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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

This is great news. I was very surprised that the term "Tesla" was being blocked. Later, submitters were using "Telsa" to beat the auto-deleting mod script.

When pressed on this subject the mods claimed that Tesla wasn't technology worthy and should go into a car subreddit, yet endless articles about how wonderful the new iphone is don't get shoved into /r/apple.

It looks like a couple moderators decided that their pet fanboyism would define the sub. Reddit had a choice of intervening and getting rid of those mods or delisting them from the front page. I think delisting them was the right move. If you want to have your own personal subreddit running on your own personal bias, then go for it, but don't expect to be a default anymore.

I find the mandatory default system to be more than a little broken. Instead, at account creation, show me all the defaults as checked checkboxes and the most popular non-defaults below, unchecked, and let me choose.

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And then Tesla fanboys voted up spam pages like this:

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla-pus...

Which reinforce the notion that, maybe the moderators banned Tesla over the quality of the submissions after all not some personal bias.

why can't the users and "knights of /new" sort that out? isn't that what feedback is for (and what makes sites like reddit great)

A proper filter must have an infinitesimal chance of a false positive. A blanket-ban on the Tesla keyword will ban many legitimate articles.

Still not an excuse to ban the word 'tesla'.

On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all, and now you've come to find out that key words relating to the spying scandal have been censored on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments in the sticky over in r/technology, it seems the main problem mods are still in power (at least according to the community) and the mods that are being called out seem to have no comments and have actually removed posts calling them out. I assume the main mod accounts have been bought and sold over and over and the current owners are trying desperately to pass it on to the highest bidder. Kind of makes you wonder if banning terms like "National Security Agency" and "Snowden" was an honest mistake (HA!) or if they're just trying to pass it off as one now.

On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all and now you've come to find out that key words like "NSA" and "Snowden" have an automatic downvote penalty applied to them on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments from moderators on Hacker News, it seems the main problem is mods either ignore criticism of this policy or spew boilerplate non-denials about automated rank penalties for submissions with more comments than votes or a high number of comments in a small period of time indicating flame wars.

I agree. Any form of moderation that uses a blanket term to apply a penalty is horrible imo (except when it comes to blatant derogatory and inciteful terms). Perhaps a better way to do it would be to check if certain terms are already on the front page and only apply penalties to new posts with that term while a post with that term is on the front page.

There are a ton of better ways than auto penalizing based on a blanket censorship system.

I agree with your (and the parent's) sentiment wholeheartedly, and I'm really upset that this has become the case here and on Reddit. The surveillance is a critical issue that should be talked about ad infinitum until adequately addressed. Instead we stick our head in the sand and self-censor to appease the people that don't care about it.

PG has straight up admitted that there is classification of articles (automated or manual) and that penalties are applied to certain classifications, such as "political". There is no real denial.

> "So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty applied. Or more precisly, they've been autotagged as being political, which entails a penalty."

> "When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list that admins see. They decide either to kill it, mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934950

Just because the mechanism for censorship is well meaning, excellently engineered and transparently implemented does not change the end effect.

I'm not saying it's a good thing (for that matter, I'm not saying that it's bad either). I'm just pointing out that HN has been open that this is going on; it's not something that is denied or excused.

Then let the community downvote weak content instead of blocking all Tesla articles. Its really a desperate move to block something like Tesla in a technology forum because of the occasional link-bait. 99% of reddit's success is based on users knowing what they like and upvoting good stuff and downvoting bad stuff.

One of reddit's larger issues is that weak stuff does sometimes get upvote, but the top comment in the thread is almost always a pretty fair criticism of why that article sucks. This is true of almost all subreddits and not something unique to /r/technology.

To be fair, a lot of the "allowed" content under these mod rules isn't much better. Cherry picking Tesla linkbait as justification for these heavy-handed rules really isn't fair.

Hacker News does the exact same thing. Character strings like 'nsa' and possibly 'bitcoin' are heavily penalized by HN's algorithm. As are links to many sites.

It also seems like it was more a case of the head mods being lazy and not wanting to bring on more moderators. So they tried to automate moderation with AutoModerator.

The default status isn't as powerful with registered users as with unregistered lurkers. Hitting the main site for the first time will bring one to the defaults, and (likely) influences who joins or does not join the site.

I wonder at what point did Tesla stop being Nikola Tesla, and started being nothing more than a car?

In the context of a news aggregator? Pretty much as soon as the company was founded and named. Nikola Tesla has been dead for decades, there isn't much news about him these days.

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