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.
edit: oh duh. thanks all, answer was 'right under my nose'!
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.
So the highest quality 'flame wars' can remain untouched, but downranking everything else below that bar probably makes sense.
To me, "flag" means "this is a serious violation that requires moderator attention". Something I'd want you to see and deal with because it's bigoted, illegal, spam, etc. I wouldn't flag something simply because I didn't think HN was the right audience, or because I personally dislike the topic. You seem to be encouraging me to use it simply as a downvote.
I'm not going to start flagging things, nor do I feel that strongly about the lack of a downvote, but if flags are effectively downvotes behind the scenes, and if that's how users are treating flags (which they obviously are, from other comments on this thread), I think the UI should have a downvote button.
I assume there's been discussion about this before and I'm curious about the thought process behind the decision. I don't find the FAQ to be informative about this.
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!
He must have been thinking something though, because Reddit was originally his conception and he was an influence on the earliest development of Reddit as well (edit: and Reddit does have story downvoting - forgot to mention that bit).
Thanks _kst_: >>39232594
Edit: see >>39234189 for a longer answer; and also krapp's comment at >>39232795 , which makes a similar point.
Here's how I look at it: if trust is present, then we don't need to publish a full log, as long as we answer questions when people ask them. That degree of transparency has been available here for many years. If, on the other hand, trust isn't present, a moderation log won't create it. It will just generate more data for distrust to work with—and distrust always finds something.
Thus our focus is on building trust with the community and maintaining it. That happens through lots of individual and group interactions, answering questions whenever we get them, in the threads or by email. That's what I spend most of my time doing.
We're never going to take the community's trust for granted because it's what gives HN the only real value it has, and it would be all too easy to lose. But I would tentatively say that this approach has proven to work well for most of the community. If people learn they can always get a question answered, that's a powerful trust-building factor.
Equally clear is that it does not work for everybody; but that's always going to be the case no matter what we do. I don't mean that we dismiss such users' concerns—quite the contrary, I make extra efforts to answer them. I'm just not under any illusion that we can satisfy everybody. It's satisfying enough if a few people can occasionally be won over in this way—which does happen sometimes!
a tame story that got some discussion, but was marked as a dupe. But I didn't see any other posts linked in the comments as expected. I search for other submissions and see two other posts... with 0 comments:
I don't really have a critique or solution here, I imagine false negatives are an inevitability. Just sharing.
Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - >>39102078 - Jan 2024 (62 comments)
I can make an argument either way there. The argument in favor of flagging it could be: Rust is one of the most-discussed topics on HN; Async Rust in particular has had a ton of discussion [1], including a major thread just a few days earlier [2] - therefore this post was very much in the follow-up category [3]; the article was arguably rather low-quality, especially by the standards of this much-discussed topic; its title was flamebait and arguably misleading as well since the article seems more about async in general; and generally it was more of a drama submission on a classic flamewar topic than an interesting technical piece. I'm not saying all that is fair but it's easy to imagine good-faith users flagging for such reasons.
I checked the flagging histories of those users and only saw two cases where a user had previously flagged a different article about Rust, and one was years ago. For typical examples of other stories that the same users had flagged, see [4] below. A few of those might be borderline calls but I don't see abuse of flagging there. It's important to remember that even when a story is on topic for HN, flags are legit if the story has had a large amount of discussion recently. Otherwise HN would consist of the same few discussions over and over, and we have enough of that as it is!
> Is there a system for monitoring flag abuse?
There are some software protections in place against that, but like all such protections, they don't catch all the bad cases and they have false positives as well.
We review the flags and turn flags off sometimes. I would not say it's perfect because although we try to look over all the flagged stories, it has to be done hastily (or one wouldn't get much else done). That makes it easy to miss things. However, users often email us at hn@ycombinator.com when they think a story has been unfairly flagged, and in those cases we always take a closer look. I don't know what percentage of the time we turn flags off in such cases, but it's not a low number. So if we include "users sending emails" as part of "the system", then yes, there's a system for monitoring flag abuse.
Last point: this is a pretty typical case. I'd say it's borderline but in the end I probably agree with the flaggers. If the topic of Rust (and async Rust in particular) weren't already so thoroughly covered, and/or if the flamewar aspect hadn't been there, then I'd probably disagree with the flaggers.
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[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] >>39061839 - the word 'async' appears over 200 times in that thread!
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] You Don't Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed - >>39228231 - Feb 2024 (21 comments)
Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough? - >>39191651 - Jan 2024 (151 comments)
New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire wear shocks some drivers - >>39175675 - Jan 2024 (64 comments)
Google layoffs: Tech giant to cut down 30k jobs, says report - >>38791297 - Dec 2023 (6 comments)
Code will make me rich and famous - >>38336699 - Nov 2023 (2 comments)
The NSA Invented Bitcoin? - >>37599194 - Sept 2023 (61 comments)
Leaving the Web3 cult - >>36803267 - July 2023 (47 comments)
How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service - >>36471105 - June 2023 (97 comments)
Alphabet plans to announce its new general-use LLM called PaLM 2 at Google I/O - >>35866435 - May 2023 (5 comments)
Is your husband/ boyfriend gay? LGBTQ - >>35734086 - April 2023 (0 comments)
But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war detection.
The one exception is if some group organizes to upvote something that fits their agenda / business plan. But in this case it's generally something worth flagging and it gets flagged?
In this case, you can see from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... that there had been a lot of submissions, and from https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... the ones that got comments.
Of those, >>39165981 had been just a few days earlier. And it turns out that there actually was a link to it in the later thread: >>39204186 , but this comment was flagkilled, probably because of the personal swipe in it. (You can still see it but only if you turn on 'showdead' in your profile.)
I could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
> could go on! because there's endless detail one can go into about these calls. But you "didn't necessarily want to dissect every little story" :)
Yeah, i imagine if I went down every tiny rabbit hole it'd be a full time job. I'll leave that to the professionals haha.
I never flag anything because it's recorded on my profile, and I don't want stuff recorded on my profile that isn't useful to me. I only upvote submissions and comments that I intend to refer back to in the future. Upvotes are simply bookmarks to me, so my only tool for voting on the quality of conversation is downvotes. Which, apparently, I can't do for articles without spamming up my profile.
Actually I just checked my profile and saw several flags that must have appeared on a mis-click, just like how sometimes upvotes appear on a mis-click. Fortunately, unlike mis-clicked upvotes, you can still remove these.
"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)
(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.
I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change (unless forced), but just wanted to point out that your argument against transparency is a cop-out and that you're on the wrong side of history here.
It could be fun to look into it together, but the fun stops at "I fully expect your mindset and behavior to never change". Why dance if someone wants to kick you in the shins?
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.
I don't think a confirmation prompt will help because people tune such things out after they've seen them a few times.
In the first set, the stakes are far higher, which is why the collection of objective data is legally mandated in the first place.
In the second set, you have only the subjective opinions of people who have an explicit goal to cultivate a specific variety of community. As members of that community, we select into the cultivation regime under which we participate. Not everyone will share the same preferences, and that's OK.
Thank you for your tireless work. HN is a breath of fresh air compared with the rest of the internet thanks to it.
You get better intent assessment than with NLP/ regex/whatever.
Plus HN is entirely in English, so you never have to worry about lexical resource gaps.
There is no off the shelf solution - afaik. In addition I have no idea how expensive running costs will be.
But something serviceable can be built.
Source: mod /t&s person dealing with these things
It's one thing for private communities to set their own rules, but it's quite another to publicly tout these restrictions as universally fair when they're essentially projections of biased viewpoints coming from human-beings in positions of power. Actual transparency permits genuine openness and dialogue, rather than masking personal ideologies as righteous principles.
Hence my interest in debating @dang's straw-man response....and nowadays, using throwaway accounts is often the only way others even see opposing viewpoints on topics like this.
(I copied this from the parent comment so I can link to it when this comes up in the future).