedingly diplomatic. One-liners that go against the grain or that will generate a lot of adversarial back-and-forth get warned.

Which is a bit crazy, isn't it? Like a micromanager gone mad. They claim it's a community but it feels more like one person's plaything

I really think it's a good thing. I think it balances the ability to allow dissent and debate while helping ensure the comment isn't flamebait. Without slashdot-style metamoderation it's the only way to keep trolls at bay. I've crossed the mods here once or twice in heated arguments, and it's almost always been a reasonable request from them to clean up my argument. Though I was unreasonably banned on my original account about 14 years ago (hence the username created in angry haste).

Affecting some billion dollar bottom lines was always the explicit goal of HN.

Do you have showdead enabled?

There is a firehose of the dead submissions and this is a good day today - just about 1 per minute and only 30% are dead. Somedays it's much, much worse.

HN attracts every wannabe out there and there is always a banal spam. So no wonder people don't want^W have time to hand hold anyone.

I've always had showdead on but don't often actually see a ton of dead comments. Occasionally I see one that's dead and seems odd (and sometimes interesting). Lot of the time it is stuff I'm not surprised is dead.

And rarely I see something that seems very very odd it's dead - although in those cases I usually assume it's just a bunch of bots or people downvoting (vs some kind kf moderator conspiracy)

> but don't often actually see a ton of dead comments. Occasionally I see one that's dead and seems odd (and sometimes interesting).

> Lot of the time it is stuff I'm not surprised is dead.

You can't see something doesn't exist [anymore].

How do you see the firehose ?

By going to new?

Just now it's 10 dead of 30, #30 is just '48 minutes ago'.

> I don't know why this popped up 13 years later

Maybe we the HN nerds are recomputing your proposed formula and quirks, and seeing it in real time, which may have worked since it's #1 now and I can prophetically reassure everyone it's gonna disappear in a few hours, per the article. Self fulfilling prophecy as they used to call it.

#2 now

Performing well https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49770293

I look when I comment on something that suddenly disappears from the front page.

Just so they could penalize it, obviously.

Still relevant! Very interesting topic.

Eager for the update! I assume there's already a couple of early hypotheses on the system.

Even more interesting to know when X.com, famously published its algorithm. Perhaps someday we'll find the fairest of them all

Do you think that the math is irrelevant now that the audience itself has become so woke that it’s basically an echochamber?

I think HN became the CNN of tech news (not journalism but “journalism”).

> Do you think that the math is irrelevant now that the audience itself has become so woke that it’s basically an echochamber?

I do very much believe that that is your own cognitive biases at work. While it certainly feels like there is a slant in a certain direction to me, I do see plenty of dissenting opinions from that perceived slant that get pretty much as much visbility. Most discourse here IS civil, too, which permits those dissents.

If you do believe that there is bad faith discourse going on, you can always email the mod team to get that sorted out.

was very interesting :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com