Ask HN mods: Why are you killing Dropbox submissions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN mods: Why are you killing Dropbox submissions?

28 pointsselmnoo18 comments

As depicted here: http://i.imgur.com/qymKtS3.png (see http://hnrankings.info/ for actual page)

The submissions all have tons of comments (including by many of HN most prolific and high rated users). Sure the conversation is messy, but that is often the nature of important conversations. We have to talk about things which make us uncomfortable. We have to talk about events that involve gay right, human rights, etc. when they involve new technology companies. If we don't, we are not being responsible humans.

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Since several submitted articles remain on the front page, it appears that the downward movement is prompted by flagging from the community, not by explicit moderator action. I suspect that the flagging and any moderator action for each story is in response to the tenor and tone and scale and direction of the discussion in the comments, not for the story itself.

HN has implicit standards for discussions. There are many many places on the internet where this story can be discussed. Indeed, there are places which embrace opinions about the Bush Administrations, the Obama Administration, what is the proper nature of American patriotism, and what role the US and it's corporations should and do play in international affairs.

But for better or worse, HN is not really among them.

That's a problem with the comments, not the story itself. If it's upvoted and legitimate content (in this case it is closely about startup world) , shouldn't it be staying where it is? Something with hundreds of upvotes probably should not go to the second page just because a few flagged the story.

For worse, surely. As a startup employee and HN reader, I'm disgusted with the amoral money chasing culture we've grown. The attitude towards politics here reminds me of a child plugging his ears, squinting hard and shouting "la la la la la I can't hear you". For all the talk of disruption, the domain of problems we are allowed to apply that to is horribly small.

Why do we have to be amoral money-chasers if we don't want politics on HN? Personally, I come here for tech and code discussions, and elsewhere for politics and current events. I don't feel politics is particularly interesting and is most often off-topic per the guidelines, so I flag all of those.

Dropbox hiring Rice is at the intersection of Tech and Politics/Ethics. It's clearly relevant to the tech community.

If you want to exclude the story because it has political content, you may not be personally amoral, but you are pressing for HN itself to be amoral.

The heuristics used in regard to article submissions that relate to political news events are not applied because the article submissions relate to political news events. They are drawn from experience and that experience is that it is particularly difficult to have a productive comment thread associated with such article submissions.

Case in point, the parent of this comment which infantalizes those whose view is that political stories are detrimental to HN.

I'm not touching this one with a ten foot stick. For me this is the perfect pairing of the Eich madness with the Bush years.

It would be funny if top brass at the NSA noticed this and decided to use it in the future as a tool to sow discord in the tech community. September 2014: Dick Cheney to advise Apple board...

It's hard to believe that you say this with a straight face. Dropbox is an absurdly relevant company to the HN community. It is a tech company, and HN alum, highly competitive, and indeed a key example that people here look up to.

How Dropbox deals with ethics and political issues as it grows is clearly relevant to HN.

So that we are on the same page, I want to distinguish between three different components of HN that tend to run together.

First there is the news event [1]. This is just the fact that Rice has been named to DropBox's board [or more abstractly that it has been reported as fact]. We both agree that this is relevant to the HN community.

Second there is a particular article [1] submission to HN [or several particular article submissions] related to the news event. Again we both probably agree that most or all of the various articles are appropriate for submission to HN because the news event is relevant and furthermore the news event is not likely to receive attention in other media proportional to its interest to the HN community.

The third component is the comments that are made on a particular article submission and it is by this third component that many in the HN community judge an article submission as a contributory or detrimental. When those members see an article submission as contributory, they may upvote it [yes, people upvote article submissions because the comments are good]. When they see one as detrimental, then they are likely to flag the article submission. And although there are members of the HN community whose experience leads them to flag article submissions the fear will lead to detrimental comments, they do not appear to be the majority.

[1] Using the word "story" tends to conflate both of these.

I don't really know why you chose to make these distinction as a response to what I wrote.

You said HN is not an appropriate place for this kind of discussion. That's all I was disagreeing with. I would agree that an arbitrary discussion of US politics would be out of place, but on this occasion it is directly relevant to this community.

That some sorts of discussions are not consistent with HN's implicit standards is a statement about facts on the ground - right now, today...erh, for better or worse.

Why? Well I suspect it's because people will preface their comments with something like "It's hard to believe that you say this with a straight face" in response to a person who pretty much shares their opinion about the relevance of a story and the appropriateness of a particular submission - i.e. I suspect its because people come in with guns blazing and the belief that god will know his own.[1]

I described how I believe decisions are made in response to an honest question. I don't make the decisions and I accept that they are made with good intent even when I might not agree with them. Sure you can disagree that I believe that. It's your right as a user of the internet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_at_B%C3%A9ziers#.22Ki...

I think the point is that you aren't an objective reporter of 'the implicit standards'. You are a participant in creating them. Each time someone asserts an opinion about what the standards are in a particular case, they are working to make their view into part of the standard.

Hacker News is run by Y-Combinator to further YC's interests and it's not much of a conceptual stretch to think of HN as a Paul Graham side project. Now it would be a mistake to attribute all the day to day moderation to PG because there were YC alums who involved and of course now YC has charged dang as chief moderator as PG pursues things he'd rather be doing. But it's certainly a larger mistake to think that these standards stem from me - not only because IANPG or a YC alum but because the standards existed in roughly their current form when I arrived nearly four years ago.

Now, I'm still here because I can generally abide by the standards. Indeed, I'm still here almost certainly because the experience HN provides as a consequence of those standards is so much better for me than the UseNet or the various fora I've actively shaped or from which I've been banned.

I don't actively flag political stories off the front page, but I tend to avoid discussion threads that proceed at 100+ comments per hour because I can nearly always find something about which I can express outrage and always find something that I can call wrong.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm above expressing outrage or don't enjoy telling someone they're wrong or as much as the next fellow. It's that I've got a better places to do that than HN and their better both because it's part of their culture and better because my effort is likely to have more impact on the world than a disagreement about the role Rice in OIF.

To my knowledge, no one has killed any of these stories. The two I believe you're asking about are both on the front page. Their rankings have been reduced by (a) massive user flagging and (b) moderation penalties we normally apply to political causes and internet indignation.

In the time that I've taken to write this, the current post was killed because users flagged it. I've unkilled it in order to post this response.

Update: We buried one of the stories and lightened the other. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7568823

Bc HN has a flamewar index, where if conversations begin a flamewar, then they disappear

The Dropbox threads are actually well reasoned and collegial. The 'flamewar index' is failing spectacularly.

I disagree.

As of May 2013, Y Combinator had funded over 500 startups.[20][21] The number of startups funded in each cycle has been gradually increasing. The first cycle, in summer 2005, had eight startups. In the summer 2012 cycle, there were more than 80. Y Combinator has since reduced their class size down to less than 50 with their winter 2013 batch, but they expect to grow it again.[22]

Some of the better-known funded companies include Scribd, reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, Disqus and Heroku.[20]

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