Ask HN: Why are we hiding feminism threads now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are we hiding feminism threads now?

16 pointsqaser9 comments

This thread from today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9941712 quickly rose to the front page and then dropped off to the third page even though there was over 200 points in just a couple hours.

Is talking about feminism too off topic for HN or was it because of the article associated with the topic, or other?

I didn't see any comments from dang in there mentioning it was inappropriate so genuinely curious now.

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> Is talking about feminism too off topic for HN or was it because of the article associated with the topic, or other?

I'd say it's closer aligned to politics than technology. But I'm just a person with an opinion, not an HN staffer. Definitely as 'dang about that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nothing has changed recently. There have been dozens (probably hundreds) of discussions about feminism on HN. Some stay on the front page; many don't. As with any divisive topic that comes up frequently, the threads tend quickly to become flamewars, and those tend not to stay on the HN front page, though the discussions stay open for additional comments.

Many things affect a story's rank. Upvotes make it go up. User flags make it go down. Moderators downweight posts for various reasons (e.g. when a story or thread breaks the site guidelines or has been discussed recently). Software downweights posts for various reasons. Sometimes it's all of the above.

Please follow the guidelines and send this kind of question to hn@ycombinator.com, rather than posting it on HN itself, where it's largely off topic.

If meta-discussions were fundamentally off-topic, homo sapiens wouldn't exist. Says something about HN right there.

I believe I've read before that there is code to detect "controversy" or flamewars and bomb the relevant thread in the default ordering.

In looking at that thread (from the OP) I am wondering how much the algorithm, among other things, takes into account the appearance of comments downvoted to oblivion. I would guess that that needs to be a factor considered. A quick scan of that link seems to indicate many grayed out comments. (Which I didn't read..)

A good heuristic is if num_points is close to num_comments, which is the case here.

It only takes a few people flagging a story for it to bumped off the front page. If the general premise of "feminism threads" is that some men in technology treat most women in technology badly, and HN readers are mostly men in technology, it make sense that any "feminism thread" would acquire some flags. And then, when you read the story, you realize that it's "anti-feminism", and so you get the feminists also flagging it. And then on top of all this, you get a third group of people, those who are just sick to death of the whole thing, also flagging it. Whoever's left in the middle has been run over by the pros, the antis, and the don't care's.

I have noticed this too, find it deeply frustrating, and concede that it's a major reason why I find myself feeling less welcome here and less interested in being part of the HN community.

At the bottom of the page Lists->Active is what I always check after checking the front page.

When there are a lot more comments than upvotes I think its pushed off the front page.

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