zlacker

> Still, as an occasional reader, I have noticed certain trends. When stories that focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace, or on diversity in tech, or on race or masculinity—stories, admittedly, that are more intriguing to me, a person interested in the humanities, than stories on technical topics—hit the front page, users often flag them, presumably for being off topic, so fast that hardly any comments accrue.

I have noticed this trend for a long time also, and well before this article was first written. It seems to go in waves though I'll cautiously say that it seems to have gotten somewhat better in recent years. I remember a time in the mid-2010s when these kinds of stories would disappear almost instantaneously. Now some of these articles and topics get a good number of upvotes and occasionally even substantive dialogue.

That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly.

>>belfal+(OP)
A lot of articles do match the very first thing in the guideline's list of what's off topic:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, 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.

Specifically, there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation.

>>belfal+(OP)
I agree that the comment sections on those articles devolves really quickly. To me, those comment sections are the worst part of HN. The normally very civil discourse found in here tends to be more "reddity".

Of course, I don't have a concrete example right now. But I do tend to stay off those topics in here cuase it feels like a shit show. Really makes me sad because the comment sections on other non-tech topics like music or literature are always interesting to read.

>>belfal+(OP)
It's understandable that they get flagged because people can't talk about these topics without emotions and it almost always derails into a flamewar.

>>nitwit+02
Just cause they are related to humanities or discuss masculinity, minorities or race in tech doesn't make them political by default.

A topic being discussed a lot in politics doesn't necessarily mean that that topic is political imo

>>belfal+(OP)
Yep this happened with my last 3 flagged submissions. All on social issues. Really sad because especially first one listed below I thought would elicit good discussions, somewhat tied other issues like affirmative action.

>>35867458

>>36065735

>>36627969

>>leonon+L2
You don't appear to have read what I wrote very carefully. The problem is that they fill most of the article with a general discussion of politics, making the article mostly about general politics.

People are naturally going to flag such an article.

>>belfal+(OP)
> That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly.

I might be getting desensitized, but (being pretty socially progressive, myself) the comment threads painful to me seem much less frequent today than a few years ago.

(Up until a couple years ago, when a comment thread seemed to bring out comment threads that were very concerning, sometimes I'd go read a little n-gate.com, as an antidote. I'd let that person rant about HN, much more over-the-top than I would. Unfortunately, during their last installment or two, before disappearing, the writer sounded more genuinely upset about something. I hope they're OK, and that they didn't absorb too much stress, while saving me from blowing a gasket.)

>>nitwit+84
Right, I'm sorry. I misread that

>>Pannon+j2
The implications here are interesting -- that discussing with emotion is something to avoid or that it's even possible to avoid at all. We're human -- as much as doing so has been a cultural aspiration for millenia in the West, it is simply not possible to decouple ourselves from our physical and emotional experiences.

In my mind, it's far less important that we try to address these topics "without emotion" (whatever that means) and instead focus on cultivating respect and curiosity and assuming good faith. This is a bit more congruous with the spirit of the site.

There's another Western cultural aspiration involving an impossible decoupling, probably more common in American culture than European, which is to depersonalize politics. But politics is about people, and some people are much less immediately affected by political and social issues than others -- there's usually a great many layers of indirection between the articulation of a regressive point of view or support for a particular law or politician, and e.g. a minority being squished out of tech or a parent who was a victim of a hate crime or a queer person's suicide. There are probably especially many layers of indirection when it comes to a lot of tech workers, given the demographics.

In any case, when discussing politics and issues of class and race it's important to recognize that you're not talking about something abstract, but people, and their loved ones and families. Given that, it's hardly a level playing field if we start with the expectation that folks will leave emotion at the door

>>vector+y7
"Discussing with emotion" is an euphemism for "saying things that you would not normally say unless you were thrown off kilter by your reaction to what you had just read."

>>vector+y7
I find the topics that are most likely to generate "heated" discussion tend to be emotional topics, but also they're more broadly important to society and just more interesting to discuss. That's why I tend to browse in /active[1]. Some JSON parsing command line toolkit re-written in Rust [4 comments]? Yawn..

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/active

>>belfal+(OP)
Hacker News would be immeasurably improved by removing the flag button entirely. That’s what the downvote button is for. Flag should be a message to a mod if there is something heinous like gore on the front page. It’s used as a censorship button here and that isn’t cool, especially in a place that is supposed to support well rounded discussion.

>>carabi+r3
I'd say >>35867458 was an interesting submission that probably shouldn't have been flagged, although it's doubtful whether a thoughtful, curious discussion is possible. Usually we end up with people charging in and wielding their priors as a stick, and from that point of view I can understand the flags.

The other two were too sensational and, in the case of >>36627969 , already a heavily discussed theme, so I'd say they were flagged correctly.

>>vector+y7
I think it's more of an admission that internet discussions aren't analogous to in-person discussions, and have a way of dehumanizing the person you're discussing with. Combined with modern-day tribalism, it means that most online "discussions" on a particular set of topics are more about virtue signaling and displaying tribal membership than they are about convincing others. As such, it's not unreasonable shorthand for a forum to avoid such topics en masse, as when allowed, they tend to drown out everything else.

>>leonon+L2
Sturgeon's Law, though. The average article on all of those topics is a pile of political flamebait.

>>belfal+(OP)
That kind of stuff has infected so much of modern discourse, if people want to talk about it there are plenty of forums for it. Why should we all stop what we're doing and prioritize discussing a niche political cause who's proponents have been blackmailing people everywhere into paying attention to them and have now come to dominate all sorts of forums and secure power, ironically with no benefit to the people they feign support for.

And when people say they want it discussed, they don't mean they want to read diverse opinions, they just mean they want to see orthodoxy regurgitated.

>>carabi+r3
Have you tried discussing your non-technical pet topics on a non-technical forum?

>>Pannon+j2
> people can't

If some people are prone to lack of control, that implies little for individuals.

Yes some of us can reason.

>>1000be+hh
Hey, that's not fair! HN is for everyone's pet topics and non-technical stories are welcome. The only criterion is that they be interesting and gratify curiosity.

I mean, there's a high-ranking thread about a huge oak table on the front page right now: >>36912861 . As there should be.

(You probably already know this but for anyone who doesn't: HN is explicitly not just a technical forum - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

>>Mistle+8a
The snipers that hit you prove you wrong: you may have looked for discussion, you received passing sneers: flagging is probably not the critical issue.

>>dang+Ob
Your thinking on these and other posts is narrow minded and totally subservient to the richest people in Silicon Valley, starting with the people who own this site. You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship. Your reply here is a great example of why you are a poor moderator. I wish you would quit.

>>versio+ch
Political threads often do go that way, and I understand the frustration. We don't want regurgitation—that follows from what we're trying to optimize for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

But the question of how to handle politics on HN is not simple. By the same principle of trying to optimize for curiosity, some content with political overlap is interesting and belongs here. The questions are which forms of it, how much, which particular links, etc.. I feel like after 10 years we arrived at a pretty coherent and stable general answer to that. Not that we get every specific call right—we don't. But the general principle has held up.

For anyone wondering what I'm talking about, here are some past explanations:

>>22902490 (April 2020)

>>21607844 (Nov 2019)

and some related points:

>>23959679 (July 2020)

>>17014869 (May 2018)

and there are lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... covering this.

>>belfal+(OP)
Opinions and views likely follow statical patterns like everything else.

Systemic reasons are why it's common to see the collective responsible for the systemic patterns in society be so fervent to deny systemic issues exist.

I myself like the idea of my success being attributed to my hard work. I would like to think that I bootstrapped my way to success. It's not an easy feeling to accept that in many ways by virtue of just being part of the main majority collective I by default have an advantage in my community over those that aren't a member in that majority collective group.

i.e. if the majority % of users in a forum are belonging to a certain category then it's reasonable to believe that most of that majority would be against anything perceived as a criticism of their group (and by extension themselves).

>>lackin+9j
There's not a lack of these sorts of discussions on the internet by males or tech people or white people or whatever. Just go on Reddit or Twitter it's everywhere.

American's love talking about those issues. It's probably the biggest thing they love talking about compared to most other countries.

>>educti+Ei
> You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship

I don't understand what you're referring to. Can you explain further?

Edit: oh, I see - you're talking about >>35719273 . Yes, sometimes when startups ask me for help, I make suggestions about how they can change their articles to better appeal to HN readers, or to avoid pitfalls. For example, mentioning one's startup only at the end of an otherwise interesting article (which I guess people do because marketers told them it was a "call to action", or something?) makes many HN readers feel like the whole article was a bait-and-switch, and then they rush into comments to complain that the article is "just an ad" or whatnot. That's what happened in that thread - e.g. >>35718172 and >>35718321 . In such cases I advise authors to mention their startup right at the beginning - an easy fix. I don't think most people would call that censorship! - certainly the authors who take the advice do so freely and say they're grateful for it.

I can't help but wonder if there's something else to your complaint because it's hard for me to understand why that would be objectionable. If you want to explain more I'd be interested...

Btw re "the richest people in SV" - the startup in that case wasn't SV related as far as I know, and certainly not YC related; I believe it's a spinoff from Andy Pavlo's research group at CMU. I wasn't helping them for any reason other than to make the HN thread more interesting and because they emailed to ask.

>>dang+Li
@dang I hope you write a book someday on everything you've learned as the main mod of HN for the past decade or however long you've been doing it.

It would be an absolute treasure trove of how to manage public forums and social media, especially as it evolves from a small niche community to a larger one, maintaining as much of its original character as possible, and in a highly politicized, adversarial, and mis/dis-info saturated information environment.

Would be a fascinating read.

>>whatsh+D8
Sounds like you were just thrown off kilter by your reaction to what you had just read and are discussing with emotion.

>>1000be+hh
created: 47 days ago

Your comment history mostly shows comments on non-technical stories. Why is that?

>>SkyMar+Uo
Hopefully he'd include an entire chapter on why he and HN failed so spectacularly at pretty much every turn during the pandemic, especially when it came to the lab leak theory discussions.

>>nitwit+84
That's true. And there's the additional factor that the more familiar a topic is, the more likely the thread is to fill up with generic comments about it. That's what the HN guidelines call generic tangents: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Those are probably the most repetitive kinds of thread, and therefore the least valuable.

This phenomenon shows up in most political threads but also in threads that aren't particularly political. The more generic topics have so much mass that they act like black holes that suck in all the interesting discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

>>Pannon+j2
Exactly, and often it feels like the most inflammatory version of the story has been posted, precisely to cause a flamewar.

>>Mistle+8a
I disagree, the flag button is very valuable, especially whenever any other social media goes through some exodus and we get a bunch of new transient users who don't really care about the culture here.

For example, since the reddit exodus, I feel like we've had an uptick in "drive-by" comments (characteristic of reddit) where people just throw in some sort of unproductive, sometimes provocative comment with no intent of engaging.

Flagging is a nice way to clean up trash like that without having to pull in a moderator.

>>Mounta+wr
I'm not sure what you mean by failed spectacularly, but if I'm reading you right, then your comment is a good example of a reliable phenomenon: nearly everyone with strong passions on a political topic feels like HN is biased against, and even is suppressing, their position. (In one memorable case, the topic we were accused of suppressing was actually the single-most-discussed topic on HN by a long shot: >>23624962 . That's how intensely these passions work: even the biggest story gets perceived as censored.)

Let's look at the specific topic you mentioned. HN had plenty of discussions about the lab leak theory, starting in late 2020 and all through 2021. I've listed some below; there were others (and of course many more in 2022 and 2023). Some fell off the front page rather quickly but the biggest ones spent 15, 16, 18 hours on the front page.

Everyone's memory about the pandemic has been retroactively revised by now, but as I recall it, the rehabilitation of the lab leak theory in (semi-)mainstream discourse began when Nicholas Wade published his article in the Bulletin. HN discussed that one thoroughly (>>27071432 ) and there had been several major frontpage threads even before that.

An appeal for an objective, open, transparent debate re: the origin of Covid-19 - >>28582290 - Sept 2021 (307 comments)

Scientists who signed Lancet letter about origins of Covid-19, have 2nd thoughts - >>27631560 - June 2021 (36 comments)

The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins - >>27388587 - June 2021 (1062 comments)

Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed - >>27259953 - May 2021 (346 comments)

The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - >>27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)

Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - >>26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)

The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus - >>26609494 - March 2021 (209 comments)

Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - >>26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)

US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins - >>26125145 - Feb 2021 (632 comments)

Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin - >>25799858 - Jan 2021 (74 comments)

Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it - >>25585833 - Dec 2020 (351 comments)

(There of course were many threads arguing the opposite as well - I'm just listing these because they're the relevant ones for answering the GP. If this post makes you feel like HN was too supportive of and/or too suppressive of the opposite side, please re-read the first paragraph - it seems to work the same way in all cases.)

>>cirrus+vp
I think I'd normally say something like that. ;-)

>>belfal+(OP)
There's substantial levels of denialism of there being any problem. It's odd to see both deflection, and abuse, where both systematically point to the underlying experiences validating the problems exist, and both attempting to "deny" it.

As an old hand in ICT it wasn't always like this. Something happened (in my opinion) between about 84 and 94 which systematically eroded and undermined women's experience in ICT.

I'd say it was gamer/pc culture but it's beyond that, although it's tied up in it. The conference cycles and tradeshows also played a role. Booth babes played a part, trivialising women's roles in public.

Several dozen highly significant design, analysis and operational roles in the internet vested in women back "then". People sometimes forget that. Women have always been a part of systems, networks, code. Always.

>>versio+ch
You can just not read these stories? Or even hide them?

I wasn't really interested in all those Reddit stories last month either, mostly because they were all exactly the same wankfest. So I just hid them. Problem solved.

As long as the frontpage isn't overrun with these kind of stories every day I don't really see the problem. Even when restricted to purely technical topics – and HN is NOT for purely technical topics – there's will always be heaps of stories you won't be interested in for one reason or the other, and that's fine.

>>carabi+r3
The first looks very interesting. The other two are, unfortunately, now hidden entirely.

>>Mistle+8a
That supposes that the only criteria for what should or shouldn't be promoted to HN users is the vote count. But HN has never worked that way, and never could; if it did, the front page would be all cat pictures.

>>versio+ch
I don't think "women in tech" is a niche political cause... and this is a tech forum.

>>dang+Uw
Case in point :)

>>dang+Li
Since there was a snarky(ish??) comment about commenters quoting Socrates, I shall waste no time and jump myself to Aristotle: “Man is by nature a social animal” (Pol. 1253a). But note that that famous translation (“a social animal”) actually translates πολιτικὸν ζῷον (politikon zoon: political animal). Of course, for the ancient Greeks, politics meant something more expansive than it usually does for us. They were right. Politics, like time, is part of the human condition.

>>dang+Uw
[flagged]

>>arp242+zz
The problem is that it’s not just limited to the stories; people in the comments frequently go on annoying or inflammatory tangents.

>>ggm+6z
It's that the profession acquired status and $$. Mid-90s into the .com boom transformed it from a nerdy but niche profession/obsession into one with status. Anytime that happens, the gatekeepers start to dominate. That's my guess, anyways. I got into this work for pay in the mid-90s, not earlier, so I'll take your word for it that there was a time when women were more prominent.

>>philwe+3N
I agree, but that's a bit of different thing, and not limited to these kind of topics.

>>belfal+(OP)
I just stend to stay clear of certain topics on HN. It's not that I'm not open to different viewpoints on the internet, it's that these comment sections are filled with bad-faith arguing and are just bound to make me angry. If I wanted that, I could just go to Reddit or Twitter.

>>spondy+9D
How did you arrive at "women in tech" as a niche from the parent comment? It doesn't mention this. And I agree, women in tech hasn't been a niche political cause for at least 10-15 years, possibly longer.

>>TRiG_I+5A
You can turn on 'showdead' in your profile to see everything that has been killed by moderators, software, or user flags.

Just be aware that if you do that, you're signing up to see the worst of what the internet has to offer HN—alongside a lot of other stuff that isn't as bad. We never delete things outright, unless the author asks us to, so that setting is basically x-ray glasses into everything.

>>philwe+3N
The “[–]” button is a Good Thing™.

>>teh_kl+r21
HN user belfalas, quoting the linked New Yorker article:

> When stories that focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace, or on diversity in tech, or on race or masculinity...

Then, HN user version_five in reply:

> Why should we all stop what we're doing and prioritize discussing a niche political cause...

>>belfal+(OP)
I started submitting articles about brazilian politics to HN after I read a really nice thread about hiring in South America. Some of them have been flagged and still generated discussion somehow. I've learned to accept it. If they get deleted, I won't force the issue.

It's true that political discussion tends to devolve quickly. This is especially true for a fifty-fifty polarized country like Brazil. I'm still glad this community has been relatively tolerant. I almost always enjoy the conversations I have here, even when I do not agree.

>>Mistle+8a
I agree 100%.

Given that some of the most influential tech people on the planet frequent HN (see Matt Cutts, etc.), I think it's critically important to discuss topics that are related simply to making the world a better place. Tech and tech people can help , but not if we can't even have the conversations.

If the richest and most influential people in tech are not even permitted to have these conversations, the chances of them getting fixed drops dramatically.

It feels like YCombinator wants to just keep shoving heads into sand on many, many topics because they're making money, and making money is the goal.

>>lvncel+y01
I know it's a complete impossibility, but some kind of "bad faith filter" would go a long way to making the comments much more pleasant.

I'm not sure what I should expect from a community that prides itself on its rationalist roots, but discussions are often disappointing nonetheless.

>>teh_kl+r21
It looks like a misplaced reply, to be fair.

>>neilv+L4
> I might be getting desensitized, but (being pretty socially progressive, myself) the comment threads painful to me seem much less frequent today than a few years ago.

I think so as well. But I also think I’ve become better at spotting the emergence of sterile discussions where people just want to push each other’s buttons. I see them coming before they completely devolve, at which point a tap on the [-] button makes reading HN much less draining emotionally. I had to be at peace with the knowledge that I would not read any good post there, though, as I have a kind of completionist mindset and it is unnatural not to read everything.

>>dmvdou+2M
When do politics begin? Three people.

>>spondy+o81
Ah, apologies, I didn't further enough up the comment tree.

>>philwe+3N
I'd prefer a block function, but the HN community (when searching old topics) seems very against it, and the one block extension I found is Chrome only. But In the meantime I guess I just minimize a topic when that happens.

>>ggm+6z
In the latter half of the '80s, MIT changed their admission criteria to get a larger percentage of women undergraduates in incoming classes. This cohort did not have the same level of "STEM advanced placement" prep classes as before and the grind/pace/atmosphere of the freshman filter classes changed; many faculty were not happy about it, as I was told by female students from that time period. I don't doubt that similar changes took place elsewhere.

I'm not saying this was not an improvement, simply that it meshes with your timeline and sheds a different specturm of light on what you are pointing out. (to put it another way, there were traditionally many fewer women who wore pocket protectors and carried sliderules, but yes they were very much a part of the community)

>>uoaei+vb1
You'd be surprise how much of this noise can disappear from blocking maybe, a dozen frequently "passionate" commenters in a community like this. But block features aren't on the table last I checked.

>>leonon+82
I do. You could even see how quickly discussion evolves when talking about the education system: >>36839983

far from the worst example, but a pretty recent one to show a bit of how bad it can get. I guess I was still (naively) surprised that affirmative action is still such a hot button topic.

>>nitwit+02
The devil is in the details, though:

>unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

And that's where we will never truly agree until the topic runs super sour. Which can take months.

> there is this tendency to briefly discuss some new social issue, but then filling the rest of the article with discussion of the current political situation.

it makes sense for multiple reasons, no? You never want to assume the general audience is caught up on every little piece of an evolving story, be it a simple celebrity drama or some complex political issue. It's news, not a research paper.

>>whatsh+D8
I'd assume that "good faith" would cover that aspect too.

And I feel that's a comment issue more than a topic issue, so it's odd that HN punishes a post topic for a commenting issue.

>>vector+y7
The emotions that most commonly arise when discussing politics online are negative ones: anger, resentment, powerlessness.

If you act out on the anger or resentment, no one wins anything. At that moment, it's a good idea to make an effort to argue from a purely logical standpoint instead of just insulting the person you're arguing with. I think that's what most people mean when they say they want to discuss "without emotion".

>>ryandr+w9
>Some JSON parsing command line toolkit re-written in Rust [4 comments]? Yawn..

I imagine people come here preceisly because they are that niche that wants to deep dive into those specific technical topics. I wouldn't be surprised if a topic like that could get 100 comments here and barely get a dozen comments on reddit/4chan/etc.

current active example:

>List of APIs that require declared reasons (developer.apple.com) > 144 points by todsacerdoti 21 hours ago | flag | 309 comments

The general topic is interesing, but the actual link and "literature" is well... a technical document for IOS developers.

>>ggm+6z
>Something happened (in my opinion) between about 84 and 94 which systematically eroded and undermined women's experience in ICT.

you're pretty much on the money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

The reasons speculated are much more boring, though. The personal computer was treated no differently than a Nintendo console, AKA a toy. So they (big coporate) simply decided boys were easier to market the home PC to (remember, this was decades before the general public took games seriously. People legitmately thought video games were a fad to die out of)

And that stuck. Snowballs into a time where the "nerd" stereotype more or less became the perogative term in the 80's/90's as a quick framing for some undesirable male. Every single piece of media had some stereotype of it, well into the 00's. It's not surprising women were put off. Men were put off too.

No particular mastermind here. Just corporate wanting to make a quick buck off of kids. Those kids just happened to pioneer an entire industry while Hollywood laughed at them.

>>dang+Li
Quick question for you: has there been any significant change in how HN handles the New York Times after 2019 specifically?

Looking over my front page archive, that's one of the first big site-related shifts I've noticed, and it's quiet pronounced:

   216   Year: 2007
   333   Year: 2008
   270   Year: 2009
   202   Year: 2010
   168   Year: 2011
   184   Year: 2012
   191   Year: 2013
   271   Year: 2014
   289   Year: 2015
   362   Year: 2016
   343   Year: 2017
   396   Year: 2018
   326   Year: 2019
    83   Year: 2020
    64   Year: 2021
    67   Year: 2022
    37   Year: 2023

I've not gone through to look at other domains specifically, but NYT typically shows up in the top 3--4 sites through 2019, then falls to #7 in 2020, #9 in 2021, and recovers to #5 in 2022.

That's a pretty big movement as these things go.

>>Mistle+8a
you can't downvote a submission, so that's already one issue.

>lag should be a message to a mod if there is something heinous like gore on the front page. It’s used as a censorship button here and that isn’t cool

I mostly agree and that is how I use flag. I've never flagged a submnission, personally unless I felt the site was outright malware (I haven't experienced that here).

But I figure in this case flagging isn't too dissimilar to how reddit will hide submissions/comments with enough downvotes.

>>dang+Uw
> nearly everyone with strong passions on a political topic feels like HN is biased against, and even is suppressing, their position

I believe that you have expressed this stance for at least several years now.

Perhaps these people's perceptions are well founded. It seems as if an orthodoxy is being enforced & people whose opinions that run counter to the orthodoxy, particularly when the orthodoxy is covertly political while masquerading as a truism.

You replied to an email from me stating a similar position...except you pointed out opinions of both the left & right of the political divide are moderated. I don't think that's that's the important imbalance though. It's the unorthodox who are more heavily moderated. There's a double standard, where the orthodox frame is given far more leeway, even to the point of breaking guidelines, without moderation.

I don't see much public self reflection on the moderation...mostly denial & self justification whenever someone brings it up. Seems like the same gas lighting that the corporate media, "thought leaders", the management class, the expert class, & elites push onto their subjects.

Perhaps some of the "strong passions" are in part inflamed by the negative reinforcement of the moderation activities...being punished for expressing observations & thoughts, taking a stand on covertly political topics, expressing the unorthodox. I have learned to not care about being downvoted or flagged or being threatened to be banned from this site or told to slow down as long as I am seeking truth & expressing in pursuit of truth. If my karma goes negative, so be it. I've learned to not be impressed by vanity metrics.

Right now it seems that nobody moderates the moderators...meaning there's no effective feedback about moderation activity. The moderator can simply use the same canned denial whenever any form of critique comes up. The downvoter or flagger can use the same knee jerk reaction to quash any self determined unapproved expression. It's too easy. It creates covert hostility on the site.

One thing that could help is transparency of voting & flagging. The people who do these activities also have bias & I don't think it's always done in good faith nor does it always support the stated guidelines of this site. Perhaps a form to explain why the downvote or flagging was done & how the guidelines or culture of the site was violated would reduce retaliatory downvoting/flagging.

If I make a comment I put in effort to think about & express my opinion in the public record. I'm motivated to put forth this effort when I think like I can contribute some to the discussion...which often occurs when the trend of the discussion is perceived to possibly be leading down a false or unoptimal path...an unorthodox view.

Downvoting/flagging should also require effort to weed out retaliation & have a cost if done in bad faith. If someone feels justified & can express why they are justified in downvoting/flagging, why not make it public record as well? The person whose expression was downvoted or flagged will have feedback to improve their expression if they violated a HN guideline. As it stands now, the author has to guess...with a possibility that the downvoting/flagging occurred in bad faith.

I appreciate whoever reads this long comment. I have learned much about human & cultural nature in participating with this site & I am grateful for this.

>>ggm+6z
Most people aren't denying anything. They are rightfully pointing out there's a vocal minority trying to overcorrect things and write history in a way that wasn't the case.

Most people don't think women are incapable. In fact, they think women are far more capable and autonomous than the average commenter gives them credit for. That's why they willingly choose not to go into IT-related fields or tend to pick things adjacent to it, despite all of the things being done to pull them in. Let alone the fact many are willingly selling their bodies both as eye candy and physically, often without a mediator in between, despite a more stable and on average more lucrative job available to them. At the very least, many of them realized back then sleeping at your office working for peanuts to work on your dream project under supervision of some corporate bigwig wasn't nearly as great as whatever their other options were back in the day.

And god forbid we point out the elephant in the room: most people, women or men, aren't looking forward to working in an industry consisting primarily of the other sex. You take any profession and it will be an uphill battle starting from the cradle all the way to the grave. People acting surprised this hasn't changed immensely in 30 years are underselling the difficulty of solving the problem given all the other options available to any individual person today.

>>dredmo+hm1
Interesting. They had a major refactor of their paywall in August 2019. Maybe that turns people off to posting content that isn’t unique to the NYT. Or maybe paywalled articles are less likely to make the HN front page (?).

https://open.nytimes.com/we-re-launched-the-new-york-times-p...

>>carabi+gr
Some people want to be able to comment freely without the zealots of the New Church of Diversity trying to get them fired.

Some people will use HN for job postings. I would certainly expect that anyone with two brain cells to rub together uses a throwaway account for anything but the most boring opinions about C++ proposals. All it takes is a single throwaway sentence 7 years ago that pisses off the Church, and you could end up not getting hired.

>>spondy+9D
women in tech care about tech

>>dredmo+hm1
According to the New York Times, no one noticed: https://open.nytimes.com/we-re-launched-the-new-york-times-p...

That cut looks a lot like a consequence of changing approaches to monetarization.

>>philsh+tp1
Drilling in on my data by month, it looks as if July or August, 2019, was the switch-over, with another big hit in Dec 2019 / Jan 2020:

   2018-1 *************************************************************************
   2018-2 ************************************************************
   2018-3 **********************************************
   2018-4 *********************************************************************
   2018-5 ***********************************************************************
   2018-6 *******************************************************************
   2018-7 ****************************************
   2018-8 ********************************************
   2018-9 ****************************************************************
  2018-10 *************************************************
  2018-11 *****************************************************
  2018-12 ****************************************************************
   2019-1 ************************************************
   2019-2 *************************************************
   2019-3 ************************************************
   2019-4 *******************************************************************
   2019-5 *******************************************************************
   2019-6 *****************************************************************
   2019-7 ******************************
   2019-8 ******************************************
   2019-9 ************************************************
  2019-10 ********************************************
  2019-11 ***********************************
  2019-12 ********************************
   2020-1 ************
   2020-2 ************
   2020-3 *****************
   2020-4 ************
   2020-5 *******
   2020-6 *******
   2020-7 ************
   2020-8 ************
   2020-9 *******
  2020-10 *******************
  2020-11 ********
  2020-12 *****************

(July seems to be an annual slump in HN -- NYT submissions for some reason, which confounds analysis somewhat.)

(Apologies to mobile readers ;-)

>>neilv+L4
> n-gate.com

first time I saw this website. Lot's of laughs but yeah, the owner probably went to therapy or is no longer among us.

>>johnny+8j1
There was an extension¹ posted a few years ago² which implements blocking on the client side. The possible issue is there may be some users who you wish to block in the general case that do add value in other threads, so you would have to weigh up those decisions.

However, it feels like a bad idea to me, if only because it reduces community building and curation a little. Without a mass of users taking action via flagging or reporting on community problems the end result will surely just tend towards submissions and comment threads that are simply garbage, as that is what new users would see as the social norms.

All that said, I wouldn't blame people for using it. There do seem to be a few members of this community that I'd not want to know in real life, and given their comments in some threads they'd not want to know me either ;)

Edit: I see you mentioned an extension in another thread, and this may be the same one. Still, I'll leave this here in case others want to see the links.

¹ https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist

² >>10005699

>>philsh+tp1
I for one won't upvote a paywalled article.

>>briant+yn1
I read it, though I don't feel like I've benefited at all.

Dang cited examples; you haven't.

You appear to be going on feeling. I'm an intuitive thinker and subject to that myself. When I've collected data, I often realise that I was wrong. So, three possibilities present themselves:

1. You are correct 2. You have a perceptual bias that makes moderation stick out more to you when it is on unorthodox positions 3. Unorthodox opinions may be correlated with negative tendencies such as lack of factual foundation or inflammatory tone, and are moderated for those reasons

>>briant+yn1
You make many points worth responding to, but I'd like to remark that I can't agree with your contention that there is no feedback about moderation.

Much as it's discouraged, people frequently discuss moderation in hn comments, furthermore I know that lots of people (including ourselves) have engaged with dang privately about this. YMMV, of course, but I've found him nothing but humble and enthusiastic about improving the state of affairs around here. dang and I disagree on several value judgements, but overall I think it's miraculous we have such a good steward of the discussion here.

>>usrusr+0s1
Probably it's just a typo, but I'd like to point out that "monetarization" is the process of turns something into a currency, whereas I think you're referring to "monetization" which refers to making something generate revenue(, or to make a painting beautiful by using the wrong colours and lots of blur).

>>educti+Ei
HN is a living vindication of dang's curation. I say that as someone who has been corrected by dang in the past.

I imagine that HN world devolve into a shitshow without him, or someone doing similar work with a similarly deft touch. We owe him our thanks.

>>uoaei+vb1
The bad-faith filter is manifested in the "flag" button.

The problem is that "rational" is taken as the highest good by some people, and a key part of their identities.

Unfortunately these people have mammalian brains, which are a prefrontal cortex sitting on top of an antediluvian limbic system. To pretend that you are rational and not emotional is to launch vigorously down the path of self-deception.

It inevitably follows that one's post-rationalisation becomes both deep-rooted and hidden from one's own view. To roughly paraphrase tfa, you'll cherry-pick facts and apply narrow logic. Worse, you'll be bolstered by the unshakeable conviction that you are completely logical. Then you'll become extremely passionate in defense of your beliefs. The irony...

It is excellent to strive for rationality, just as long as one keeps one's own fallibility in mind. That implies self-knowledge. You can't reach the top of Maslow's pyramid without self-knowledge; we should teach techniques to cultivate it in schools.

>>Y_Y+pw1
We're in the Monet!

>>denton+nv1
That's one hypothesis I'm considering.

It'd be interesting to, say, look at a number of sites which have gone paywall and see how that impact on HN front-page posts.

Off the top of my head, some of those would be:

- NYTimes

- WSJ

- Quora

- WaPo

- LA Times

If anyone has a handy list, especially with dates, I'd appreciate it.

Here's the top 40 "general news" sites with barplots by year. I know that NYT, WSJ, WaPo, LA Times, telegraph.co.uk, and possibly a few others have paywalls and may have implemented them over this period. Pastebin to spare readers here another monster text post, expires in a month:

<https://pastebin.com/raw/nmNXyE8G>

>>dredmo+2A1
Het Nymphéas -bekken - Claude Monet - Valuta van 50 euro of - 1/4 oz Be - 2022

https://www.pieces-et-monnaies.com/nl-nl/products/le-bassin-...

>>psd1+jz1
Thank you for a perceptive and well-stated comment.

>>dang+Z41
I'd love to read some of your own flagged and heavily downvoted comments! They must be doozies. Can you do a database query to find the worst? ;)

>>briant+yn1
> I'm motivated to put forth this effort when I think like I can contribute some to the discussion...which often occurs when the trend of the discussion is perceived to possibly be leading down a false or unoptimal path...an unorthodox view.

I have read this sentence four times and I have no idea what it means.

>>Y_Y+pw1
Thanks, not a typo, never occurred to me that the two character sequences are almost as different as the two concepts. I guess I'll invoke "they rarely occur in the same context" as my excuse, and how passive use gets by just fine without looking at the letters all that closely.

>>usrusr+0s1
To be fair, what the NYT is claiming is that there were no technical glitches during the rollout.

People did notice paywalls going up.

>>dredmo+ZE1
Paywall dates:

- NY Times: ~August 2019

- BBC: none

- The Guardian: none

- Washington Post: June 2013. <>>5829206 > HN traffic actually rose. Tightened markedly in 2018: <https://web.archive.org/web/20171213135245/https://reason.co...>

- Reuters: April 2021 <>>26820053 >

- NPR: none

- CNN: none

- Slate: 2015 (International readers) <>>9821492 >

- Vice: none?

- LA TImes: Paywalled, 2012. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/la-times-paywall_n_1299997>

- CNet: none

- Yahoo: none

- SFGate: 2015 <https://old.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/2sj78h/death_spira...>

- cbc.ca: none

- CNBC: none

- guardian.co.uk: none

- vox.com: none (though discussed)

- salon.com: none?

Mixed bag on impacts, though I suspect paywalls going up or tightening has a lot to do with FP story trends.

>>psd1+uv1
> Dang cited examples; you haven't.

I don't need to. For example, it it possible to cite examples of "bad faith" moderation? There's nothing to cite. It's an ephemeral action. There is no access to who downvoted the comment & why the comment was downvoted.

> You appear to be going on feeling. I'm an intuitive thinker and subject to that myself. When I've collected data, I often realise that I was wrong. So, three possibilities present themselves:

In this case, there is no data to collect. I also check my intuitions with data. I have also told others that they were wrong (period, end of story) only to realize later that they had some great points & were even right.

> You have a perceptual bias that makes moderation stick out more to you when it is on unorthodox positions

I often comment when my position is unorthodox as it's a motivation to express points that have not been expressed in the discussion. I will also add additional information in a reply. I think both tendencies fall within the HN guidelines & contribute to the value of the discussion...whether acknowledged or not.

> I read it, though I don't feel like I've benefited at all.

Not everyone is going to agree with all of your positions. If you only value those who agree with you or somehow contribute to your beliefs, I'm afraid you are handicapped in the pursuit of truth. I find value in your comment & took the effort to respond...This site has a guideline of "intellectual curiosity". Taking a pre-determined closed stance does not really follow that guideline.

> Unorthodox opinions may be correlated with negative tendencies such as lack of factual foundation or inflammatory tone, and are moderated for those reasons

Let's say someone exhibits these negative tendencies. If the moderator must justify the downvote/flag action in the public record, the original author will receive feedback on their lack of factual foundation or inflammatory tone & adjust their posts accordingly. Right now, there is only non-obvious negative feedback...unless someone who downvotes/flags posts a comment explaining the reason, which I observe to be rare.

There is also a double standard. Many orthodox opinions are upvoted without any factual foundation & have an inflammatory tone. I suppose my assertion could be tested with sentiment analysis & score. Are there any open source projects to perform such a test? How could the software developer code what is orthodox or unorthodox? I'm challenged in creating a system as to how to verify the claim with data. Public justification of the downvote/flag would help immensely.

I have to note that this is a weakness of a Positivisist philosophical position. What is easy to quantify is "more real" & what is difficult to quantify is "less real". What is easy to quantify can be cherry-picked to support a pre-conceived position. It's too easy to game the perception of reality. It's too easy to deny the existence of a phenomena when there are no handles to measure the phenomena. Conversely it's also easy to create a conspiracy theory about it. There is no practical way to verify or invalidate the claim in quantifiable terms, so one can only use logical/rational discourse, adopt heuristics, & express subjective perception.

>>Y_Y+Zv1
I appreciate Dang's effort & value him as a person. I think that he is limited in how effective he be can moderating the site's policies. Any single person would be limited. I think making moderation activity publically justified would lift a burden from Dang's shoulders, weed out bad faith moderation, & provide feedback to moderated authors. A win win win.

>>Eisens+0R1
Apologies for the mis-edited, grammatically incorrect, & unclear sentence.

> I have read this sentence four times and I have no idea what it means.

I'm motivated to make an effort to comment when I think I can contribute something to the discussion in accordance to the HN guidelines.

> which often occurs when the trend of the discussion is perceived to possibly be leading down a false or unoptimal path...an unorthodox view

I'm motivated to express views that I perceive to be valid/true/truthful when I have not seen these topics addressed. This means the expressed perspective is often unorthodox, since the orthodox perspective has already been addressed. These expressions are not always unorthodox, but I intuit that they are often more unorthodox than the norm.

My intention is to aid "intellectual curiosity" by expanding the breadth & depth of the discussion.

>>briant+2p2
>> Dang cited examples; you haven't.

> I don't need to.

Actually laughed out loud at this.

"I don't need examples, you just have to believe that I'm right, trust me!"

Plus you seem to be confusing downvoting for moderation. It is not surprising that strong unorthodox views are downvoted. That's pretty much definitionally what "unorthodox" means, that most people won't like the view.

>>sander+ew2
> Actually laughed out loud at this.

Tell me how I can cite an example of someone downvoting/flagging a post in "bad faith"? Perhaps I do have an example. My previous post in this thread was downvoted. Who downvoted it? Why was it downvoted? Was it downvoted in good faith? What HN guideline did it violate?

> Plus you seem to be confusing downvoting for moderation. It is not surprising that strong unorthodox views are downvoted. That's pretty much definitionally what "unorthodox" means, that most people won't like the view.

Then it should be added to the HN guidelines. @Dang, please codify "Don't post viewpoints that most people don't want to view" in the HN guidelines. @sanderjd expressed a reason for downvoting unorthodox views & if it's the position of people who downvote/flag posts, then let's make it an explicit rule.

Thank you to @sanderjd & whoever downvoted by previous comment in the thread (possibly also @sanderjd) for providing an example to discuss.

>>briant+0y2
Yeah sorry, but it made me laugh because it was such a let down after reading all this text you and dang have been writing in this thread, and then I get here for this lack of payoff. That kind of dissonance gives me a sardonic humor reaction.

But to try to answer your questions: I think what's weird is that I kind of thought you were complaining about unfair flagging or moderator behavior resulting in comments or posts being removed unfairly. But if you're just complaining about downvoting behavior, well ... honestly that's pretty silly. People can downvote whatever they want. (And isn't it actually explicitly discouraged by the guidelines to complain about this?)

Edit to add (to respond to what I think you added after I first replied):

I guess I don't get what you want here. You have unorthodox views, and seem to foster that and take pride in it. That's great! The world totally does need people with unorthodox views! But you must know that those views will not be popular. That is what the word "unorthodox" means. So I don't get it, what do you want? You want rules enforcing a safe space to express unorthodox views without people disliking them? I'm sorry but that's not possible in a social space. You have to write on a blog with no comments or something if that's what you want.

But I do think people shouldn't downvote just for disagreement with the content. (FWIW, PG and Dang have expressed in the past that they don't agree with me on this, that it's fine to downvote just for disagreement, but I still think it's better not to.) But I think it's fine to downvote for bad faith. And as you've noted, this is totally subjective.

So yep, I downvoted your "I don't have to provide examples" comment (but not any of your others), because I thought it demonstrated that you weren't engaging with dang's many examples in good faith, but were just ranting at him about an unfairness in moderation (again: not just voting) that you've just intuited.

>>sander+Jz2
The HN system told me that I am "posting too fast" so this will be my last reply for now...

It's all part of the moderation process. Dang frequently mentions the HN guidelines & he justified his position with:

> nearly everyone with strong passions on a political topic feels like HN is biased against, and even is suppressing, their position

In my experience, downvoting & flagging behavior or negative feedback from @dang doing his moderation job can inflame strong passions & instantiating a covert retaliatory cycle. When someone feels that a viewpoint receives this sort of feedback, one is inclined to ask why? Extrapolating my experience/observations to others, I think transparent justification for moderation would provide feedback as to why, leading to less reply comments asking "why was this downvoted?" or "why was this flagged?". It also disincentivizes bad faith moderation activity.

I'm not complaining about downvoting or moderation per se, but expressing ways to make the HN guidelines more clear, create more fruitful discussions, improve feedback loops, & disincentivizing negative moderation/downvoting/flagging activity.

Edit:

> I guess I don't get what you want here. You have unorthodox views, and seem to foster that and take pride in it. That's great! The world totally does need people with unorthodox views! But you must know that those views will not be popular. That is what the word "unorthodox" means. So I don't get it, what do you want? You want rules enforcing a safe space to express unorthodox views without people disliking them? I'm sorry but that's not possible in a social space. You have to write on a blog with no comments or something if that's what you want.

I agree. All views are subject to criticism. The problem is it's too easy to anonymously knee-jerk a downvote as it often has a negative impact on the "intellectual curiousity" (a stated HN guideline) of the participants of the discussion because it adds the notion of punishment. I have learned to not feel a negative emotion toward downvotes & to incorporate the feedback as some sort of ephemeral HN community sentiment. However, it would be even better feedback to both the original author & the person moderating if the justifications were public.

> But I do think people shouldn't downvote just for disagreement with the content. (FWIW, PG and Dang have expressed in the past that they don't agree with me on this, that it's fine to downvote just for disagreement, but I still think it's better not to.) But I think it's fine to downvote for bad faith. And as you've noted, this is totally subjective.

It is. Which is why making the justification public helps in discerning the downvote feedback. I agree with you that knee-jerk downvoting ought to be discouraged in favor of justified downvoting. Overall, it would make a better, more thoughtful user experience & supports "intellectual curiosity".

> So yep, I downvoted your "I don't have to provide examples" comment (but not any of your others), because I thought it demonstrated that you weren't engaging with dang's many examples in good faith, but were just ranting at him about an unfairness in moderation (again: not just voting) that you've just intuited.

I disagree. Please don't confuse verbosity with a rant. I have to be explicit & thorough about my chain of reasoning.

Rather I have gone in-depth into the issues & repeatedly proposed a simple solution to the issues. I don't have a quantifiable study to point to & I don't think it's even practical to make one without funding & a considerable amount of innovation in software. Public justification of downvoting/flagging activity would help with making such a study. I greatly appreciate @dang for providing his reasoning for his moderation activity. It is very helpful & underappreciated. I think public justification of downvoting/flagging would help him in his job & make his job more rewarding to him.

>>tptace+hC
Where do I go to upvote that happening?

>>DonHop+jM1
My bottom 10, starting from the bottom:

>>10877423 (Jan 2016 - maybe before we figured out how to treat the dreaded title fever, which drives men mad like mosquitoes in the old northwest)

>>7611005 (April 2014 - what a time warp - remember when anything anti-Elon would get flamed?)

>>8477279 (Oct 2014 - thank god I changed it back or lord knows how bad it couldve gotten)

>>14248635 (May 2017 - everyone wants more monthly threads until the front page fills up with them, guess how you'd like that now)

>>11608112 (May 2016 - fair play for airbnb? how dare i?)

>>10564079 (Nov 2015 - ugh. hn must have gotten better about religious flamewar because that one made me cringe)

>>17780480 (Aug 2018 - i probably wouldn't do that now - but please come back, pvg)

>>8759235 (Dec 2014 - i'm sorry don't hit me!)

>>13752227 (Feb 2017 - oho! we can detach things!)

>>8809021 (Dec 2014 - i have sweeter ways of making the exact same point now)

>>dredmo+hm1
Reading the replies by philshem and others, I think it has to have been the paywall change.

>>dang+z43
Thanks, and appreciated.

Paywalls certainly seem associated with a few declines (NYT, WaPo), but not others. E.g., NPR and CBC.ca both fell off a cliff in 2022, PBS fell after 2008. None impose paywalls.

Might be a pattern there, could just be noise.

>>scns+Lc1
Ask three people a political question and you’ll get five opinions.

>>carabi+gr
Because I'm a bad faith imposter here to bully lesser nerds

>>johnny+Vi1
Here's my HN block extension for Firefox: https://gist.github.com/arp242/3159b9cbbbe148c786e1ca10adaae...

Also includes some other things like changed styling and whatnot; it's not really "for publication" and some tweaking may be required, but here it is. Load it manually via about:debugging.

You need to load a post by clicking on the date, and then you can click "bozo" or "block": the "bozo" just marks the post as someone being a "bozo" but doesn't block it. This is useful because everyone can have a bad day or whatever, and that's fine. It's people who consistently seem to be having "bad days" that are the problem – unfortunately there's a small group of highly prolific posters that I find consistently unpleasant, and with just ~20-30 people hidden like this (some of whom really ought to be banned IMHO) I found HN becomes a significantly better experience.

The main problem I have with this is that I can no longer flag or rebuff their posts (whichever may apply), so these people become the proverbial "missing stairs" if everyone starts doing it :-/

>>arp242+k95
Oh, this is perfect. Thank you! (On a tangent: replies like these are why I wish we had ways to get notifications for responses. Another paradigm of HN I don't fully agree with but I digress).

I do like the distinguishing factor between marking a commenter and blocking. I don't like (and think it's dangerous) to feel like blocking any old bad commenter over one comment is the go-to option, so having a way to self-warn myself if this is the same user before going nuclear is a nice touch.

>The main problem I have with this is that I can no longer flag or rebuff their posts (whichever may apply), so these people become the proverbial "missing stairs" if everyone starts doing it :-/

True, it is indeed a macro issue. But at the same time I feel it's a micro problem and there's a point where I need to look out for myself as opposed to the site at large. Let sleeping dogs lie, for now.

>>briant+5B2
> When someone feels that a viewpoint receives this sort of feedback, one is inclined to ask why?

But the answer to this "why?" is just super boring: it's because people don't like unorthodox views (that's what makes them unorthodox). It's not an enlightening answer.

> I think public justification of downvoting/flagging would help him in his job & make his job more rewarding to him.

I do think requiring a rationale for a flag is a good idea. I don't think so for a downvote.

The "solution" for downvotes is just to not worry about it so much.