Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds

https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/

Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source

https://futurism.com/sam-altman-energy-breakthrough

Avoid Async Rust at All Cost

https://blog.hugpoint.tech/avoid_async_rust.html

(Perhaps that last one could be renamed to be less hyperbolic, but the content was still an interesting opinion piece)

I don't think this is being done by the mods, by the way. It's more likely some spam filter with false positives, report brigading, or an anti upvote ring mechanism.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

"Ring will no longer allow police to request users' doorbell camera footage" (npr.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=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) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=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 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39119387 - Jan 2024 (141 comments)

Ring steps back from sharing video with police – mostly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=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 try to summarize the article, 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.

(3) The reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=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 seeing everything that gets posted here—there's far too much. I've flagged it now.

(I copied this from the parent comment so I can link to it when this comes up in the future).

But if we get into that we'll trigger the flame war detection.

Avoid Async Rust at All Cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=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 [email protected] 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.

---

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=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 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228231 - Feb 2024 (21 comments)

Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39191651 - Jan 2024 (151 comments)

New tires every 7k miles? Electric cars save gas; tire wear shocks some drivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175675 - Jan 2024 (64 comments)

Google layoffs: Tech giant to cut down 30k jobs, says report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791297 - Dec 2023 (6 comments)

Code will make me rich and famous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38336699 - Nov 2023 (2 comments)

The NSA Invented Bitcoin? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37599194 - Sept 2023 (61 comments)

Leaving the Web3 cult - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803267 - July 2023 (47 comments)

How the Military Is Using E-Girls to Recruit Gen Z into Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471105 - June 2023 (97 comments)

Alphabet plans to announce its new general-use LLM called PaLM 2 at Google I/O - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866435 - May 2023 (5 comments)

Is your husband/ boyfriend gay? LGBTQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35734086 - April 2023 (0 comments)

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.

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.

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.

Thank you for your tireless work. HN is a breath of fresh air compared with the rest of the internet thanks to it.

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?

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 do think that this approach has proven to work reasonably well for the bulk of the community. If people learn they can always get a question answered, that's a powerful trust-building factor.

Equally clear is that this way 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 those users. 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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189 for a longer answer; and also krapp's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232795, which makes a similar point.

edit: oh duh. thanks all, answer was 'right under my nose'!

Thanks _kst_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232594

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39203106

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190710

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39186297

I don't really have a critique or solution here, I imagine false negatives are an inevitability. Just sharing.

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, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165981 had been just a few days earlier. And it turns out that there actually was a link to it in the later thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=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.

All from only one day:

* Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/22/24045932/ford-android-scr...

* Secret Plan Against Germany (a very big story in Germany about a far-right planning meeting): https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-...

* Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development: https://vxdev.pages.dev/

* Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds: https://codeengineered.com/blog/2024/open-source-not-builds/

>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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not as if the internet is lacking in places where this can be discussed freely.

[1]: As in you have to click the link to see what it is about, and to decide if it is interesting or relevant to read.

There's a reason it's a big deal in German politics and already had some fallout (and thankfully multiple dozens of counter-demonstration of ten of thousands of people all over Germany.)

Most likely, people flagged the Germany story because it has a sensational title and they likely aren't from Germany and so wouldn't have context to know whether it's overblown.

I'm confident that Vx.dev got flagged by a bunch of people because they're tired of LLM stories (as repeatedly attested in this thread).

Based on the ratio of comments to upvotes, I suspect the Open Source Builds and Ford discussions ran afoul of the overheated discussion detector. Usually when the ratio gets too lopsided the software automatically drops the post off the front page, because that's an indicator that a lot of people are arguing in the thread without actually reading or enjoying the article.

Does that mean stories about LLMs or by LLMs?

Serious question.

I am one of the (few? many?) people (devs) who haven't look into LLMs or even tried out ChatGPT yet :), except to make jokes about it here once in a while.

If Company A makes a killer product announcement, rival Company B could simply get its employees to spam down votes on and flag that post. Company A gets less visibility, and dang won't be able to come on time to stop it.

This is an easily plausible hypothetical, which may already be happening.

Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in successful community moderation, but you have to wonder 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost entirely at the behest of big tech.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(In many places there, obviously a lot of that is about Meta the company).

Periodic threads like this one are, I think, allowed as a sort of escape valve for pent up meta energy. Emph. on "periodic".

If you want a site that makes the opposite call here, Lobsters has a public mod log. You might like that system better!

My interest is broadly about the attitudes towards speech as they continue to be shaped by corporations who continue to privatize the public square. See Taibbi's 'Twitter Files' for ample examples.

This is definitely one of those 'if you don't like it, build (or buy) it'. It has worked out disastrously in the conservative realm so far, but perhaps you have better ideas.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103328

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103483

We sometimes turn flags off on such submissions, assuming that the article is substantive enough to have a chance at supporting a thoughtful discussion; and also assuming that the topic hasn't been discussed recently. But neither of those particular submissions was likely to be such a solid foundation.

It doesn't look like https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00169862231175831, the paper, has been submitted yet. That one might work, if you or someone wants to try submitting it.

Ford's new 48-inch digital dashboard is a lot of Android for one car - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39089599 - Jan 2024 (78 comments)

Secret Plan Against Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39092116 - Jan 2024 (5 comments)

Show HN: Vx.dev – GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39091819 - Jan 2024 (34 comments)

Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387 - Jan 2024 (68 comments)

Of those 4, the Ford one and the open-source builds one set off the flamewar detector (a.k.a. the overheated discussion detector); the Germany one was flagged; and the Show HN one got moderated down. Let's look at what happened in that order. (I'm checking these as I write this btw..)

The Ford one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is easy to understand: hatred for modern car UIs is one of the most popular topics on HN these days and it always gets people going (me too! but never mind)...which no doubt is one reason why the media sites keep playing it. We wouldn't turn the penalty off in such a case. The discussion might not have been a flamewar but it was nearly entirely generic - for example the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090622. Given how over-discussed this topic already is, this is IMO clearly a case of HN's software working as intended.

The open-source one setting off the flamewar/overheated detector is also unsurprising as this general topic is also highly discussed and also gets people going. In this case I could make a case for turning off the penalty, but in the end I would decide against it, because the article isn't very deep, the discussion is rather generic, HN has a surplus of this sort of topic and thread, and nothing here really clears the quality bar. But it's more of a borderline call; I can see how others could interpret it differently.

"Secret plan against Germany" was flagged by users. That's a political story with a baity title, so the default would be for it to get flagged. We sometimes turn flags off on such stories but I don't know that this one clears the bar. It's more current-events than deeply-interesting, the ideological material is inflammatory and nobody is going to approach it with curiosity. The thread was already showing clear signs of turning into a flamewar. Even then, we might still turn off the flags, but only if the story were intrinsically of great significance—the sort of thing it just wouldn't make sense not to discuss at all.

The Show HN, we moderated down because "star for free trial" is not a valid thing to do in a Show HN and certainly is something the community here would strongly oppose (see the top comment). Here's what I emailed the submitter: "We downweighted the post after getting complaints from users. 'Star repo for free trial' is way too much of a hard sales tactic for HN, and even more so for Show HN, which implies that users can try out the product (see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). Asking them to star your repo first may be an ok tactic in other communities, but in the HN context it comes across as manipulative and is not in your interest at all."

[editing - bear with me...]

I have/had no objection to the moderation on these posts. In fact, if I were monarch of HN and the Internet, I'd want an order of magnitude higher standard for the quality of posts, comments, and conduct. I want to spend my time and on the actual very best intellectual content and discussion possible - it would probably be mostly the very best books and papers from journals if I had my way. (Not that I think HN should serve my personal preference, I'm just demonstrating that I am far away from criticizing the moderation.)

My GP comment and my other one that you responded to [0] were trying to recenter at least part of the discusson on a factual basis, which I find much more interesting than the (completely unintersting) conspiracy theory aspect. That is, if we explore it factually, objectively, intelligently, how does it work? how does it work out? For example, I imagine there are some interesting emergent properties which would tell us about the HN population, emergent properties of algorithms, and the interaction between them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055

It's disingenuous to blame it on the users when there are clearly other "forces" at play here.

There are a billion forums with less stringent moderation. Moderation is a very large part that makes HN good and not so game-able like most sites

What people maybe don't realize is how many constraints there are on HN's system. There aren't many degrees of freedom for us to change things that wouldn't lead to a massively different site, and most of those outcomes would be worse, because most of them would be closer to internet default.

It's easy imagine "HN, but without the things that I personally find annoying". But try to generalize that for a moment and the problem quickly becomes intractable.

The reason I say we definitely don't is that we'd have to write code to do that, and I'd remember writing such code.

Open Source Doesn't Require Providing Builds

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094387

Sam Altman Says AI Using Too Much Energy Will Require Breakthrough Energy Source

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738

Avoid Async Rust at All Cost (flagged)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102078

How can you tell? Those are from a week and a half ago. The OP's definition of 'removed' is (if I understand correctly) 'dropped from the top-30 to below the top-90 in 1 minute'.

IIRC: Mods can downrank a post so that it doesn't change anything for users, aside from the fact it won't be on the front page.

That's a big change?

... that is a hard question, something akin to topic amalgamation or cosine similarity on the bulletpoints?

could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are both sufficiently simultaneous about baz?

.... is there any dataset one might be able to play around with on this topic?

[0] there's like 3 good mods left online and you are one of them, so thanks for that.

Yup. We played with that years ago and dropped it as much too big of a potato. Another HN user spent a lot of time working on it and eventually gave up too. Someone should have a go using the newer AI tools though.

> could one (semi)automatically ask the community to confirm if story foo and story bar are

Also yup - building support for the community to take care of this is how we plan to do it, whenever we get to working on it. I think this could work well because people care about this problem.

I suspect that it has been flagged for that reason by multiple people.

At this point he's indistinguishable from a bitcoin advocate or a tv preacher.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055

I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.

It's vital to HN that user flags and/or software like the flamewar detector clear most such submissions off the front page. They tend to attract a lot of upvotes because that's what sensational (and especially indignant-sensational) stories do. Without countervailing mechanisms, HN would be completely taken over by those stories.

His statement wasn't even hyperbolic or fearmongering.....?

He just extrapolated based on current amounts of compute and estimated a possible model size that could be equivalent to AGI (based on current architecture).

Training a model of that size would require too much electricity.

That was his point.

Everyone should run to wise man Altman and he'll protect us from the evil AI. Please pressure governments to regulate the domain until only OpenAI is legally allowed to work with it.

https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/announcing-500-million...

In the case of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39095738, it just set off the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector. We sometimes turn that penalty off, but in a case like this we wouldn't do that because "$Celebrity says $thing about $common-subject" is almost never a substantial story. It's essential to HN to clear such stories off the front page in order to make room for more interesting, less sensational things. If we didn't, the front page would consist of little else.

I don't understand why this story was removed: "It turns out the six-feet social-distancing rule had no scientific basis", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39200511

On a forum with an overwhelmingly science-minded audience, it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.

I also think this sort of thing invites flag brigades. Or better yet, a small batch of bad actor can easily start brigading and forcefully associate such flamewar expectations with any subject they don't like to drive it off HN.

Maybe worth reconsidering how you flag? You might be getting played. Or not, I really don't know. No obvious answers.

It seems to me that the quality of any public discussion tends to increase when it’s relevant to the expertise in the room, and decrease when it involves people’s casual reads of complicated stuff about which they have vague but emotionally-charged impressions. HN folks have great, nuanced discussions about a wide range of technical questions, but we’re much less likely to collectively know what we’re talking about in questions of the latest hot-button political mudslinging.

There are communities that are good for that kind of discussion, but that’s not what we come here to do. And for this place to stay good at what it does do, it can’t afford to drown out the signal with the noise of emotive bickering.

The site guidelines do, I think, an incredible job of articulating what sustains the tenor here.

But at the end of the day, how best to capture “the vibes” about whether we collectively think a topic is tired or doesn’t fit here? It seems like HN does it just like a good dinner party host would: Change the subject when your guests—that is, the people with a strong track record of positive contributions—indicate that they’re weary of it. After all, we’ve got plenty of things to talk about that we do agree would be fruitful.

The expertise on HN is indeed unrivaled.

If I want to learn about the quirks of a variational autoencoder in some neural network, I read the discussion between experts here on HN [1].

If I want to learn about protein folding, I can find relevant domain experts answering questions here on HN [2].

But why do you and so many others think that there is a covid-shaped hole in the expertise on HN? Do you really believe that out of all domain experts, the covid ones decided to stay away from here?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39215242

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32262856

This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is. That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.

I hardly see any covid threads here. I happened to see the one of this week. It got 8 comments before being flagged into oblivion.

>That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.

You cannot have it both ways. Either you flag covid threads preemptively [1] along with a bunch of other users [2], or you try to learn from domain experts in these threads.

But making assumptions about what these experts would have thought of these threads, had they not been flagged down prematurely, is a weird leap of reasoning.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231535

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232084

In plain English, not enough people actually know what they are talking about to create an informative and educational discussion. So they all just end up as a pointless exercise in all the worst aspects of forum flame wars.

HN is at its best when people with lots of relevant experience and knowledge come into the discussion. Then the rest of us can learn new facts, tools, perspectives, etc.

There’s a long list of topics where that is just not available in the existing audience. So there are a lot of topics that, while interesting, are just not a good investment of everyone’s time here.

HN is a single place on the internet with clear moderation guidelines[1]. It doesn't have to cater to every form of speech. In fact, actively not doing so is probably the reason why HN's level of discourse is comparatively high.

People who want Reddit should go to Reddit, not drag HN with them through the mud.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

HN does not have to be a space for conversations about every important story. It is enough for it to be good at the conversations it is good at. There's a whole wide internet out there for the rest of the important conversations to take place on. Moreover: that has always been the premise of HN; it's not a principle we just sort of slipped into accidentally.

But this attitude explains a lot of the abusive flagging that goes on here. Stories get flagged because they make people feel ick, and they feel ick because they previously took positions that were wrong. So they flag. And when asked, why do you flag, they say "I don't know, I just don't like it", forgetting that the site exists supposedly to help drive intellectual curiousity. You may not like these stories, but other people do find them useful and you should not interfere with them.

Concrete examples from your comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32104731

"Given the weak sourcing, it feels like this article, in particular, flunks the "divisive subjects require more thought and substance" test."

(on a Bari Weiss article arguing that health authorities weren't really driven by science, something they now admit themselves was true).

In other comments you asserted that COVID vaccines can't possibly be dangerous but also said, "Convincing suspicious vaccine-skeptics of the value of vaccines is not the goal here. We're not a public health service; we're a forum for curious conversation. Tedious rehashes of antivax arguments aren't curious; they're just tedious."

If you don't like such discussions, ignore them! Nobody forces you to click through to the comments section. But this tactic of trying to define disagreement with your very strong opinions as not "curious" enough is tiresome. Other people do in fact want curious conversation, which will sometimes mean conversations about topics that you don't like. I'll say it again: leave those discussions alone. Stay away by all means, but don't interfere with other people's curiousity.

Check this out. It's barely on the front page, and has just 3 comments right now. How great is this post? How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235484

My son is a biochemist (interviewing for grad school slots right now, as in this actual evening, I'm living vicariously through him, wish him luck). I've been for years paying attention to bio/chem/biotech experts on HN, because I'm a biochem dad. We have lots of expertise about COVID here. None of it is on these COVID threads because all of them would apparently rather eat a bug than "truth it out" with people paraphrasing Bari Weiss. The verdict is in. You're on the wrong side of it!

But these have been useful data points for me, and I appreciate you offering them up. Have a great weekend!

Flags, karma and upvotes are fundamentally flawed and only allow the quality to reach a local maximum. For those inside the echo chamber, it's seemingly great. For those outside, it's useless. And we never hear from the dissenting voices because they are flagged/downvoted to oblivion.

You're correct that this is not a serious COVID forum, nor a particularly serious biochem forum and that's OK.

You could respond to this situation by talking about it with your son openly, encouraging him to uphold the highest standards of scientific honesty and rigor, to try and stand out from the rest and blow the whistle if necessary. Be honest with him that grad school will be full of fraud and intellectual corruption. But by taking your current stance you're going to flee unpleasant information for years and both ended up be blindsided when you realize that biomedical grads are less trusted than journalists. You can't flag reality.

Anyways, my point is: we have subject matter experts on virology on HN. They tend not to participate in COVID threads, which are invariably overheated and Weiss-ian.

Surely his middle school biology teachers had something to do with it. You should pay them a visit. Maybe ask them how many genders there are and see their faces contort in horror.

Please note that on this, covid, and whatever other such... things.. I offer no opinions of my own. I don't actually care very much about those topics and also, perhaps similarly to you, am put off by the far-(right|left) fanatics obsessed with them.

My peeve is with what it did to good public discourse and good people.

Perhaps if you see it on the faces of your sons teachers, who no doubt have had a rather increasingly stressful job in the not so many years since he left them, and to whom he owes at least a modicum of his no doubt bright future - you will understand my objection to your behavior of drumming out people in this fashion.

> How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than about Bari Weiss? Infinity times more

So do so! Nobody forces you to click on the Bari Weiss stuff. There is no doubt an evil twilight zone tptacek who flags the other way. And you both think you're great sheriffs clearing the joint from scum.

How much would I rather the thread you linked on daunting papers. How much more would I rather be reading comments on this than "you-are-wrong-about-my-sacred-cow, flagged!" remarks.

In my opinion you should just let people be wrong (see, no snarky air quotes from me! I hope you understand my tone and where I'm coming from) in the covid threads, leave each other alone and it won't boil over to more interesting threads. It's weird adults teach this in kindergarten but on a fancy I so smart forum we can't bring ourselves to rise above.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

An editorial that clearly does not embody that spirit is a poor starting point if you want the discussion to trend towards sanity.

Especially when the title itself violates—and ensures further violations of—this rule:

> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29532676

That thread actually changed my mind on the issue. You say "We should be able as a community to discuss conterversial subjects somehow." Well, guess what, we're not, or at least we're not without a great amount of care. Stories like the submitted one, which may be factually accurate but clearly have a political axe to grind are absolutely not going to lead to anything but a shitstorm of useless discussion.

IMHO story submissions should be judged based upon their own merits. Toxic commenters can be downvoted/banned but the story submitter shouldn't be punished for the misbehavior of others.

> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.

You mean purely based on the expected awfulness of imagined future comments, instead of the actual comments? If so, with a precrime mindset like that, you're fanning the flames of controversy.

There's not enough space on the front page for all the good things we want to read. I'm not interested in expending extra effort to rescue marginal stories with a low likelihood of generating a good conversation. The people most invested in these kinds of stories seem to be almost the least invested in HN's rubric of curious conversation.

I don't call any of the shots around here, but I think I speak for a bunch of different users who flag this way.

I didn't ask you to expend effort in rescuing stories. I took issue with the way you expend effort in burying stories, even before the comment section turns out to go sideways:

> I didn't flag (or see) that story, but I would have.

Remember though: we're not having this conversation so you can persuade me to change how I use the site. I'm just one doofus here. Wha ye need tae worry about are the t'ousand doofuses standing behind me. (_The Devil's Own_, 1997, starring Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford).

That top comment complains that the HN title is WSJ's informative subheading instead of its clickbaity headline.

If there's no possible title to use for a submission that won't get it flagged, then clearly it's not a great article to be submitting.

And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules. (The paywall doesn't help its viability as an HN submission, either.)

What do you mean: "not an accurate characterization of the content of the article"? The title pretty accurately describes an admission by the former NIAID director in a House Select Subcommittee, according to the WSJ. That admission is the topic of the article.

> And it's disingenuous for you to pretend that the issue is HN users being unwilling to reexamine the public health response to Covid-19, when the submission is clearly flouting HN's rules.

From HN's rules:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait;

I think using the clickbaity original title ("Anthony Fauci Fesses Up") would be flouting HN's rules.

Maybe you should Submit it again with the original title, and see what happens.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you demand precise scientific rigor in all aspects of everyday life, public health is probably not the career field for you.

Put a water hose on mist and spray someone with it. Then put a cloth over the nozzle and try to spray them. It's self evident yet people just could not grasp it.

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abs...

When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless. Also keep in the mind that the primary reason for studies showing masks not working is that people don't wear it correctly or at all.

That's just one RCT. The Cochrane meta-analysis looked at a bunch of them.

>When the medical field phases out masks because they "have no benefit" I will believe that masking was useless.

You're putting the cart before the horse. In an ideal world, guidelines for the medical field are based on scientific evidence. But there's always a delay.

You better consult the scientific evidence to make up your mind.

When it comes to covid and masking, policymakers will wait as long as possible before aknowledging the evidence, because they know the public hasn't forgotten the draconian masking of school kids yet.

It is an extraordinary claim that wearing a mask properly does not reduce transmission of viral particles. You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously. Then you can point to studies whose results are explained by that hypothesis.

I'm not trying to prove anything. I just rely on the judgement of domain experts.

In this thread I cited Cochrane, The Lancet, SciAm and Science Magazine. If you have more reputable sources, please share them here.

>You'll need to come up with a physical basis for this unintuitive hypothesis if you want to be taken seriously.

It's only unintuitive if you stick to the droplet model. SARS-CoV-2 however spreads like smoke through the air, as I documented already extensively in this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234677

SARS-CoV-2 is an aerosolized virus that can spread long distances through air ducts, and hang in rooms for long periods. This was known since the Diamond Princess was put into lockdown and COVID cases appeared randomly throughout the ship anyway, way back in 2020. The only possible explanation for this was transfer via the ship's air circulation system. It's as expected also because the same thing was observed with SARS-1 in Hong Kong.

It may also spread via droplets, but that doesn't mean it's the dominant path or even important at all.

Incorrect models of how this whole thing works are exactly why none of the predictions coming out of epidemiology were correct (or even close). If you think the dynamics of COVID are "self evident to the point of being axiomatic" you'll have to explain why nobody was able to correctly predict what it'd do next.

--> May 2020: "How Coronavirus Spreads through the Air: What We Know So Far"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-coronavirus-s...

>For months, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have maintained that the novel coronavirus is primarily spread by droplets from someone who is coughing, sneezing or even talking within a few feet away. But anecdotal reports hint that it could be transmissible through particles suspended in the air (so-called "aerosol transmission"). And the WHO recently reversed its guidance to say that such transmission, particularly in “indoor locations where there are crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces where infected persons spend long periods of time with others, cannot be ruled out.”

>Even if aerosols do not travel farther than most droplets, the oft-touted “six-foot rule” for social distancing may depend on the circumstances, Cowling says. If there is a fan or air conditioner, infectious aerosols (or even droplets, as was suspected in the case of that restaurant in China) could potentially sicken someone farther away who is downwind.

--> October 2020: "Airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2"

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf0521

>Viruses in droplets (larger than 100 µm) typically fall to the ground in seconds within 2 m of the source and can be sprayed like tiny cannonballs onto nearby individuals. Because of their limited travel range, physical distancing reduces exposure to these droplets. Viruses in aerosols (smaller than 100 µm) can remain suspended in the air for many seconds to hours, like smoke, and be inhaled. They are highly concentrated near an infected person, so they can infect people most easily in close proximity. But aerosols containing infectious virus (2) can also travel more than 2 m and accumulate in poorly ventilated indoor air, leading to superspreading events (3).

>Individuals with COVID-19, many of whom have no symptoms, release thousands of virus-laden aerosols and far fewer droplets when breathing and talking (4–6). Thus, one is far more likely to inhale aerosols than be sprayed by a droplet (7), and so the balance of attention must be shifted to protecting against airborne transmission. In addition to existing mandates of mask-wearing, social distancing, and hygiene efforts, we urge public health officials to add clear guidance about the importance of moving activities outdoors, improving indoor air using ventilation and filtration, and improving protection for high-risk workers (8).

--> May, 2021: "Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2"

https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(21)00869-2/full...

> First, superspreading events account for substantial SARS-CoV-2 transmission; indeed, such events may be the pandemic's primary drivers. [...]

> Second, long-range transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between people in adjacent rooms but never in each other's presence has been documented in quarantine hotels. [...]

> Third, asymptomatic or presymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from people who are not coughing or sneezing is likely to account for at least a third, and perhaps up to 59%, of all transmission globally and is a key way SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world [...]

> Fourth, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is higher indoors than outdoors and is substantially reduced by indoor ventilation.5 Both observations support a predominantly airborne route of transmission.

> Fifth, nosocomial infections have been documented in health-care organisations, where there have been strict contact-and-droplet precautions and use of personal protective equipment (PPE) designed to protect against droplet but not aerosol exposure.

> Sixth, viable SARS-CoV-2 has been detected in the air. In laboratory experiments, SARS-CoV-2 stayed infectious in the air for up to 3 h with a half-life of 1·1 h. [...]

> Seventh, SARS-CoV-2 has been identified in air filters and building ducts in hospitals with COVID-19 patients; such locations could be reached only by aerosols.

> Eighth, studies involving infected caged animals that were connected to separately caged uninfected animals via an air duct have shown transmission of SARS-CoV-2 that can be adequately explained only by aerosols.

> Ninth, no study to our knowledge has provided strong or consistent evidence to refute the hypothesis of airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission. [...]

> Tenth, there is limited evidence to support other dominant routes of transmission—ie, respiratory droplet or fomite. [...]

But I don't get your reply at all, wtallis. "the next few paragraphs should be about backing that claim up with convincing evidence and explanations" - which is what the stuff about the Diamond Princess, SARS-1 and Hong Kong was about? Evidence and explanations for why the droplet model was wrong. Do you see that? The connection is that the claim exposure as simple as inverse square law on distance assumes no aerosol transmission, which is incorrect.

It's hard not to feel that if people didn't keep flagging these kinds of discussions off the front pages, the wider HN community would be aware of all these basic facts which as the sibling post points out, is actually not controversial and hasn't been for years. HN is supposed to be about intellectual curiousity but the aggressive flagging behavior talked about by others in this thread means that too many posters here are stuck in a timewarp where it's still Jan 2020.

In reply to a comment about the inverse square law, you replied with arguments about droplet vs aerosol when neither concept was mentioned in the comment you were replying to. Simply put, your argument was unsound; it lacked any connection between the concepts in your comment and the concepts in the parent comment. As written, it falls somewhere between a non-sequitur and a straw-man.

When your conclusions are correct, such unsoundness is usually easy to rectify; you've now made it at least halfway there by implying that the inverse square law applies to droplet transmission but not aerosol transmission. You now only need to reinforce that new claim with evidence to complete the originally broken chain of reasoning and have a convincing argument.

Even when you are right, you still have a responsibility to make your point using complete and coherent reasoning. I routinely downvote people whose conclusions I agree with when their explanations or justifications are clearly deficient and overreaching and don't come close to proving their point. I flag such comments when it looks like the poster is being disingenuous or displaying egregious intellectual laziness. Because discussions here are meant to be thoughtful and substantive, and you don't accomplish that by regurgitating talking points without even re-writing them to fit appropriately into the context of the discussion. Bad arguments are always bad comments for HN.

(Not having researched the droplet vs aerosol issue myself, my suspicion is that both are likely subject to distance falloff that is at least quadratic, but that the constant factors are so wildly different that effective "social distancing" for aerosol transmission would require distances that do not fit into most indoor spaces, and consequently aerosol transmission in confined indoor spaces can result in aerosol concentration becoming fairly uniform instead of maintaining a strong gradient. But that's rather more reading between the lines than you can reasonably demand from people.)

The evidence for this was referenced in my first post when I mentioned the Diamond Princess. Aerosol transmission isn't even slightly governed by inverse square law of distance from the source. It's fundamentally about air currents, which are non-linear and governed by things like ducts, walls, heat convection and even (in the case of SARS-1) the wind between buildings. You can't model this as a simple linear distance function, and this was made clear when I said that cases on the DP occurred a random throughout the ship.

> I routinely downvote people whose conclusions I agree with when their explanations or justifications are clearly deficient

Don't. Your ability to follow simple conversations is far too poor to judge others like this. You've admitted that you haven't researched the issue, failed to understand very basic things about what we're talking about in this thread, have clearly not followed any of the references we provided despite demanding evidence (of things that are well known outside this forum!), yet never considered the issue might be on your end even when other people have also pushed back on you.

It's not about ability to follow "simple" conversations. It's about willingness to chase down numerous seemingly-unrelated references (that you didn't even bother providing links for) in order to discover the missing connections that you could have easily explained up front, without much a priori confidence that tracking down those references would satisfactorily fill in all the gaps.

On a forum with such a broad audience, you have to be more careful about assuming which things "everybody knows", and need to put more effort into fleshing out your arguments and explanations. Otherwise, it's hard for people who don't share your expertise or obsessions to tell when you're eliding important information because it can reasonably go without saying in some narrower community you're used to discussing the topic in, or whether you're presenting an argument that genuinely has serious holes in it. The latter happens often enough in discussions where I have expertise that I'm sure it's common when other subjects are involved.

I'm sure we'd both agree that HN has plenty of people who are not qualified to provide expert opinions on subjects like epidemiology. Whatever qualifications you you may have are not on display here, so users such as myself have to estimate your credibility based only on your comments. That evaulation will necessarily be a snap judgement, because there are too many trolls and misinformed people debating controversial subjects, and because someone who is knowledgeable and right but bad at explaining to people not already in the know isn't worth much more of my time and still isn't what people want to find when they come to HN.

Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here. Please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

However, because there's a right wing cult around Donald Trump, whose fortunes were hurt by the pandemic, the six foot rule and masking and vaccines are set up as straw men and attacked by a gigantic and well funded and organized horde of proxies, including the #1 media network in the US. It goes something like this: because a particular individual got COVID, that's proof that vaccines are not 100% effective and so They Lied To Us For Nefarious Purposes. Or because this particular individual stood 6 feet away and still got COVID, that's evidence that Fauci Is In A Conspiracy With The Chinese. Or because this particular individual survived COVID, it's just a cold. Or because masks are not 100% effective when not worn securely, they are not effective. And on and on.

So it's not unreasonable or unlikely that you heard a thing about bad science and six feet of social distance or whatever. But hearing a thing, and the thing being true from foundational motivations of actual science, are very different right now.

You can't just make up the beneficial effects of something as you go. Can you cite some randomized controlled trials that support your claim?

>Just like forced masking up probably saved tens of thousands of lives.

One year ago, a huge Cochrane meta-analysis of the available RCTs regarding masking has put that idea to bed: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

"Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."

Example very large study published in a reputable journal: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069?cookieSe...

Yes. To their credit, they only looked at randomized controlled trials.

>"Key messages We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed."

In other words: the RCTs don't show an effect to a significant degree.

1. I think for anyone that has been on HN throughout pandemic knows it is extremely unlikely for topics like this to produce any sort of valuable discussion. I almost never see any sort of humility on the topic (to be clear, from many/all sides) that admits that people (individuals, experts, literally everyone) were doing what they thought best with the information they had available at the time. It always devolves into portraying the other side as evil. I'm tired of it, I don't want to see it on HN, there are literally pages and pages and pages of place on the Internet where you can have that debate if you're so inclined.

2. Are you honestly purporting that specific article is well tailored to "an overwhelmingly science-minded audience", as opposed to just having a particular political axe to grind, given the title is "Anthony Fauci Fesses Up"? Honestly, if the article was written with an intent to encourage an actual understanding about where the 6-foot rule came from, and about whether the evidence for it was lacking, I probably wouldn't have flagged it.

> it bothers me that an important topic like that is deemed untouchable.

I think the mistake you are making there is thinking because a particular article is flagged by a lot of users that "an important topic like that is deemed untouchable." I can't speak for others, but for me that is absolutely not what I think, and it's not why I flagged this particular submission.

But you also say that making it undiscussable is also not about making the topic untouchable. That's just playing with words, isn't it? It's exactly what you're trying to do and exactly why you're flagging it.

This particular case is really egregious. Fauci has said this draconian policy "just sort of appeared", yet you damn anyone questioning his competence or motives as lacking humility? What would it take for you to allow criticism of this guy?

I could respond to some of your other sentences, but you've exactly proven my point, so thank you.

It's not that the topic itself is "untouchable". HN had quite a few threads about the lab leak hypothesis for example. But these things are sensitive to initial conditions, and something about the way that headline frames the story feels doomed to me, from an HN point of view. The sweet spot for HN is substantive, thoughtful conversation driven by intellectual curiosity. That's what the site is for. We don't always get there by any means, but I only want to turn off user flags when the odds give us a fighting chance. I remember seeing that story get flagged and thinking: it'll never work.

Another aspect of this: like it or not, curiosity and repetition have an inverse relationship. After the mind has been hammered with the same hammer enough times, curiosity gets sick of it and goes "ugh, not that again". That means that on a topic like all-things-covid, which we all got hammered with, the majority of the audience, who don't care that much, check out at first mention of the topic. Who does that leave? The ones whose motive is more intense than mere curiosity.

From an HN point of view, that's a ticket to hell. Curiosity can only operate within a certain range of nervous system activation. If the needle sinks too low, the topic is 'bleh' and nobody cares; but if the needle goes into the red, people will care—my god will they care—but they'll no longer be functioning out of curiosity. That's a failure mode for HN.

When it comes to divisive, heavily-covered topics like that one, the thing to watch for is some kind of interesting new information that isn't entirely reducible to existing battle lines. The same forces driving the thread into flamewar will still be present—but at least you'll have some current running the other way.

Really? A NASA report, on the official .gov site? Maybe the comments were horrible but that seems right in the middle of what HN is interested in.

NASA System Predicts Impact of a Small Asteroid over Germany - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39126705 - Jan 2024 (18 comments)

It was downweighted because it was a dupe (or quasidupe) of this:

Scientists discover near-Earth asteroid hours before it exploded over Berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103412 - Jan 2024 (46 comments)

That's the system functioning as intended. We work hard to try to prevent repetition from taking over the site, because repetition is the enemy of curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

One thing I've learned today, after 11 hours of posting in this thread, is that it's easy to look at an article in isolation and say "Really? That got moderated?" - when in fact if you know the larger context there's nearly always a straightforward explanation.

One can certainly argue that 86 points and 46 comments is too low a threshold to treat the repost as a dupe, but that's a different question, no?

The effort is appreciated by some if not most.

When I get tired I start to complain. It's a bad habit.

Edit: I’m not asking a rhetorical question. There are a lot of comments in this thread thanking “the mods” and I didn’t realize there was a mod team cultivating the front page. Can anyone attest to this?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

You're right that user flags do more than mods do, just because the numbers work that way: there are many orders of magnitude more users flagging things than there are mods.

Edit: 5 orders of magnitude more, in fact!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231055

> We didn't flag the post; users did. When it comes to submissions, that's nearly always the case - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169622

Example 1: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39142094

Example 2: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39130652

Example 3: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=39214844

Does this crowd think it's cool and normal that all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed, based on the opinion of a dedicated minority?

US tech giants are heavily implicated in this, so no one can seriously argue the topic isn't relevant. A World War could come from these "plausibly genocidal" actions, which are enabled in various ways by US tech giants.

Exactly. Big tech has been staggeringly complicit in these oh-so documented war crimes. For example, AI is being used to 'target' people, even in refugee camps and residential areas; even when hundreds of civilian casualties are predicted. This has been admitted - even boasted about.

As tech people, we can't just stick our heads in the sand and expect this not to come back on us. We're enabling this destruction in myriad ways, from funding to coercion to suppression of discussion [cough].

Genocide isn't just politics. We are legally bound as a nation, and morally obligated as humans, to prevent it. Instead, the US and many its tech companies are complicit.

If we can't even discuss the ICJ ruling that this may well be in fact a genocide, even when people are behaving and upvoting without breaking guidelines, then imo something very important has been broken.

"We" ain't all americans. There are people here coming from opposing sides in various wars. And there are more wars and slaughtering going on, than in the middle east. And "we" are just tech people. Not better or worse by principle, which shows off very easily as there can be religious flame wars about software already. So it would be good, if we could debate all this in a nice way. But apparently we cannot. This is why many people want NO politics here at all. As there is usually nothing coming out of it, except more of the usual - and not interesting discussions.

The vast majority of English speaking countries signed the Genocide Convention, if not all [0]

> This is why many people want NO politics here at all.

They're not a majority, far from it. And the rules don't say "NO politics"; that would be absurd. Tech and politics overlap often - as they do here.

0 - https://www.statista.com/chart/22194/countries-that-havent-r...

I'd call the flaggers colluding to spike stories with lively and non toxic discussions the 'activists'.

> Activism is controversial. Which means flame war.

So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options. Suppressing anything with a whiff of controversy doesn't result in positive outcomes.

Besides; freedom of speech, and free exchange of ideas, are both decidedly in the "good hacker" wheelhouse.

Have you seen one discussion about Gaza free of that? I haven't. (My main account is rate limited, because of a recent Gaza debate btw. Because I like heated discussions from time to time. But I can respect that it is not wanted here)

"So add a flame war tag, or a politics tag, and let people filter it. Filter it with AI. Grow a thicker skin, or expand your mind - there's a lot of options."

So one of those options are, you start your own forum, where you can have all that, instead of demanding that other people and places change to your liking. Just a suggestion.

I have. I linked them as examples above.

> demanding that other people and places change to your liking

I haven't made any demands. I've said what I'd like to see improved.

On the whole I like this community, and I try to contribute to it positively. Making suggestions on how it could be run with less censorship and suppression is not an unreasonable thing to do, and it's odd you think it is tbh.

In my opinion they were not free of that.

"ICJ orders Israel to stop genocide in Gaza"

And this one is really bad, as the ICJ did not do such a thing. The ICJ has not made any ruling, whether what happens in Gaza is genocide or not, so what good can come out of such a manipulative headline?

(1) These stories feel incredibly important to me now!

-and-

(2) Complete strangers, all over the internet, and with no official duties or obligations regarding the subjects of these stories, should be required to pay attention to them!

The first one is fine. The second one suggests a somewhat immature worldview, or limited social skills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The initial invasion was allowed due to the international significance, but to discuss subsequent events head to Reddit.

This is in the FAQ linked in the footer.

Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar will be on topic.

From the submission guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

People here were clearly finding those stories interesting, as measured by upvotes and comments.

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

US mainstream TV mostly declined to air South Africa's side of the case, as well as the actual verdict; opting instead to only air Israel's defense.

> Something novel with drones or new medicine or similar will be on topic.

"Something with drones" = on topic, but a plausible genocide verdict from the ICJ is not of "international significance" and therefore off topic... This isn't computing for me, sorry.

The verdict had a thread with over fifteen hundred comments and was on the front page most of the day. Others were presumably down ranked as they were dupes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043

Also, it was removed within a minute of hitting the front page (if I'm reading the graphs right). Doesn't quite line up with your presumption.

Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?

Besides - the point is this: Not all the stories that are in OP's list are spam, or unsuitable. Some topics hit a third rail.

They are easily removed by a small group of users, and then Daniel can come by months later and say, well, users flagged it [ie, 0]. It even happens to PG [1]. This isn't ideal, and pretending it isn't happening is uncool.

I'm not saying Dang doesn't do a great job. But there are some topics that are verboten, despite their impact/relevance on the tech community and our general interest. And this particular topic is too important to allow for such narrative control by a tiny group of flaggers.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38311933

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38144931

Presumably users flagged both posts almost immediately, and by the time mods decided that the topic was worth discussion the second thread had more engagement. The first thread was still a dupe despite being posted earlier.

>Any theories on why the Guardian's visual exploration of Gaza's destruction was flagged, despite positive upvotes and comments?

While the verdict was a major event like you said, The Guardian's story was not. Users flagged it, like all posts on the topic, and the mods decided it was not different enough from previous discussions to justify a new flame war.

The ongoing wars are topics worthy of discussions, and they get discussed here. They don't need daily discussions. If you want daily discussions, there are plenty of places you can go to do that.

I think I read this from a comment from dang.

We don't ban these sites, because all of them occasionally produce solid original articles. But we downrank them because if we didn't, the frontpage would consist of little else—and many readers still feel they're over-represented, even with the downranking.

Per the guidelines:

>What to Submit

>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The latter two stories are not new phenomenon (the war has been ongoing), and the former, literally being a decision by a political body, falls squarely under "politics", and is highly likely to lead to nonproductive flamewars.

Part of this is because I’m European, and the whole “red vs blue” team sort or politics a lot of Americans seem to do these days is just silly, and often hateful. But part of it is also that we’re a bunch of people who know tech and business, but not international politics. I guess I could just ignore them, but I’d frankly rather they were kept to other places on the internet.

HN had an enormous thread about the ICJ decision:

ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043 - Jan 2024 (1397 comments)

The question here isn't whether the topic has been suppressed; it's how much of it HN can handle. This site is not designed for frequent repetition, especially of flamewar topics—it's designed for precisely the opposite. That makes the question of how to handle a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) a tricky one. HN has a reasonably well-defined approach to this, which has been stable for many years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Which is the point - a small crowd of partisans can flag third rail topics here, no matter how much interest or how much positive discussion is happening.

I remember, in particular, the time all the posts about a lead torturer from Abu Ghraib were suppressed. Although she destroyed Congressional evidence, she was promoted to a top position at at a top tech hirer. We should be able to talk about things like that.

Your response then was the same as now; to deflect responsibility to 'users'. I don't buy it. The same happened with Annie Altman's claims about her brother. The same has happened with quite a few Zionism related threads, recently and historically. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37953737, which clearly is squarely in our domain.

There is room for improvement here. A minority of strongly biased participants, on any issue, shouldn't be able to completely disappear whole sides of the story, as has been happening.

But there are other ways besides flags for stories to fall suddenly off the front page: software penalties (e.g. the flamewar detector, a,k.a. the overheated discussion detector, various abuse detection systems, etc.) and moderation downweights. Users don't do either of those.

These points are covered in the FAQ although necessarily tersely. See "How are stories ranked?" and "What does [flagged] mean?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

IMO this happens because fundamentally people have "The reddit mental model" about how moderation works here, as if moderation is some privileged, limited position. It's just wrong.

Yes, there is dang, the single admin who posts publicly, and I guess it's possible/probable there are other HN admins who assist him. But 99.9% of the time when I hear people complaining about "the mods" or "power tripping mods" or "censorship", it's basically that other users saw what you had to say, and we just don't want to see it here.

It's also weird that occasionally people think there is some sort of "rule" about what can be flagged. There are obviously guidelines, but as this power is held by any normal user, it's basically whatever they want it to mean. For example, I frequently flag stories where I think the topic and article is totally valid, but where every single time I've seen the topic debated on HN it becomes a useless flamewar or is filled with the lowest quality commentary. At least for me, flagging isn't a value judgment on the "worthiness" of an article, it's simply about stuff I don't want to see on HN.

Partially, but I think these are all symptoms for a more fundamental root cause: HN is just comprised of too many emotional, passionate users with fundamentally differing beliefs.

The usual song and dance with flagging goes something like the following with cryptocurrency:

1. User posts cryptocurrency article

2. People who passionately hate cryptocurrency start adding in emotional comments about how they hate it.

3. People who want to fight this passionate hate respond in kind.

4. The thread turns into a giant argument where nobody is willing to concede anything and everyone is just shouting at each other.

5. Either the flamewar detector kicks in (as it should) or everyone not in the thread tires of the shouting and flags it.

That's fine but regrettable when limited to some topics like crypto. But it's happening with social media company earnings reports, layoff posts, RTO discussions, posts about Musk, autonomous vehicles, and on and on.

dang (and the mod team?) are doing great work, but this is despite the feeling I have that HN is barely being held together into a cohesive community, and I'm struggling to even use the word "community" here. I feel the temperature of discussions has gotten a lot hotter here than it used to be and some basic work I've done with sentiment classifiers on comments here mirrors my perspective.

I just don't think a single community can handle so many passionate, opposed groups. It bubbles up by proxy in these sorts of flagging wars where so many articles get bumped off the page due to the inability of the community to discuss it well. Maybe the solution is to just discuss software as some people really want, but even then you get massive flamewars over things like Rust async. Even with interesting topics like VR posts, the overall temperature of the comments here is high enough that I've stopped bothering to comment as much as I used to.

An interesting heuristic I've seen play out a few times now across different communities (and that HN is starting to suffer from now on more contentious topics) is that too many comments on a post means that it's low quality. A handful of comments on an old post means there's not a lot to say about a topic; too many comments means that there's not a lot to change your mind about

I posted detailed explanations in those other threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39224560

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210947

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172045

If you (or anyone) read those explanations and still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is. These practices have been in place for many years and haven't changed.

One questions I do have–I would guess posts critical of HN/YC are going to get a log of flags and have not the best discussion. This has a side affect of biasing the home page to not have posts critical of HN/YC. Do you see this as a problem?

And it creates a very visible feedback loop, as users start to think that this is what HN is supposed to be. They're probably the biggest quality problem of HN.

You can take this with a grain of salt as I'm obviously not the most neutral observer, but from everything I've seen (which at least is a lot!), yes they get a lot of flags, but they get even more upvotes. It's hard to say which side wins out in the tug-of-war. The tendency towards negativity that jsnell's comment describes is very real, and it's on the upvote side in these cases.

Most probably the tug of war goes one way some of the time and the other way the rest of the time. The funny thing is that as mods, we have to have a regulating influence either way. What I mean is that if a rage story hits the top of the front page, we'll downweight it (though not necessarily all the way off the front page); but if a rage story about YC gets too many flags, we'll reduce those or remove them altogether. The recent shitfest is a good example; let me dig up some links for you... Edit: oh wait, I already mentioned those links in the GP. Sorry, I'm getting a bit tired here!

Did I answer your question?

@dang You did–thank you. I hope my question didn't come across as accusatory. This is a hard problem and, unfortunately for you, many of us enjoy discussion of difficult problems. What many of us my not see if you having to have the _same_ conversation over and over. Thanks again for your work. I don't envy your position.

The answer to OP’s first question, but there was a second one:

> How big is his team? What kind of tools are they using?

It's pretty clear to me that any online forum needs good moderation to be healthy long term. HN has been good about this with a strong community providing upvotes/downvotes and a moderation team that seems pretty light handed but not afraid to say no when necessary. Please keep doing what you're doing.

However, I do see a few decent posts in this list that probably warrant a second chance.

plural ?

That told me all I needed to know about the moderation of this site.

Thankfully someone captured a screenshot: https://merveilles.town/@cancel/111834048502040552

huppeldepup's comment in the screenshot is collapsed on p2 of the comments (after it was no longer relevant) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39157010&p=2, and is also accessible as the parent of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39170137.

I mean yeah it probably was just a mistake but what do you expect somebody to say?

I'm sure there's a model in which lying some of the time but not too often has marginally higher expected value, but it's also going to have significantly higher risk and that's not worth it, plus you have to be disciplined enough to actually apply such a strategy. One slip and you're dead! I'm too lazy for that.

Btw the more accurate reason why we don't do things like that is that we don't want to because it would feel bad. It's not who we want to be. However, the actual reason doesn't always have much persuasive power and when I'm sensing that's the case, I use the cynical argument ("not in our interests", basically), because it's also true. But as the cynical argument isn't persuading you, maybe I should switch back!

This site is a marketing campaign for a VC company. If you see it the same way, I’d be shocked.

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

In that case you drew a general conclusion from a freak accident so rare that I doubt it had happened in the 17 years this site has been around. (Edit: 17 years this month in fact! https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...)

If what you require from an internet forum is that the moderators under no circumstances will ever commit a copy/paste error, HN is definitely below your standards.

Edit: the mods would like to share that they weren't drunk when they made that mistake, just rushed and watching a rather gripping tennis final.

That prompted me to check other dates in the archive: apparently the "Startup News" title lasted for around six months before changing to "Hacker News". I was pretty sure the change was before I made my account, but I didn't realize the "Startup News" period had been so short.

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

Edit: here's the last copy of Startup News that archive.org has—from 2007-07-13:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070713212949/http://news.ycomb...

and here's the first copy of Hacker News they have, from 2007-08-30:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070830111558/http://news.ycomb...

They missed an entire 6 weeks there, but bless them for having anything at all—who among us preserves our own history?

Another way to look at this is that the mods have the same biases you do. Depending on how you’re feeling on a given day, you could call that an echo chamber.