And this thread is now deleted/blocked/banned/hidden. (not by me, I am not part of ycombinator/HN org).
edit: It seems to be back now. It probably scrolled of instead of being flagged/buried. So I was wrong, sorry.
edit: It seems to be back now. It probably scrolled of instead of being flagged/buried. So I was wrong, sorry.
It seems to be a new thing, that the front page is being editorialised.
An example of dang whitelisting something to get what he feels should be on the front page on there (and past the various things that would block it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634603
And the criticism of Sam Altman's Barack Obama fundraiser at YC was silently removed the moment it became apparent that nearly all comments were negative.
What we've seen in the last month is:
1) Things can be whitelisted and their place on the front page assured (skip filters and checks)
2) Things can be killed in a way that excludes them from the front page without leaving the item as [dead] (penalise in the placement algorithm)
3) Things can be silently removed (soft delete)
And all of those things are happening.
As a community we used to be able to rely on the fact that pg basically didn't get involved. And so we could trust that the front page reflected the community intent.
That trust is being broken.
Your comment, on the other hand, is not so great. For instance, you've decided to put an inaccurate spin on Daniel's actions. What you call "whitelisting", Daniel calls "overriding the voting ring detector that you had no control over in the first place, and that you only know about because he told you it was there".
This is all metadrama, of course, but this story is also worthless so a bit of meta here isn't going to kill us.
But without transparency how are people going to learn from it and adapt (in what they upvote, submit, etc).
If it happens silently, then those who comment on things as well as those who submit things are going to be left wondering why. You may consider this a positive on the line that "They're creating the wrong type of content", but not all of the content should be removed, sometimes the discussions are insightful and valuable even when the story itself wasn't.
Nobody ever said hellbanning would go away, or that users wouldn't lose privileges.
If people believe themselves to be "rankbanned" or "slowbanned", they can mail hn@ycombinator.com and be virtually assured that they'll get a personal, candid answer from the mod squad about what's going on. That's not as gratifying as snarking about it in public, though.
That is not correct. Fairly often pg responded to questions about whether a post was getting flagged.
Anyway, you're right that my comment wasn't really related to your original comment. I guess just the defensive tone of your comment set me off, because I keep seeing rampant censorship on HN, perhaps even more than before, and that irks me.
> they can mail hn@ycombinator.com and be virtually assured that they'll get a personal, candid answer from the mod squad about what's going on. That's not as gratifying as snarking about it in public, though.
So, the problem with jacquesm -- who has been publicly complaining about his inability to submit articles for a long time now, is that he just never emailed hn@ycombinator? That is a _necessary_ step to regain the ability to make submissions? I think in a healthy community it would not have been. I've known jacquesm for a long time now, he's a genuinely nice guy who's always willing to spare time to give tips on everything from programming to startups, he should not have had his submitting privileges revoked in the first place.
I think it's totally inappropriate for me to discuss 'jacquesm, or really most other HN commenters, with random people on HN.
From my measurements (in 2013 before the latest changes), at least 20% of front-page articles and 38% of second-page articles were penalized, so there have always been a lot of invisible ranking changes.
I wrote up details at http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
> As a community we used to be able to rely on the fact that pg basically didn't get involved.
PG was heavily involved, right from the beginning. The HN front page has always been a blend of user voting and curation. At no time, ever, was it determined by voting alone. Had it been, HN's quality would have been lower—because quality is only one of the reasons why people upvote stories—and HN would never have been HN.
Other moderators, including me, worked with PG on this. I started in September 2012. One reason he took so long to hand over primary responsibility for HN, despite unsustainable demands on his time, is that he wanted to be sure that the moderators really grasped what he'd been doing all along. I'm thus in a position to assure you that we're not doing anything now that hasn't been done since basically forever—except that we're being a lot more transparent. Even that isn't a policy change (pg answered questions when he could) so much as a consequence of there being a dedicated team for the first time.
It never occurred to me when I started posting these transparency comments that we'd get accused of making insidious changes to (paraphrasing) "how HN has always been", "breaking trust", and so on. But I understand how it could seem that way. There's an upside to being unobtrusive. When stuff just works, people can rely on it and focus on the topics at hand. That goes a long, long way (though it doesn't do so well when stuff doesn't just work).
Edit: For some reason I didn't notice this earlier:
> the criticism of Sam Altman's Barack Obama fundraiser at YC was silently removed the moment it became apparent that nearly all comments were negative
That's not only completely false, it's a shameless misrepresentation that eats half the hope out of my soul. Nothing was "silent" [1] and nothing was "removed"—users flagged the posts and I personally rolled the penalty back at least four times. I said above that I could understand how one misconception might have arisen, but I can't understand this one; it seems devoid of even a grain of good faith.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612226 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7623254
I have no opinion on that thread, as I didn't see it, but let me just say that this is a result of lack of transparency... what I referred to in my post a while back when your involvement was announced.
When you care about a topic emotionally and it gets buried, and you don't know why, you tend to assume not the reasonable explanation, but the worst explanation. I've seen that reaction in myself, so it's not surprising to see it in others.
If there had been some sign that the post was heavily flagged (hey, how about a flag counter?) and perhaps even a sign that you were rolling back the flag counter manually, buro would not have felt this way.
I think one simple, obvious start to a solution might be to make the flag counter visible. Worth a try?
A suggestion I have, though: let's get rid of the guideline that says not to explain your flags.
But... a moderation policy that relies on all users having read all comments on all stories is unrealistic.
Just create a page somewhere and say "these are the moderators, they do this when necessary, but most of the time it's not necessary as the community is largely moderated by users, and these are roughly the switches that the users have to control things".
I now know, as you've said. But I really wouldn't have guessed that people flag stories as much as they must do, nor that it carries such a penalty. And I'm a fairly heavy user and hadn't seen your comments and responses before.
This is not my intent, I moderate forums too and I know it's hard but I'm trying to explain something to you about what happens when one is merely an observer of the witnessed behaviour and not privy to any information to explain the behaviour.
Bear in mind that as a user I have a different view on HN than you do. I do not see flags alongside stories, and do not know the workings of the algorithms and moderation tools put in place.
There are many examples of people trying to observe and divine the behaviour of HN, mostly focused on "How does the front page ranking algorithm work?".
Observed behaviour: A story about YC appears to take a strong politic position and received many extremely negative comments. I could not then find this story, thus it has been removed.
Guess (because moderation is not transparent, visible, and searchable after the event) of what happened:
1) Was it flagged? Possibly, but would expect to see a [dead] text much like how comments show [dead]
2) Did it just not have ranking attributes? No, it was highly upvoted and had only been on the site a short while when I saw it.
3) Was it likely to have been removed by some other mechanism? Given that I can't see it's #1 and don't believe it's #2, yes.
This is what I mean by lack of transparent moderation.
I cannot see anywhere that says: "When a load of people flag it, the result of the collective flagging will penalise the story". Except, of course, in your comments here. This means that anyone (the majority) who hasn't read the comments of this story may also not know this is the case.
Without understanding what can happen and why, the behaviour of HN is subject to people attempting to make their own sense of what they observe.
What I observed and remarked on are three things:
1) Things can be whitelisted and their place on the front page assured (skip filters and checks)
Confirmed, you state that you have done this.
2) Things can be killed in a way that excludes them from the front page without leaving the item as [dead] (penalise in the placement algorithm)
Confirmed, but you've clarified that this is a consequence of collective flagging rather than an editorial moderation policy
3) Things can be silently removed (soft delete)
Seems to be a dupe of #2, a harsher penalty.
The key question that transparency would answer is this one: Are the adjustments the result of the community collectively deciding what content to show, or is the result of an editorial policy within YC?
The lack of transparency meant that there is little awareness of how the moderation tools work, how they effect things. Without that understanding it cannot be a great surprise that people (including me) are considering the latter of the two explanations.
> it seems devoid of even a grain of good faith
This is what I mean by trust being broken. I'm personally sorry my posts appear this way to you.
The more that unexplained behaviour is observed, the more the observer is going to be left with what unanswered questions sowing uncertainty and doubt.
Perhaps my view is biased as beyond the technical, the stories I am interested in include the set of stories that cover politics around startups. It's likely that many other stories were affected, but I didn't observe those. And perhaps my being on a different timezone means I don't see explanations you (or others) make at the time, we see a story placement be modified in our afternoon, but miss your explanation in your afternoon.
I love this place and spend more time on here than is probably healthy. I certainly want to believe and I question things so that I can. Your responses in this thread help a lot.
I am not someone who wants HN to change in any great way (a bit more towards the quality, but nothing seismic), but that's precisely my concern when behaviour I have never noticed before I now notice frequently enough for me to comment publicly on it (and risk whatever social penalty comes from questioning something people love).
Perhaps this could all just be solved by someone updating this page: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Make it clear on there that collective flagging introduces penalties. Explain how flagging and downvoting changes things. Encapsulate pg's "Stay out of the controversial" policy.
Transparent moderation does not necessarily mean that you need to create software that lists every single thing that happened and why, it merely means that the users shouldn't be left guessing when a story they're reading vanishes on them or suddenly takes a dive down the front page.
This story is a good example—almost a litmus test—of what pg called "shallowly interesting" [1] and what davidw called "articles that get you riled up, but really don't lead to any productive or interesting discussions" [2]. I'm as shocked by the story as anyone, but it's essentially celebrity gossip (for some sort of "celebrity"), and that is off topic for Hacker News. This person is of little importance to this community (how many of us had heard of him before? surely very few), nor do the threads reveal insight into underlying phenomena. They're mostly about what a horrible person he is. So in terms of HN moderation practices, this doesn't seem like a borderline call.
This is not to deny the obvious importance of the story to the people—most importantly the victim—affected by it.
Besides this being a good lesson of how being an asshole is not the ideal way to success...it's also a good example of the machinations of our justice system. Wonder why the rich seem to have better outcomes than the poor? This guy's legal team did great wonders for him. If only his PR team was a bit better, he may be still CEO (deservedly or not).
I also think moderation should be used more in moderation.
This is fine.
I don't necessarily agree with the 2nd paragraph as this is merely an update to an ongoing story that does have some importance given it's context within the current efforts to have the startup world and programming be a more equal place.
I know that comment points have been hidden, and largely I think that works really well, but is there any chance that the stories could have some indication made public when they become subject to a moderation penalty.
Simply, if you could let people know why things appear to change place wildly outside of the params of the position algorithm then people would know that this was a result of community intent rather than any kind of interference. A bit like Slashdot's comment level "-5 Offtopic", but for stories.
You know as well as me that flags are seriously overpowered, particularly flags from long-term users like us. I wouldn't disagree with flagging this if the front page was drowned with these stories, or if this was a particularly contentious source, but given that it's a straightforward report of the resolution of an event relevant to the tech scene, it seems reasonable to let it have some attention even if you don't personally like it.
In other words, don't use your flags to remove all stories that you're not interested in from HN - use it to remove stories that are just not right for here. I don't see how you can argue this story is one of the latter.
* Nobody knew who this guy was before he beat up his girlfriend.
* Virtually nobody on HN knew anything about his company before he beat up his girlfriend.
* There is no interesting or intellectually gratifying conversation to be had about a guy beating up his girlfriend. It's a valence issue.
This is one of those stories where the only "discussion" is going to end up being people trying to one-up each other on how authentically they can appear outraged.
It's weird, I feel as though this story has gained enough attention that its conclusion ought to be acknowledged, however whilst I imagine that other people might want to read the story, I personally don't. Without wishing to deny the importance of this story to the people involved, it's not really what I come to Hacker News for.
I also flagged it. No redeeming value for this story or associated commentary in the context of HN.