It was flagged by users and set off the flamewar detector. We review those, but not while asleep.
The site guidelines specifically ask you not to post like this, but to send such questions to hn@ycombinator.com instead. Would you please review them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? The reason we ask that is that such comments routinely spark completely speculative subthreads that range from completely off topic (at the high end!) to outrage mobs. They're extremely repetitive and they basically act like a drug and not a nice one.
We're always happy to answer questions—it just takes time to deal with the firehose. Yes, you have to wait for an email reply, but you've had to wait for a reply to this comment too, and if you'd sent an email you wouldn't have damaged HN. This digression (I'll use a nice word) was the #1 subthread on the #1 story of HN when I saw it.
You can't compute a post's rank from its timestamp and score. The software is more complicated than that, plus user flags affect things, plus moderator action. The "why is this post at rank N when given the score X and the timestamp Y my mental algorithm tells me it should be at rank Z?" question is an HN classic, but people grossly overweight moderator action, or rather sinister-moderator-misdeeds in the answers they give themselves.
I mean, think about it you guys. Do you really think we're suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase "communist bandits" from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.
Hey, dang. I've sent a letter to hn@ycombinator.com 5 hours ago, questioning why my AskHN submission "Self-censorship on HN" has been flagged and blocked for further replies. Have you seen it by any chance? I'm really concerned about the issue.
> Do you really think we're suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase "communist bandits" from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.
I have not seen it yet. If you saw the inbox you'd understand why. I'll get to it as soon as I can.
Edit: One not-so-obvious reason why subthreads like this are so disastrous for HN is that they suck up all the moderation resources. I haven't had a chance to even look at the rest of the HN front page yet, let alone the emails.
Definitely agree it's not sustainable to moderate these issues individually. But maybe it's a red flag that HN needs to change their approach to this issue? It feels like a "guilty until proven innocent" setup.
Thanks for the reply. If subthreads like this happen at all (let alone, as you put it, are so disastrous), then it might be a good idea to revisit the moderation mechanisms, don't you think so? Ideally, with a public discussion.
What I'd personally be happy to see being discussed:
- abandoning downvoting of comments completely
- introducing a compensation mechanism for flagging of comments (debatable)
- displaying all flagged submissions in a separate page with a link in the header (like "new", "ask", etc.)
No, because subthreads like this are eternal and no effort to prevent them can succeed. They can only be somewhat contained sometimes. If moderation mechanisms need to be changed, it needs to be for more substantial reasons.
Each generation of internet users thinks they're the first to come up with these things, and in a way they are, it's just that every previous generation was also the first to come up with them. It's an eternal cycle of internet forum life. The points you raise have been raised on HN for over a decade (HN Search is your friend!) and if they weren't those points they'd be others.
That probably sounds too dismissive. I don't mean that we're uninterested in hearing from users, getting suggestions, and answering questions. We do that all the time, and it's welcome. But making meta-posts to HN is not the best way to do it, especially in any inflammatory context, where they are almost guaranteed to blow up like the gas station in Zoolander—and then consume all our limited resources for the day, which ought to be going into making the site better.
I completely understand that it's an eternal issue. That does not automatically mean that it does not merit a yet another discussion. Downvote hell is real. Targeted censorship by (possibly coordinated) flagging is real (I presume so). I would love to read HN users' opinion on Bill Gates driving the world into a nightmarish dystopia, but can't do so, because some of the users think, that it's conspiracy bullshit (even if backed up by facts to some degree)? Might very well be so, but the fact, that we can't have such a discussion at all, has far-reaching implications, given the status of HN in the eye of the Internet crowd. It would be different, if all politics related subjects were outlawed here, but that is not the case. Rather, only some subjects are selectively and very opaquely (for the majority of users, who don't even get to see, that such a subject has been brought into their attention) dismissed as flamebait/propaganda/conspiracy/whatever. Why is that necessary?
On the question of political topics on HN, I've written about this at length in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... If you take a look at those and still have a question I haven't addressed there, I'd be interested to know what it is. Just be sure you've familiarized yourself with past explanations, because if the idea is something like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already explained many times why that won't work.
I honestly visited the links and read some of your comments. I still fail to see why downvoting and flagging are necessary. Am I overlloking something?
Those links were in response to different issues you raised. The answer to this question is that downvoting and flagging are vital mechanisms for preventing HN from becoming completely overrun with much lower-quality threads. There is a ton of dreck on the internet, including here, and there needs to be countervailing mechanisms to address it. Upvotes alone can't cut it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
Basically, they are the immune system of the forum, and we need those white blood cells. There's a downside, to be sure—HN certainly gets bad downvotes and flags. But there are mechanisms to address those, like corrective upvotes (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and vouching (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and as a last resort you can always email hn@ycombinator.com. Meanwhile the downside of having no immune system at all would be much worse.
It is an endless tussle of how people want to be moderated. I definitely see the value of flagging given many if not all forums, commenting blocks and social media sites have that. It seems highly suspect to cast doubt on the value of it. Adding a low friction way to say "why" would give a way to add priority.
Second, downvotes are community driven and very useful where the participants use it to bring up quality content. Of course it can be used unfairly as well.
Could not agree more, HN is taking the "we know best, so we ask that you blindly listen to us" highbrow approach. I lost 20% of my karma because I took a non-popular stance within a single thread lol. My stance was backed up by references/facts/data, but none of that mattered.
In a comment above, I mentioned the possible solution (to the issue discussed in above thread) that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions. I feel like HN could squash 90% of these concerns with that simple feature.
The question is whether it would squash 90% of those concerns or blow them up 900x. I don't know the answer to that, but I fear the latter. Everything we do as moderators is defensible—it's our core principle not to do things that we can't defend to the community, with confidence that the majority would support it. But that doesn't mean that everything we do explains itself, and therefore that a moderation log would be a good thing. On the contrary: it's all prone to misinterpretation, accusations of sinister manipulation, secret communist or nazi sympathies—I mean, you name it, we get accused of it. The bottom of that barrel is large, and at any moment there are hundreds if not thousands of readers raring to go there. Posting explanations as I've been doing in this thread is by far the highest-energy-expending thing that we have to do. We don't have the capacity to do significantly more—that's a recipe for burnout.
Moreover, the litigious sort of users who would post most of the meta complaints are also the least likely to ever be satisfied by the explanations. Why would it be a good idea to give them more material to work with and a single place to go get it? If, on the other hand, the goal is to keep the majority of the community satisfied—well, the majority of the community is already satisfied: the clear majority, and clearly so. If that weren't the case, believe me, we'd know it, and we'd already have adjusted. That's how we keep the community satisfied in the first place.
This doesn't mean we don't want to be transparent. But we take an ad hoc approach to that by answering questions as they come up. There's no specific question you can't get an answer to.
I understand being a moderator isn't easy. Definitely agree this conversation is mentally draining...I'm doing it because I care about what the underlying topic represents.
> Why would it be a good idea to give them more material to work with and a single place to go get it?
It's one thing to not make it easier to acquire, it's another thing entirely when it isn't possible to acquire.
> There's no specific question you can't get an answer to.
Until HN decides they don't want to answer it. Or until they play the "lost in my inbox" game, like used in this thread multiple times.
It is possible to acquire in any specific case simply by asking.
> Until HN decides they don't want to answer it.
Sure, there's always a risk that the people operating the site will ruin it.
> Or until they play the "lost in my inbox" game, like used in this thread multiple times.
A swipe like that deserves no response, but in case anybody actually thinks we might do that: I have 44 emails waiting for replies right now (edit: 45, while writing this. edit: 47). I spend hours every day answering HN emails, but haven't had a chance to do much today because I've been busy providing explanations to the commenters in this thread, as well as trying to do the normal workflow of HN moderation, which itself has been set behind by several hours. If I'm lucky, I'll spend my evening working through those emails. It's a point of conscience to try to give everyone who writes to us a meaningful reply, it's not a game, and I don't lie to the community—that would be not only wrong but stupid.
It seems like my comment was also vanished from the top of the thread? I don't see what guidelines I came even close to breaking. Help me out here? No one's going to see your reply, my comment is detached from the submission. But I do want to understand what's going on here.
That's a bit disingenuous isn't it? You're saying that the actual beef (vanishing Ask thread about google censorship) is okay to mention, and the reason my comment was silently nuked is because I happened to address the HN team? That's a bit strange.
I really do believe you have the best interests of the community in mind, but this chain of events is making it difficult. Using 'off topic' as an arbitrarily broad mechanism to remove high SnR content doesn't have the best optics, especially when a lot of the child discussion was pointing out seemingly inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of HN guidelines.
Again, help me out here. You're acting in good faith. Maybe a more clear and specific set of guidelines would help?
You're not going to tell me with a straight face that the highest upvoted comment on that submission and the origin of some healthy debate was 'off topic' when the top 3 comments of most front page submissions are far less related to TFA, are you?
I'm saying that what you posted was completely off topic, you shouldn't have posted it, and you should have emailed us instead (as indeed other users did). It's not that your comment was so bad in itself; it's the upvotes and replies that it attracted. They turned it into the worst subthread I've seen at the top of a high-ranked HN story in a long time.
If you think a subthread about "inconsistent and arbitrary enforcement of HN guidelines", or rather people's feverish imaginations about that, doesn't qualify for being downweighted as off-topic, I'm not sure what to add. A subthread like that sitting at #1 on the #1 story of HN is a three-alarm fire from a moderation point of view. Smart readers don't come to HN to read that.
We routinely downweight this sort of thing because if we didn't, most threads would consist of nothing but. Do you think that HN discussions stay on topic (to the extent they do) by themselves? That would be a self-driving-cars-level achievement.
HN users will happily comment all day about HN, moderation, and their imaginings about these things. There's no stronger force on the site, but unfortunately it's an addictive process that burns all the oxygen from actual discussion and ends up asphyxiating it. A forum becoming self-referential like that is the road to death. If a smart new user showed up here, wanting to read about interesting topics, and ran into endless reams of insider bickering, they'd close the tab and never come back.
We 100% see where you're coming from. Would it be crazy to request that HN create a publicly available list of "marked off topic / down-weighted / removed / flagged as duplicate" actions? I feel like HN could squash 90% of these concerns with that simple feature.
The troubling issue here seems to be HN asking users to "keep it quiet" by sending an email rather than commenting publicly about valid concerns. But I get your point that those concerns are technically "off-topic" from the underlying thread itself.
For what its worth, I was also shocked to see your entire comment thread, with over 110 children I believe, deleted from the thread without mention. Before this, I thought HN handled deletion with graying out, [flagged] or [dead] etc.
I only found it again by checking @dang's profile.
I've also emailed HN support strongly objecting to this complete deletion.
I didn't delete it; I downweighted it. You're running into the pagination problem (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184485), which is that you've confused the first page of comments with the entire thread. Click More at the bottom and you'll find it perfectly intact, just lower.
We don't delete things outright on HN unless the author asks us to. The most we ever do is 'kill' a post, meaning it's still visible to anyone with 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile, and even that's rare. Beyond that, we'd never kill an entire subthread with dozens of replies. We might downweight it or we might auto-collapse it. That's all. By the way, if I had actually deleted that thread, you'd not have been able to find it via my profile. I'm not sure whether to be more hurt by your assuming I'm such an evil censor or such a bad programmer. (<-- that is an attempt at a joke)
Thank you for clarifying - you can disregard my email! I don't think I've ever seen/clicked the More on comments and was unaware of that feature. I appreciate you taking the time to explain!
You're welcome! I understand the shock of it seeming like something has completely disappeared, which is one reason I want to get rid of that pagination, as soon as our software can handle that load.
The site guidelines specifically ask you not to post like this, but to send such questions to hn@ycombinator.com instead. Would you please review them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? The reason we ask that is that such comments routinely spark completely speculative subthreads that range from completely off topic (at the high end!) to outrage mobs. They're extremely repetitive and they basically act like a drug and not a nice one.
We're always happy to answer questions—it just takes time to deal with the firehose. Yes, you have to wait for an email reply, but you've had to wait for a reply to this comment too, and if you'd sent an email you wouldn't have damaged HN. This digression (I'll use a nice word) was the #1 subthread on the #1 story of HN when I saw it.
You can't compute a post's rank from its timestamp and score. The software is more complicated than that, plus user flags affect things, plus moderator action. The "why is this post at rank N when given the score X and the timestamp Y my mental algorithm tells me it should be at rank Z?" question is an HN classic, but people grossly overweight moderator action, or rather sinister-moderator-misdeeds in the answers they give themselves.
I mean, think about it you guys. Do you really think we're suppressing discussion of the suppression of the phrase "communist bandits" from YouTube? I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a.