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
There should be some way of doing language detection to detect the relative quality of 'flaming' going on.

So the highest quality 'flame wars' can remain untouched, but downranking everything else below that bar probably makes sense.

>>Michae+fF
Yes, the carrot of automation would be so much easier than the stick of manual review. I haven't seen any system that works well enough yet though.

The nice thing is that the comments are all public so if someone wants to take a crack at building a state-of-the-art sentiment detector or what have you, they can have a go—and if anyone comes up with anything serious, we'd certainly like to see it. As would the entire community I'm sure!

>>dang+4O
You don’t really need a state-of-the-art anything here. People get too distracted with building the perfect system when it comes to use cases like this because they are paralysed thinking about the avoidance of false positives and make a bunch of sub-optimal decisions on that basis. False positives are much less of a problem with a human in the loop, and putting a human in the loop doesn’t require moderator effort.

You can probably put a big dent in the number of low-quality comments by just showing a “hey, are you really sure you want to post this?” confirmation prompt and display the site guidelines when you detect a low-quality comment. That way you can have a much more relaxed threshold and stop worrying about false positives. Sure, some people will ignore the gentle reminder, but then you can be more decisive with flags and followup behaviour because anything low quality that has been posted will by definition already have had one warning.

>>JimDab+8U1
You're right about one thing: I didn't need to say "state of the art". A system that works at all would be great!

I don't think a confirmation prompt will help because people tune such things out after they've seen them a few times.