In the old days I don’t remember as much political / world news allowed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
But I’ve seen more types of TV news stories going through, like stories about political protests, stories about politics in Eastern Europe, free speech debates, etc.
Without getting into the details of each particular submission I’m curious if you think the submission standards have remained consistent throughout the years or if your curation philosophy has changed at all and if so, in what ways?
P.S. Thanks for all you do as mods and for making HN an a valuable and unique community. It’s awesome to go to a thread and see helpful links or comments that enhance the conversation.
What's amusing is the post on the front-page: "Web 2.0 is a bubble for 3 reasons" yet seeing the same for Web 3.0.
HN from 2007 http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/https://news.ycomb...
Edit: Strange downvotes...
History (particularly twentieth-century history) is caked in the blood of people killed by technologies that were originally conceived of by people pursuing what they thought was innocent (or, at least, amoral) knowledge. The Pugwash conference (https://pugwash.org/) grew from the need of those who built the atom bomb to wrangle the ramifications of their technology.
A hacker without ethics is a terrible risk. We should have discourse on the human side of what we do.
Dead simple. Somehow it’s also emailed me minutes before the reply became visible on HN. I later realized that the user probably had a “delay” set in their profile, but HN likely publishes the comment to the API even if it remains hidden on the site for a few minutes. So it was funny to see a secret way to bypass the delay feature.
Upvotes are a terrible proxy for value, by the way. One wouldn’t say that a Reddit comment was valuable just because it was popular. The same standard seems true on HN — particularly for fluff, which tend to be upvote magnets.
It uses the same algorithm, but only counts upvotes from accounts created before 2012 (iirc).
EDIT: I was slightly off, the deadline is 2008: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hacker...
The short answer is that not much has changed, including the perceptions of change (e.g. "HN is becoming 2005 Slashdot" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 - August 2013.)
If anyone wants to understand our thinking about political topics on HN, here are some links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490
or you can look at these past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
p.s. In case anyone's worried, no, we're not letting (or going to let) HN be taken over by politics. The proportions are stable and carefully regulated, although there is fluctuation, as with any stochastic process.
Macroexpanded:
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25048415 - Nov 2020 (291 comments)
The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643052 - Aug 2019 (777 comments)
Perfect example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30246830&p=2#30247139
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance. [0]
I went through months of your comment history with showdead:true, I could only find a handful of interactions between you and the moderation staff.
The most recent example is about 10 days ago and then one 36 days ago. Both comments were gray from being downvoted and one has been flagged.
There was another one about 40 days ago that had a bit more content to it but was simply you quoting yourself where you call a concept idiotic... on a post that had a pinned comment by Dang that said "If you're going to comment, please focus on specific, interesting things in the article that you're curious about."
Dang exchanged with you politely to explain the issues every times.
What more do you want?
Personally, I know that I don't want to see content such as your "y'all look like a cult" comment. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29864386>
See: https://hn.algolia.com/help
It's also accessible as a DDG bang, !hn
I also make heavy use of search. Often searching for dang's comments ;-)
That's only one problem with collective moderation. Moderators are a trust and quality backstop.
FYI, clicking a username tells you have much karma someone else has.
For example, you have 4,258 karma: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stronglikedan
Note that the last one or two actually predate Hacker News, because it was called Startup News for the few first months.
Later, it's like having one's brain sandblasted: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I don't remember most details but I pattern-match quickly.
It's probably not so different from doing any other rather-specific thing enough times.
I also wrote a browser extension with a lot of keyboard shortcuts that by now has close to 10 years of learning baked into it. It doesn't make any decisions but it lets me do repetitive things faster. One of these years I want to open source it (or make it a profile option to serve as JS) so people who like keyboard shortcuts can flip around the threads more easily. It just requires surgery to take out the mod-only bits, which is a bit like separating conjoined twins.
Outside that extreme sort of comment, though, the problem is not as simple as it sounds, or feels, because there's no consensus on how to define or interpret these terms. That means any particular moderation call is going to end up feeling wrong to a sizeable subset of users—good-faith users, not bigots or trolls. Put a few of those data points together and pretty much every reader is going to find a pattern to dislike. It's literally impossible to avoid this, even if we could see everything.
One consequence is that we/I regularly get lambasted with every horrible label that exists in polite society (a clarifying example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22941387), because most people misinterpret a sequence of bad-data-point experiences to mean "the mods must agree with and support this kind of thing".
I wish I could get across to people how these perceptions are unavoidable given the stochastics of the site (HN is a statistical cloud) and how our brains deal with randomness (by strongly overinterpreting it). I've been writing about this for years - a lot of which shows up in these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - but it doesn't really land. Even if one knows these things intellectually, it doesn't change how they feel, and the feeling determines everything.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
We do mark some accounts as banned in extreme cases, but it's a manual switch. We added it a year or two ago because some people would forget that they had turned on 'showdead' in their profile and then get upset about all the dreck they were seeing on HN. If anyone notices a particularly egregious account they're welcome to bring it to our attention at hn@ycombinator.com and we can turn that switch on.
> it's not plausible to think that the answer is "one side sees HN accurately, while the other side sees HN completely the wrong way"
The reason it isn't plausible is that the claims the various sides make (specifically about the ideological bias they perceive in HN, and in the mods) are so interchangeable—they resemble each other perfectly, except for one bit (the ideological polarity) flipped. It's possible that radically different mechanisms could be producing these isomorphic comments—wildly distorted perception in one case, accurate perception of reality in the other—but it's not plausible.
Suppose I come out of my house in the morning and the street is wet. Most likely it rained last night. Now what are the odds that most of the street is wet because it rained, but the stretch right in front of my house is wet because someone came out with a hose and watered it? That is possible, but not plausible. It's more likely that a common mechanism explains both, especially because there's a simple explanation for what that might be (that it rained).
I'm sure that's not the best analogy, but it's the first one that occurred to me (well, the second), and I can modify it to make it even more analogous to the situation on HN.
Consider that two neighbors are each convinced that while it rained on their neighbor's stretch of street, their own stretch is wet because someone came out in the night and watered it. It's possible that one neighbor is assessing reality accurately while the other is totally wrong. But it's not plausible. It's more likely that some common underlying mechanism is producing these perceptions, which are identical except for the obvious you/me bit flip, and which can't both be true because each claims the other is false.
> However, you seem to either deny holding it or deny that you are appealing to it as part of your argument.
It's the latter. The reason this is not an argument in favor of political centrism is that it's not an argument about the underlying politics in the first place. It's an empirical argument about the comments people post. These comments are so identical that it is not plausible that one mechanism produces half of them (or whatever the portion is) while a radically different mechanism is producing the other half. It is far more likely that a common mechanism is producing them—especially because there's a simple explanation for what that might be.
