Why is HN Suppressing all NSA related topics? | Hacker News Reader

Why is HN Suppressing all NSA related topics?

18 pointsAlupis27 comments

This is not good. This information affects a large amount of HN users and is very relevant; new information is still coming out almost daily.

Here's some examples from only the past few days alone:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011461

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8010993

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8010692

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009696

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008449

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008168

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008041

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8007422

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8007161

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8006966

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8003864

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8003038

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8003035

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8000175

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7993883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7993571

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989555

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7988973

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7988253

HN is not "Suppressing" all NSA-related topics.

Users are flagging these posts. The HN community is divided. Some people think that there are too many NSA stories; others, too few. On any issue where the community is divided, upvotes compete with flags, and stories rise and fall according to the tug of war.

The HN software adds a small default weight to NSA stories. The purpose of this is obviously not to suppress them. If we were trying to do that, it would be a large weight and not a small one. Instead, it's tuned so that NSA stories can still easily make the front page—and so they do. It's an attempt to strike a balance between the different segments of the community who strongly disagree with one another about how much NSA is the right amount of NSA.

The story last night about Muslim leaders was not much affected by the software. If users hadn't flagged it, it would certainly have stayed on the front page. In my view, users were right to flag it. I hope this site never sees another thread where a large class of fellow citizens are accused en masse of being fifth columnists and rapists. If we do, I trust that users will flag it again.

Some of you feel that such stories are so important that the flamewars around them should just be allowed to burn. Our experience and observation suggest the contrary: they are bad—existentially bad—for the site. Like fire in general, they lead to more of the same. So the alternative to the current policy is conflagration. The best aspects of HN, in our view, would not survive this.

Maybe I'm missing something... (I'm newerish here), but it seems to imply there are more HN users who do want NSA coverage more often and more prominent, as evidenced by the need for any "weighing down" at all, no?

Why not allow it to be organic? If it's true that most are being flagged down, then that will be the same regardless of any added weight.

I can understand the want to avoid obsessive flame wars, but simply suppressing important articles isn't going to do that. I understand this weight has been in place for a year now - perhaps the weight should be removed as a trial, and see what happens...?

I think what you may be missing is that HN is and always has been determined by more than just voting. Voting, user flagging, and active moderation have always been in the mix (well, flagging was added after a year or so).

> simply suppressing important articles isn't going to do that

What important articles have been suppressed? Please don't cite the one from last night. It wasn't suppressed, except insofar as users flagged it.

> Perhaps the weight should be removed as a trial, and see what happens

Yes, that might be a good idea.

Perhaps in addition to a trial period of removing the weight, you can try increasing the reply cooldown for deeply nested conversations (more-so than it currently is) that are in threads whose subject contain the triggered keywords. This way, you can slow down/stop flame wars in NSA articles without having to weigh it down.

(I don't care if the "NSA penalty" is removed from HN).

If the site were solely moderated by voting, it would be Reddit. "No cat pictures" is practically the founding charter of the site: it was started as "Startup News", specifically to be a place that was germane to startup founders that would not be overrun by flavor-of-the-moment content.

"Startup News" became "Hacker News", with a broader focus, but it didn't turn into "Everything News", which is why the site has guidelines.

Obviously, NSA content is trickier than cat pictures, because much of it (even I'll concede) is very relevant. However, the fifth or sixth game-of-telephone take on every NSA story isn't relevant. Neither, I'd say, are stories about the NSA that touch merely on the political implications of NSA surveillance.

This is one of the oldest arguments about moderation on the site. We had it over TSA stories (when I was one of the people voting those stories up!), and we had it (believe it or not) about Ron Paul. There's always a six-degrees-of-startup-relevance to be played with any current events story. If you can't make Justin Bieber's egging conviction relevant to startup founders, you're just not being creative enough.

Wasn't it set up to be "what reddit was at the start, when it was all about tech & startups?"

No, it was set up to be more or less "what pg finds interesting", and that is a lot more than tech and startups.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008168

Despite "NSA" being penalized (along with some other high-volume topics, I believe), there are still regular NSA posts that make it to the front page and get plenty of discussion. For example:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983124 (6 days ago)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989730 (5 days ago)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7991696 (4 days ago)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7993472 (3 days ago)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008025 (yesterday)

Also note that the vast majority of posts on any popular topic do not make it to the HN front page.

HN isn't suppressing these stories; they're getting flagged off the site by users. (The mod has been at pains to point this out over and over again as NSA stories fall off the front page and people complain).

That's not entirely accurate, FWIW. It's pretty simple to prove that certain topics get penalized without direct user/mod action (or at least, used to--presumably via a keyword filter): http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... (and discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854)

I built a version of the front page that calculated penalties "live" and allowed the user to see what the front page would look like without penalties. It was interesting, but I haven't had time to update it for use with the new HN search API.

There is a small penalty, "the second smallest on the site", for NSA topics. But 'dang has been pointing out that it's flags that are knocking these stories down the rankings, not that small penalty; the point of that penalty is that it is supposed to be easy for important stories to overcome it.

The NSA penalty could not exist at all, and the stories we're talking about here still wouldn't have ranked.

Right, but that seems like a different statement than "HN isn't suppressing these stories"--HN is suppressing the stories, both as a community (via flags) and through its administrators (via software).

The "second smallest" penalty on the site has a pretty substantial impact, FWIW (I'm not complaining).

EDIT: I created this comment and grandparent purely in the context of this subthread, after reading 'tptacek's parent comment. In future I'll check the overall context first--it strikes me that my attempt to inject interesting commentary and correct what I viewed as a minor piece of misinformation about how HN works might actually be adding fuel to a fire that I'd rather not feed--I am grateful for the level of moderation that 'dang and the gang exert, and even more grateful for community members who know how to use the flag button and then actually use it in an appropriate fashion.

I, for one, would appreciate it if you patched up news-yc.appspot.com to work with the new API.

One of your links answers this very question.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008168

Links with NSA in the title get penalized because of the massive number of stories submitted about the NSA. This is Hacker News, not NSA News. While news about the NSA is important, historically it has flooded the site and completely dominated the front page with mostly duplicate stories. The penalty was put in place to counter the effects of this.

There are already systems in place to weed out duplicate posts/links.

The NSA news has "flooded the site and completely dominated the front page" because there is a flood of news.

I don't control HN, so you don't need to convince me. It's not uncommon, and the NSA isn't the only topic like this. Check that link that you and I both posted.

I think the argument is the "penalty" applied to posts related to the NSA, is a little overbearing and is suppressing posts that shouldn't be (ie. unique posts with new information).

Such as:

AMA: G. Greenwald on the Muslim-American leaders spied on by NSA and FBI (reddit.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009696

"Unique posts with new information" is not the standard of relevance on a startup news site. Lots of things that are interesting but not startup-related make it into the list, but it wouldn't be appropriate for the front page to be full of NSA stories even if there's a "flood of news". This isn't CNN.com.

You are already greyed out, someone is keeping an eye on posts like this, clearly.

"Text" posts on HN are always displayed in gray. pg said this was to discourage making long text posts directly to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468231

For example, the text in this post by pg is also gray: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304

Hacker News is one of the best online communities i've come across so far.

But some of the passive-aggressive and condescending 'features' baked into to the forum to discourage participation on the premise that engagement === entropy are really getting kind of annoying.

He could have simply added a character limit, or a word limit, if he wanted text posts to remain brief. Or just told you as you posted to keep it simple. But nope - he chose instead to make every text post difficult to read as a form of operant conditioning, because the only way the plebs will learn is through pain.

The site has worked this way for many many years; you aren't arguing about something the moderators are doing so much as trying to litigate the basic functions of the site. That's unlikely to be productive.

Probably not, although the devs are currently working on some tweaks here and there, and so might consider adding "not making text posts illegible by default" to the list.

There's a reason for that too: text posts aren't meant to create privileged, sticky comments. You can see that here: the poster didn't just ask a question, but tried to answer it (proposed answer: "it's just wrong that these weren't on the front page, and here's evidence").

If the poster wanted most of that content to be prominent in the thread, they could have added a comment to their question.

But clearly the legibility penalty didn't help them to realize this subtle distinction before posting. Any number of alternatives (limiting the post length, auto-commenting after a certain length, limiting the number of links in a post, giving posters the chance to revise if a post is too long, reducing legibility as a factor of length, or just letting people downvote the posts, etc) might well have resulted in better behavior. But all the current solution seems to accomplish is penalizing everyone else.

What distinction would prevent someone from abusing "Ask HN"? The poster penalized their own content, by hoisting what should have been a comment --- were this post appropriate for "Ask HN" at all, which it isn't --- into the text of their question.

Anyways: it's not worth the argument to keep pushing this thread. I just think it's interesting how many aspects of HN that annoy some users turn out to have an important role in how the community regulates itself. Note for instance how the site isn't flooded with bogus text submissions, the way sites with sticky comments get.

I stand corrected, my mistake.

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