zlacker

>>Robin8+(OP)
Looking at the list of removed stories makes me really happy with the moderators here. They're all sensationalist, advertising for some company, clickbait, way off topic, or some combination of above. In fact, I don't see a single story that I personally feel should not have been removed.

Thanks, mods.

>>a12k+Q2
At a quick glance, I found several that don't match that criteria you mention, here are a few:

Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds

https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/

Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source

https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough

Avoid Async Rust at All Cost

https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html

(Perhaps that last one could be renamed to be less hyperbolic, but the content was still an interesting opinion piece)

I don't think this is being done by the mods, by the way. It's more likely some spam filter with false positives, report brigading, or an anti upvote ring mechanism.

>>TheCor+f7
The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector. The last one was downranked by users. Admins didn't touch any of them.

Note for everybody: can you guys please include the HN /item link if you're mentioning specific threads? That would be much more efficient and that way I can answer many more of people's questions.

>>dang+6l
> The first two you listed were downranked by the flamewar detector.

Just some feedback that I've found a number of articles fall off the FP due to the flamewar detector that I've felt were good articles/discussions. In fact, I think some of the more valuable discussions tend to have a lot of back and forth discussions relative to the votes.

But I also recognize that flamewars can also look a lot like that.

So I'm wondering if it may be worth revisiting the algorithm for this, and maybe having it factor in a few other things vs. simply the vote:comment ratio (which is what I'm understanding it currently is, but correct me if I'm wrong).

I don't think it necessarily needs to be a lot more complex, maybe simply add to it some standard deviation of upvotes/downvotes (or just a simple ratio), if that's not already part of it.

But I've seen some discussions fall off that I don't remember seeing a particularly toxic discussion happening (e.g. relatively little to no downvoted comments).

Again, happy to see flamewars fall off, but just hoping to see some more interesting/helpful discussions not get caught in the crossfire.

>>jader2+0t
Absolutely. We review the list of stories that set off that software penalty and restore the ones that are clearly not flamewars. No doubt we miss a few, and also - not everyone interprets these things the same way. But if you (or anyone) notice a case of a good thread plummeting off the front page, you can always get us to take a look by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

>>dang+nB
Here's one from last week:

"Ring will no longer allow police to request users' doorbell camera footage" (npr.org) >>39138423

I posted an on-topic supporting quote to explain why this item was newsworthy and got one unhelpful one-word response and my comment got inexplicably flagged (not the commenter) >>39138481

How did that slip past detection? How do I get the abusive flag on my comment reversed? This behavior seems to have managed to push an important story off the frontpage quickly. (yes there was a badly-worded dupe headline, but that's a separate thing)

>>smcin+nN1
If I understand correctly, you have three concerns here: (1) the story was downranked off the front page; (2) your comment was flagged; (3) a comment that replied to you was not flagged. I'll try to respond to these in turn:

(1) the story was downranked off the front page because the topic had already been discussed a bunch—for example in these threads, two days earlier:

Amazon's Ring to stop letting police request doorbell video from users - >>39119387 - Jan 2024 (141 comments)

Ring steps back from sharing video with police – mostly - >>39120892 - Jan 2024 (15 comments)

Culling repetition from the front page is one of the most important things HN's systems need to do. Actually, it's probably the single most important thing. Certainly it's best if we can link to the previous discussions so people can know where to find them—but we can only do that some of the time. Users help out a ton by posting links to earlier threads. Ultimately we need better software support for dealing with this, but that's not done yet.

(2) Your comment >>39138481 was flagged by users. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I'm pretty sure I know why: comments that do nothing but quote from the article, or post a summary of it, are considered too formulaic by readers here. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but please do it in your own words and share your own thinking. To simply paste a quote from the article is too superficial. On HN the convention is to assume that readers are smart enough to evaluate an article for themselves.

Edit: I'm going to copy the above paragraph into a reply below, so I can link to it in the future when this comes up, without the rest of the post.

(3) The reply >>39138536 , which only said "and?", was definitely an unsubstantive comment that deserved to be flagged (and killed) even more than yours did. The reason it escaped detection was simple, albeit unsatisfying: pure randomness. We don't come close to reading everything that gets posted here—there's far too much. I've flagged it now.