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Dear parents, you need to control your kids. Sincerely, non-parents

themattwalshblog.com

12 pointsdrharris10 comments

Hypothesis confirmed. I posted this as an experiment to see how moderation occurs. People were clearly interested in this (7 points in 15 minutes), made it to #11 on the front page, and then was killed completely. I was mainly curious how these articles (non-startup, non-tech) that are quite interesting get killed so quickly, and now I know.

Lots of us flag "non-startup, non-tech" articles like this. They belong on reddit, not here. Think of HN as /r/startups + /r/coding or something, of course general interest articles like this are going to get moderated out, with the help of flaggers.

That's fine, but from the guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.

Certainly if it's not interesting to the community, it wouldn't get upvoted enough to make it very far.

You only see up-votes, not flags. Your statement is completely untrue:

> Certainly if it's not interesting to the community, it wouldn't get upvoted enough to make it very far.

It could garner enough votes to make it to the front page, then collect enough flags to drop off. The population of users who watch the "new" feed isn't always identical to the population of users who watch the front page.

Amost everything is interesting to hackers, we're a curious open-minded bunch by nature. But notice the guideline says "good hackers", implying an expectation of posts and discussions of a deeply technical and analytical nature. Rants about day-to-day annoyances need not apply.

Also, HN can't be a site about everything, or it becomes a site about nothing, no different from any other news aggregator out there.

The theme of tech and startups and stuff directly related to them (like legal issues) needs to be enforced, and is.

Mind candy posts like this get unthinking upvotes, and that is exacerbated b/c unlike reddit, you can't un-upvote after you've thought better of it. Hence the mods cull posts like this, and the community flags it to help the mods catch it.

So what do you think: is the moderation reasonable?

I'm not sure. I think this site should be mostly tech and startup related, but I also enjoy the occasional non-tech article, and find that this community sources those types of articles better than other aggregation sites (i.e. no Buzzfeed junk). If I wanted to read a bunch of non-tech I'd go to Reddit, but I don't go to Reddit, I come here. I've seen a few other articles I liked hit this same trend (immediate popularity, front page, then disappears), so I decided to run an experiment.

In the end, I think this kind of moderation is ok, but I'd rather see it a bit more refined. A flag should really be for inappropriate content, a downvote should be used for "I don't like seeing this kind of content".

>>A flag should really be for inappropriate content, a downvote should be used for "I don't like seeing this kind of content".

A flag should be for content that doesn't belong on HN. It's not necessarily inappropriate. The example in the guidelines suggests avoiding sports (which I am sure many hackers find interesting, I know I do), since it wouldn't fit with the broader goal of the site. However, Grantland ran a fascinating piece on the use of motion tracking camera in NBA arenas, with tons of interesting data generated by the Raptors. I remember seeing it hit the front page, since, despite being about sports, it fit the general definition of something that good hackers that are on HN find interesting.

What do you "know" now? How can you know it was "killed" (a term that implies active moderation, IMO) as opposed to passing some time/vote threshold? Simply observing vote/rank over time for a single story isn't enough to deliver this level of insight.

No moderator touched this story.

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