zlacker

There are many things I appreciate about YC News but being certain that this report will not be censored here is something I truly appreciate about this forum. Thanks @Dang et al.

>>paulet+(OP)
This exact story was already flagged by the community. The HN groupthink is way more powerful than the moderator.

>>jeffbe+51
Indeed. Well, not to take away from the moderation team.

>>jeffbe+51
well to be fair, the Mission Local story from 3 days ago about Tan tweeting Tupac lyrics, was posted 3 days ago and flagged 3 days ago.

This story's lede is several San Francisco Board Of Supervisors members receiving post cards quoting Garry Tan's words.

Different story.

>>etc-ho+s8
The same story (different source) was also flagged today

>>39199703

>>paulet+(OP)
There's a lot of censoring here, not sure how you can be so certain. I think that the admins outsource most of the censoring to "senior" users though by giving more weight to their flagging.

>>paulet+(OP)
> being certain that this report will not be censored here

Why? HN censors shit all the time, and its all invisible unless you go looking for it.

>>jeffbe+51
In a lot of ways censorship here is worse than other places due to the weirdly attributed trust given towards HN members who think of themselves as enlightened intellectuals.

For example, try to post something pro Apple, or even try to play devils advocate. Your comment will be flagged within minutes.

>>ijhuyg+Qb
> I think that the admins outsource most of the censoring to "senior" users though by giving more weight to their flagging.

Nah even easier, it’s mostly outsourced to groupthink. Doesn’t involve anything nefarious, just inaction and delegation.

>>paulet+(OP)
Looks to me like they've applied some kind of heavy weighting penalty so it's already down to page 7.

I wonder how hard it would be to reverse engineer the penalty. You can easily poll to get points/time for stories and then probably use that to figure out the algorithm and any penalties/boosts (an old version seems to be documented).

>>IshKeb+vV
We didn't touch the post. It set off the flamewar detector, and rightly so. However, because of the principle I described recently at >>39172045 *, I'm going to turn that off now.

* and past explanations over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

>>ecf+bi
I think in most regards HN actually has a pretty favourable opinion of Apple, at least when compared to, say, Google or Microsoft.

>>ijhuyg+Qb
If you have a system that relies on voting, and people vote against some things appearing, that's not called censoring! That's just the system working as intended.

>>edanm+N12
So, just so we're on the same page, you are saying that users of "news.ycombinator.com" wanted to purposefully hide a story about the CEO of Y Combinator wishing the death of San Francisco politicians, as well as the actual death threats that have surfaced as a result.

You can call it censorship or not, but it's not a good look either way.

>>LexiMa+s03
> [...] you are saying that users of "news.ycombinator.com" wanted to purposefully hide a story about [...]

No, you're interpreting things here in a specific way.

It could be that users didn't think it belonged on HN because it was politics, which is often frowned upon. It could be that they thought there was a problem with the article itself.

In any case, even if it was totally the community choosing to not want to see this news (which I doubt), it wasn't a deliberate action by the people running the site, which does make a difference (otherwise that would've been the original accusation).

>>edanm+Do3
I would hope that a CEO of a company that runs the forum you post in sending a drunken text wishing death upon people is both newsworthy and something that we could all agree on is bad. But not only was this article flagged by users, so were many others, as noted elsewhere in the thread.

However, I think you are making a distinction without a real difference. The company that hosts this forum set it up with an incentive structure that results in the behavioral outcomes we see on this forum. If these incentives lead to newsworthy posts concerning the CEO of the company that runs these forums getting flagged, perhaps the incentives need to be changed.

>>LexiMa+3P3
Look, I wrote a huge reply, but I ended up deciding we agree more than we disagree, so I scrapped it.

I think the only thing I'm trying to push back on is any kind of "conspiracy" thinking - this might not be anything coordinated, definitely not by HN staff, nor by HN "elite" users or anything like that.

>>edanm+s24
I don't think that structural problems with incentives require any sort of conspiratorial thinking. If you give individual users the ability to flag or downvote posts to tank their discoverability, it is possible for a disconnected group of users to decide to flag a post for less-than-legitimate reasons, even if they're not communicating with each other.

It's a different flavor of Reddit's "downvote for disagreement" status quo. The rules might say one thing, but the behavior of users says another.

>>ijhuyg+Qb
Lol, yes, shadowy "admins" (there really is primarily just one, dang), and "senior" users, as if there is some hidden way to become senior. This isn't Reddit, and it doesn't work that way.

The behavior of who gets downvote and flagging rights is clearly spelled out. It's available to anyone who's been on the site long enough (and it's not that long, at all). I see this all the time where people complain about "being censored", where the reality is the community has heard what you have to say, we just think it sucks. That's not censorship, that's pretty politely stating we would prefer HN not become the cesspool of online discourse that pervades nearly all other online forums.