The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News
99 points by Ambroisie
99 points by Ambroisie
I try to stay away from the orange site these days, partly because of stuff this article mentions but partly also because I think its massively astroturfed.
It still has some threads with great discussions from great people, but it tends to be for more niche topics, so if I go there its usually by searching for specific threads.
I am not sure how the HackerNews backend works, there could be all kinds of caches or intentional obfuscation mechanisms; so take what I say next with a grain of salt.
The only thing I can see is my own Karma over there, and with my own karma, I see strange behaviour.
I'm a reasonably controversial person (I've been flagged on Lobsters enough times that I'm aware that there's a standings page) but if I actively monitor Lobsters, I can see what appears to be a quasi-random up/down (or, a slow trickle up, or slow trickle down) of Karma on my comments.
But on the orange site? It is often the case that there will be a slow trickle up (1-2 points every 5-10 minutes for something reasonably new and actively promoting discussion) but a sudden precipitous drop of 5-6 points in a few seconds. Which will then coincide with it getting eventually flagged until [dead] over the course of a minute. It's quite weird to watch something go from +10 or +20 to -4 and [dead] within a minute.
It's possible that all the flags were being tallied in the background, or that there was moderator intervention, we'll never know. But it leaves a dirty taste in my mouth, especially because those "weird flags" are usually for speculative opinions intended to promote deeper thought against groupthink (cloud sentiment and derision of "devops" as a term, and my dislike of messengers that don't allow third-party client implementations come to mind), and are taken in the spirit in which they're intended - at least by the commenters. So, who knows. But it feels like astroturfing to go from +10 to -4 so quickly...
Not that karma matters; except to say that it probably informs the reader if there's a grey comment saying something; it's a signal that this is not the correct opinion.
The highlights of HN are when people like John Nagle personally chime in to clarify things about the technologies they've worked on. But it's clear that there is extreme and egregious censorship on the site and that the votes and rankings are totally inorganic. Not really a place for actual hackers to hang out at, since you will find very few like-minded people there.
One bit of behavior this doesn’t get into is the flame war filter. If your post gets some upvotes, but then also gets a lot of comments, it can get strangled by the comments. Stories with more comments than upvotes are harshly penalized. So if you get, say, 15 upvotes and then two people have an argument with each other that goes on a bit long, it can make it really hard to recover.
Also, it doesn’t talk about the second chance pool. The moderators look for stories that maybe should have made it that didn’t, for whatever reason, and will re-submit them again with a little boost. This can be nice when you think you have a good post but something like the above drowns it out, or maybe it got four or five upvotes but no more, even though it’s high quality, or the spam filter accidentally trips.
I've had my work promoted by the second chance pool a couple of times, even.
Yes, I should have mentioned this: the site emails the submitter when your story gets a second chance. It's ince.
Do they really email submitters when this happens? An article I wrote was apparently given a second chance but I wasn't notified about it.
A post of mine got a second chance once, but it was submitted by multiple people before that and the one that got boosted wasn't submitted by me. Apparently it is possible to have multiple entries to the same post, all using the same URL. Maybe that happened to yours as well.
I’ve gotten one several times, and it described itself as automated. I forget, do you have to give them an email to sign up? Maybe you didn’t do that so they don’t have yours.
Of course hitting the second chance pool can lead to a bunch of comments from people who don't understand what's going on ("didn't this get posted two days ago?") and probably trigger the flame war filter again :)
The flame war filter is exactly what happened with the author’s post he wrote this about, from what I can tell. 115 points, 147 comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309
Edit: read on in the article and he claimed it was flagged, so maybe it’s both.
Also, it doesn’t talk about the second chance pool. The moderators look for stories that maybe should have made it that didn’t, for whatever reason, and will re-submit them again with a little boost.
Fun fact about the second chance pool: any user can nominate a story for the second chance pool. You're even allowed to recommend your own article for the second chance pool, but they'll probably get annoyed with you if you do it too much.
I've recommended several stories for the second chance pool, and a lot of them make it to the front page when they had flopped before. I've never recommended my own, but my articles have made it to the front page via the second chance pool, either through the mods or a kind reader campaigning for me.
What is mysterious? Hacker News has community moderation, so if enough users don’t like something it will be flagged. Sometimes a moderator will unflag something, but I think that only happens after the fact.
For the record: I’m not always happy with the results and I no longer participate on/support that site because I don’t want to support its owners, but I think Dan (dang) does an admirable job, considering the volume of content that flows through.
Yeah I think all flagging is largely done by users not mods. Given that all users have access to flag posts and mods explicitly say they don't secretly promote or demote things related to YC or it's companies.
Furthermore users have the ability to unflag things too. But people don't know that so it happens less. Granted it's hidden behind clicking into one specific post or comment where you unflag by hitting Vouch.
If you say things that are broadly unpopular with a large enough subsegment of users, it will probably be flagged by that subsegment of users.
Given that all users have access to flag post
You need 31 karma to flag, so it's a vast majority of active users, but not everyone.
Yup that's true. I meant that it's attainable by anyone (and without much effort). I'm also not sure if you get Vouch ability at 31 karma either.
I think you need 5,000 to vouch. When I created a new account, it took a while to work up enough karma to get access to it again.
What is mysterious? Hacker News has community moderation...
True but I think there's more going on but don't have anything but a feeling. I follow a third-party mastodon feed (the name escapes me) of hn that surfaces posts that get some relatively low combination of votes and comments before they reach popularity, and regularly find ones that are buried, can't be found in the first four pages, or entirely deleted by the time I check. This sometimes happens within minutes so it's not obvious brigading, flagging, or down-voting because the posts numbers don't show that or even enough activity. It could be automodding or, maybe, very diligent human mods, but it feels like there's some targeting.
You can turn on Show Dead in your HN settings and see posts that have been flagged or filtered to be [dead].
I know it’s a good narrative to say “mysterious forces are censoring posts on the orange site” or “I have a feeling something else is going on” but compared to a lot of sites HN is pretty transparent. Users can flag posts which cause them to be [flagged] or [dead], you can see dead posts with Show Dead. If you have karma you can vouch for dead or flagged posts.
Instead of complaining about how it’s impossible to know what’s going on, and these posts are being hidden unfairly, why don’t you turn on Show Dead, look at the post, and vouch for it if it’s unfairly hidden. Most moderation actions on HN are taken by normal users of the site.
You can turn on Show Dead in your HN settings and see posts that have been flagged or filtered to be [dead].
[... snipped...]
I have it enabled. It's not all that frequent, less than once every week or two, and I'm not sufficiently motivated to track and analyze them in the future or can't for deleted ones, but I can't shake the feeling that there are still actions that lack transparency.
Instead of complaining about how it’s impossible to know what’s going on, and these posts are being hidden unfairly, why don’t you turn on Show Dead, look at the post, and vouch for it if it’s unfairly hidden. Most moderation actions on HN are taken by normal users of the site.
I do that sometimes. I believe most are legitimate.
My only advice is to keep in mind that, whenever you find yourself browsing Hacker News, you’re seeing a curated view of the current tech landscape
Same with Lobsters, naturally! As a user you can mitigate this issue with an RSS reader or alternative clients that are not the official websites.
For example I never realized how "does not relate to computing" dominates the moderation log. If it's not a direct removal, the article may be flagged off-topic, including content where perhaps it's unclear where to draw the line? (See my earlier submission about a Raspberry Pi NAS build. I'm not pressed, it's just an illustrative recent example.)
Regardless, all submissions from topics I'm filtering stay on the RSS feed, whether they came from orange site or Lobsters. It's helpful to know what the communities promote / reject, but we can decide for ourselves if an article is worth our time.
I think many of us came to Lobsters from the orange site and expect it to be as broad, but its scope is explicitly much narrower. Curation, imperfect though it may be, is the feature which shields Lobsters from much of what I dislike about the orange site. It just culls a little too much for my tastes. I can empathize with your feelings about your submission being removed since the strict rules here can be inconsistently applied, but I give the moderators some grace for this because moderation is an awful job.
I do believe there is clear demand from users here for a "Lobsters but with less granular focus on computing" (as evidenced by highly-upvoted pieces that slip through), but I also think that even a companion site for stories off-topic on Lobsters would not stand on its own --- I think moderation is a large part of the secret sauce here.
the lobste.rs codebase is open and there are unrelated sites using it for different topics. I don't have a list of them though.
my personal position has been, and continues to be, that we shouldn't see other sites as our opponents. the entire world benefits from there being more places where people enjoy talking to each other.
I don't think you were proposing to make another site, but just so you know in case you ever do :)
(I've put the hat on just in case there are people who don't recognize me, this isn't an official post)
While I would like there to be another site that magically retains the quality of users/stories/comments of Lobsters and has more of a user-led approach to topicality (a la the orange site), I think making it a reality would mean signing myself up for far more responsibility than I would like.
(so uh, thanks again mods for making Lobsters what it is!)
I wonder how hard it would be to implement a combined frontend for multiple lobste.rs-powered sites, that could be kinda cool.
I've noticed that on HN there's a large contingent of people (or bots, or both) that are there to irrationally move things in one direction or another. By "irrationally", I mean they post the kinds of responses that are simply knee-jerk, with no actual content, that most often don't even address the thing being discussed, much like many fake Amazon reviews say, "wonderful product!" without showing any signs of actually being about what's being sold.
It's true that there are plenty of real people who do this, so bots aren't necessarily needed to explain this, but the frequency of this behavior coupled with the sudden changes in popularity that the quoted person described as "circuit-breakers against high-temperature threads" made bots, in my opinion, seem likely. And although there are definitely bots on HN, the behavior discussed here appears a bit more sinister.
I've seen this behavior myself, and even wrote them about it - a story that was submitted still existed and the page for it could be visited, but it didn't show up in their search and it couldn't be found in the list of stories if one sorted by date order.
The quality of engagement on HN, to be blunt, sucks. I quit HN and requested that my user account be deleted several months ago. They wrote to ask if my account could stay and be disabled so that the comments and stories would have my name, and I agreed by not requesting a full deletion.
lobste.rs isn't perfect, but it's much, much easier to identify inflammatory accounts here, because there aren't so many. There are still plenty of emotional discussions here, but holy cow, it's worlds better than HN.
But lobste.rs isn't perfect, of course. This post, even though it's a story that's precisely about dissemination of technical news and discussion, has "12 off-topic" flags right now. I can't imagine how anyone would make a rational argument that manipulation of news stories and community discussion in technical communities is somehow off-topic, but here we are.
I can't imagine how anyone would make a rational argument that manipulation of news stories and community discussion in technical communities is somehow off-topic, but here we are.
I flagged this as off-topic because the internal workings of community moderation on another site doesn't really help me become a better programmer.
Some measured degree of elitism can be a force for good. Inviting people after their work gets posted here seems like a pretty good filter. Makes it more difficult for people who have secondary objectives to get into a community.
I've heard that the HN discussion UI looks different for YC people. E.g. when you're a YC-funded founder, comments from other founders show up in a different color so that you know you're talking to a fellow founder.
I believe the premise of this article is true (HN has mechanisms to boost good publicity related to YC investments and mechanisms to suppress bad publicity) but I'm not convinced by this particular analysis. HN seems to have quite sophisticated ranking algorithms and in most cases these algorithms decide the fate of a story. The way that YC-related job posts get a fixed amount of time on the front page is an obvious example of how HN serves YC interests.
I use this site to view the orange site. Amazing how much flagging had happened since the orange one has returned to power.
It coukd just be that the moderators get very tired of politics. It could be that the "powers that be" behind HN have seen the writing on the wall and are going to lean right for a few years to get in on the govt cashgrab that big tech is engaged in.
It gets lost in the technical term but at face value, I would expect a very specific perspective from a website with the URL news.venturecapitalfirm.com.
are going to lean right for a few years
It's always been right leaning due to the "capitalism is GOD, we are the BEST PEOPLE" sentiment. Even before Trump1, it was rife with racist and fascist dog whistles. Now it's just overt racism and fascism (which, to be fair, will sometimes be downvoted or flagged.)
(The only reasons I still read the atrocity is because there's much more volume than here which means a) many more stories that may pique my interest, b) many more comments on those stories which can sometimes elucidate whether a story is insane or not, and c) the range of accepted topics is much broader. It sucks but it's impossible to replicate that kind of feed.)
It sucks but it's impossible to replicate that kind of feed.
There's also the option of not reading something that violates your higher values, even if it comes at a personal cost. That's why I left Twitter even though it badly hurt my business.
There's also the option of not reading something that violates your higher values
A fair point although I think the comparison to Twitter is unfair: Twitter is now an explicit fascist platform from the top down. HN only has sprinklings of fascism in the comments from the wannabe plutocrats/dictators.
I think it's community flagging - while I don't do it, I'm tired of seeing repeats of political content, even that which I agree with.
People often claim censorship of stories that I've seen make up a large percentage of the front page, and it feels like we're not looking at the same website.
Unsure if things have changed since 2013, but http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-works.html (linked in this post’s opening) is interesting as an analysis of HN story ranking/flags/penalties by regularly scraping /news and /news2 then charting story rankings over time.
Didn’t read this article but I’ve watched in real time as HN mods send an interesting post I just spent time commenting on to the shadow realm for no discernible reason. I don’t trust their moderation.
HN is a site funded and run by VC billionaire ideologues, practices moderation via obfuscation (shadowbans, special flag and unflag privileges, inconsistent editorialization, etc), has inconsistent rules about civility and good faith, routinely promotes conspiracies about covid/autism/DEI/etc to the front page while insta-flagging any genuine acknowledgment of sexism/racism in tech, etc etc.
Yes, it calls itself a bastion of free speech and enlightenment but one has to be either willfully obtuse or intellectually dishonest to accept that characterization.
I agree with jaredkrinke and steveklabnik - I think the Matrix one is explainable by the flamewar detector and the Omarchy one by community flags.
I do wish HN had a more transparent mod log that cited the reason for things being demoted/promoted, but community moderation + flamewar detector + dang giving things a second chance is both pretty well documented and on the right side of Occam's razor.
In that vein, YC funding Protocol Labs investing in Element with years seperating them feels like far to tenuous a connection for shadowy moderation, which I think they deny for YC companies themselves.
Hacker News is neither unbiased nor free from censorship.
Good. The reason Hacker News remains useful is that it has an active moderation team who work hard to keep the quality up. I'll accept moderation and bias in exchange for a useful community resource.
You should disclose your conflict of interest.
My conflict of interest here is that I'm really good at writing content that appeals to the Hacker News crowd. It's possible I've had more front page stories than any other individual over the past 12 months, though I haven't done the analysis to figure out if that's true or not.
Moderation such as why lobste.rs exists. "Hi, despite the official moderation rules of HN, you got banned for violating the secret moderation rules. Which are we can do whatever the heck we want".
Which means that all of the talk of moderation, ethics, etc. is a lie.
I can't find it now, but there was a reddit thread a while ago about HN moderation. As expected, the thread was full of people complaining that they were banned for unpopular opinions.
But the best part was one of the users who started replying to the comments in the style of HN moderators. He had the tone down perfectly. Superficially polite, but every sentence dripped with condescension and a "holier than tho" attitude.
Why are people upvoting this article?
Did anyone feel they became wiser by reading it?
My only advice is to keep in mind that, whenever you find yourself browsing Hacker News, you’re seeing a curated view of the current tech landscape that won’t necessarily represent the full picture.
Isn’t that quite obvious? What site can cover all of tech?
RFC-3986 equivalent URL: https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/the-mysterious-forces-steering-views-on-hacker-news/
My own personal observation is there is a lot of mob voting and flagging by legitimate users. A lot of political things die immediately unless a moderator intervenes.
I’ve seen controversial things about YC companies and popular people stay up, so the moderation isn’t an absolute. For the most part, I have no problem taking dang’s comments at face value.
I am absolutely sure that some people can ask for a specific post be nuked and it gets nuked most of the time, but not always. (This is not disclosed.)
So you don’t need a lot of conspiracy theories to explain most of what is happening. All it takes is pissing off enough users and your post is dead unless a few people vouch for it or a moderator rescues it. The rest of it could be explained by a moderator removing some things by request.
That’s my personal theory anyway. There absolutely is hidden censorship, but it’s not aimed at particular people or for a particular goal.
Calling Protocol Labs a "YC intermediary" is a pretty absurd claim, anyone who knows anything about PL would know this.