> Around the start of Trump's second term, HN reduced the degree to which politics was considered off topic.
That is inaccurate. The standard has remained the same ever since pg changed the name of this site from "Startup News" to "Hacker News", and its focus to intellectual curiosity, coming up on 20 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. You can see there the original language: most stories about politics are off topic (note that the word is "most", not "all"), which is still in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Arguments about HN having gotten-too-political go back many years, long before the time you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that there are swings and fluctuations, some of which last for quite a while and give the misimpression that the site has permanently changed. Such swings are inevitable—they are caused by macro trends, which HN is not immune to: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
The other is that when people see a series of threads they don't like, or even a single thread they don't like—for example because it offends them politically—they rush to overgeneralize. This applies to all of us and has to do with how our emotions affect our perceptions and thinking.
The one exception to all this was when we tried a "no-politics week" as an experiment back in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404. That experiment failed quickly—its actual effect was to make HN more politicized, so we canceled it after a couple days (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251), and reverted to the original tried-and-true (albeit unsatisfactory, in the sense that no one is really satisfied by it—there's something for everyone to dislike) standard.
At first I thought this experiment was what you were referencing, since to this day there are people who occasionally get confused by the fact that we briefly tried it. But when I read more closely I see that you were talking about 8 years later!
Yes—but a confounding factor is that someone who knows a lot about X usually also has strong feelings about X. This makes it hard to tell what part of one's reaction is to wrongness/ignorance vs. having one's feelings offended.
To mention some (hopefully safe) examples, I know things about certain programming languages, and smoke comes out my ears when someone who appears ignorant to me comments about how APL or K programs are "unreadable", or that Lisp macros lead to code no one else can understand.
The level of outrage in my inner self isn't a measure of anything particularly interesting, though.
Reading incorrect comments might (or might not) make smoke come out of my ears, but the salient point is that they are (likely) incorrect.
When I read about things I know little about, my tendency, given the passive authoritativeness of a lot of HN commenters (myself included), is to believe that the comments are correct.
Logic would suggest that this is a mistake, but I find myself unable to switch to a mode of default disbelief.
We use shadowbanning (i.e. banning an account without saying so) in specific cases such as spammers and serial trolls. I don't think that's inhumane. In the case of spammers, telling them would only lead to more spam. As for serial trolls, they are usually aware of which of their stable of accounts have been banned yet vs. not.
But when you say "wait until it happens to you", I'm curious if that means that we banned one of your accounts without telling you so? It would be interesting to look up, if so.
If there is an established history of at least two prior accounts of an identity being banned via a regular ban in the last two years, I can then see the justifiable reason for a shadow ban. Without these strict criteria, I think it doesn't give the person a sufficient opportunity to remediate.
I have heard from users having as many as a thousand karma points that were shadowbanned without warning.
Fwiw, I do not have any other account on this site, and I haven't had any other account since this account was created. I had a different account many years ago, the login for which I had fully lost.
> I have heard from users having as many as a thousand karma points that were shadowbanned without warning
I don't think that can be true, at least not in the last 12 years. Far more likely is that someone incorrectly concluded that they were shadowbanned. But if anyone wants us to check a specific username, we'd be happy to do so.
People come to all kinds of mistaken conclusions, especially when they're upset about something that we or someone else did on HN. Self-reports of this kind, especially about being banned, are mostly unreliable.
> Congratulations, you have political opinions. Despite your claims elsewhere,
Your underlying point is correct of course, but can you please make your substantive points without snark, and avoid the flamewar style? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
@dang - "Your underlying point is correct, of course". Could you please explain which statement of sheafification's, specifically, is correct (besides the fact that I have political opinions, which I do not believe is mutually exclusive with being politically neutral)?
Yes, happy to - but I'll be offline for most of the next hour, so it might have to be later.
I should mention though that I wasn't making a point about your comment (which I haven't really read) and certainly not about you personally. Rather, it's a general observation that has come up many times over the years.
With respect (especially for the work you do here), this isn't ok.
sheafification's reply was specifically to me and specifically personal. (Every sentence was directed at me - not something that I wrote.) There was no "general observation" that I can see in his reply. For the record, here is his reply in its entirety:
> Congratulations, you have political opinions. Despite your claims elsewhere, you’re not “politically neutral.” Nor do you believe, in practice, that political opinions do not belong on HN.
Where is the "general observation that has come up many times over the years"? What part of this response read as "correct" to you, and why?
From my reading, it was an ad hominem generalization based on a flawed understanding of my previous post designed to dismiss my opinions based on some perceived contradiction. What about this is "correct"?
I agree that that language was too personal. That's one reason why I asked the commenter not to post like that in the future.
The underlying point, as I understand it, is that it's not possible to be "politically neutral" or "apolitical" because what counts as "political" is itself politically contested. This is an argument that people often make in discussions like this—it has come up countless times over the years—so I was pattern-matching in interpreting the GP comment that way.
FWIW, although I happen to agree with that claim in general, I disagree with the consequences people usually try to derive from it (for example, that it is necessary to choose a single political position from which to moderate a site like this one).
None of that is pertinent to the moderation issue, though, which is that if people are going to make points like this in HN threads, they need to do it without snark, personal attack, or other flamewar devices. My moderation reply was about that, not "is it possible to be politically neutral or not"—it would be the same regardless of topic. I just prefaced it in this case with "your underlying point is correct of course" because (1) I like to say something to connect with the person I'm replying to, if I can*; and (2) it makes the "you're only moderating this because you disagree with my opinion" objection a tad less likely.
@dang - thank you for the explanation. I can see how you might read this into the post, but I think it's a real stretch to derive that conclusion from three sentences that ascribe motivation and belief to me personally. You have more experience with this than I do, so I'll respect your conclusion.
> people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things
I think that's probably overinterpreting. No doubt there's a long tail of weird behavior, but the fat part of the distribution is covered by a simpler fact: humans change when emotions get activated. People who have interesting things to say when their curiosity circuits light up have entirely different things to say when their amygdalas are inflamed.
Edit: their right amygdalas, that is! it isn't clear to me what the left one does but it's a puzzle why everyone says "the amygdala" when we all have two.
I mostly avoid this place these days, but there are certain topics where people hyperrationalize, i.e. they (silently) accuse others of being reactionary because an argument looks like reaction to them on the surface.
I started self-censoring on HN because I knew some very normal and on-topic things to say would be voted to oblivion because they had the shape of a controversial topic that the average HN commenter can not relate to except through some mainstreamed right-leaning cultural narrative. The mere mention that I was an affected party in some culture war adjacent thing was treated as if I had invoked a thought-terminating cliche. It was very... anti-curious.
So I principally agree on the conclusion, when emotions get activated this site gets worse. I just see the impact differently - anything that deviates from the libertarian-right leaning default is pushed away. I'm still relieved I had my pseudonymous account with a lot more HN internet points wiped and don't have to care about this site on an emotional level anymore.
Yes in the sense that users flagged it, but not in the sense that moderators penalized it. I didn't see it until someone emailed a couple minutes ago.
The only thing I've done since then is mark the post so it won't be killed by excessive user flags. This means the thread can stay open for new comments.
I'm not going to remove the flags, because they are clearly an authentic community reaction, though of course some users will have the opposite reaction as well; this is normal.
IMHO, for fairness, upvotes should be the vouches countering the flags. I think unless the amount of flags is really significant, they shouldn't have priority over the 117 upvoters (and counting) who are clearly interested to have this discussion here.
My thinking could be naïve, as the algorithms were probably created with the backing of some data and experience, but anyway, I felt like sharing my opinion.
In a real tug-of-war, the teams are balanced. In the HN tug-of-war, flaggers have an advantage because flagged posts are invisible to people who might otherwise upvote them.
Flags having a stronger influence than upvoting is a necessary algorithmic check against genuinely bad behavior/brigading, not disagreement. In general it works as intended, which is the best you can do without something potentially worse.
Are there any stats available on the weighting ratios such as flags to upvotes, likes and comments per post after flagging, average time to frontpage to flag?
(G summarises the following[0], but a definitive source would clear up what the necessary algorithmic checks are).
I'm curious - Do you have a reaction to the specfic point of suggestions that were brought to you, per the article? Do you recall specific ones, and if they were considered/deliberated?
Wouldn't excessive/above average flagging rather indicate a post is controversial/counter narrative enough to warrant longer front page exposure? It certainly seems to have gotten the people going in the short time it was up, and it's not a secret that early vocal users can be quite generous with the flag button.
I applied it in this case by preventing the thread from getting killed outright, which would have closed it to new comments. This is moderating less than we normally would, since any thread that is flagged this heavily would normally get killed.
It's important to understand that "moderating less" means moderating less than we normally do. It doesn't imply "not moderating at all", and certainly not "always override user flags". Those would be loopholes that any internet provocateur could drive a truck through, as I've mentioned from time to time over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Some community reactions are considered more authentic than others, it would seem.
I’ve seen so many shit articles and corporate announcements manually unflagged by the mods over the years. (Here’s a recent one, flagged to death very quickly before miraculously being resurrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602728) An explanation is rarely given.
Sure! We should just wait long enough (perhaps a couple of months) so the effects of the current thread wear off and it won't feel like a follow-up anymore. If you want to, you'd be welcome to email us then and we could arrange a new thread - similar to what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49807631 (on a completely different topic of course!)
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
Maybe they ran it through OP's de-sloppifier to see how well it works. And look how well it did! The slop detector doesn't suspect a thing! I can already smell the value this thing is adding to the world.
That is inaccurate. The standard has remained the same ever since pg changed the name of this site from "Startup News" to "Hacker News", and its focus to intellectual curiosity, coming up on 20 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. You can see there the original language: most stories about politics are off topic (note that the word is "most", not "all"), which is still in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Arguments about HN having gotten-too-political go back many years, long before the time you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that there are swings and fluctuations, some of which last for quite a while and give the misimpression that the site has permanently changed. Such swings are inevitable—they are caused by macro trends, which HN is not immune to: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
The other is that when people see a series of threads they don't like, or even a single thread they don't like—for example because it offends them politically—they rush to overgeneralize. This applies to all of us and has to do with how our emotions affect our perceptions and thinking.
The one exception to all this was when we tried a "no-politics week" as an experiment back in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404. That experiment failed quickly—its actual effect was to make HN more politicized, so we canceled it after a couple days (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251), and reverted to the original tried-and-true (albeit unsatisfactory, in the sense that no one is really satisfied by it—there's something for everyone to dislike) standard.
At first I thought this experiment was what you were referencing, since to this day there are people who occasionally get confused by the fact that we briefly tried it. But when I read more closely I see that you were talking about 8 years later!
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