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Comment by sirsar | Hacker News Reader

NSA for example. Any topic with "NSA" gets a very large hit.

Stores with "NSA" get a large number of user flags. As recently as last week, they also got a small penalty --- the second smallest on the site --- to compensate for the very large number of NSA stories that are generated every day.

If you submitted an NSA story and it fell off the front page, it was user flags that did it, not the penalty.

Although the issue with NSA is important, the problem with most of those threads is that they all the same. Same predictable arguments, or no arguments at all.

Why do they get upvoted then?

Because the community is fallible.

I'm willing to bet that has way more to do with the substantial body of people flagging down all the NSA posts than some mod conspiracy

Where do you go to get this definitive data on HN activities?

From Daniel Gackle, who comments on the stories that get buried.

That's exactly the problem. You received that info directly from a third person. There is no transparency. Would you believe everything I say? I wouldn't. But if the facts where out there you wouldn't need to. On an issue such as this where people take such sustained and intense interest, your second hand account of someone giving you their word is not sufficient. Maybe it is for you, but please don't condescend by passing it along as though it must be for others.

The third person is the site moderator. And yes, I believe pretty much whatever Daniel tells me. He's that kind of guy.

"That Daniel Gackle is the HN moderator" is the kind of factual detail you might want to know before developing very strong opinions about how the site is run.

Please see my other comment on this page where explicitly say I completely agree HN is in the right in running a site in this manner. I was just trying to point out that while you may know Daniel others might not. And, again, I believe that a moderator system is 100% fine. HN news has made it work and produces quality content. But, for someone to tell me that since they know someone I should keep my trap shut, it's a little presumptuous.

First, nobody told you to keep your trap shut.

Second, if you don't trust the site moderators, HN isn't going to be a pleasant place to spend time.

sheesh. your comment isn't a pleasant place to spent time. someone needs some internet kitten love.

It's probably people flagging it and not the mods, yes. But are the people flagging it actual users?

The story in question here had 200 upvotes when it was a link to an NSA story at Slate. The link was changed to the same, source NSA story at First Look and it was quickly flagged to oblivion. I think there're likely some monitoring scripts and flag alerts at play, not just NSA fatigue by actual users.

Is this real data or are you just going on gut feel?

A few months ago, kens wrote a detailed black-box analysis about the penalization system. http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799854 (920 points, 235 days ago, 190 comments)

But many articles are flagged by users, don't assume that all the penalties/kills are dew to moderators actions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com