The second one is both sensationalist clickbait[1] and politics. It was rightly removed:

>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.

The second story is evidence of a new phenomenon: The far right political movements thinking about an anti-constitutional policy, a new step on the ladder of escalation.

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.)

What these are is evidence of your parent comment's point that this isn't direct moderator action, rather a combination of algorithms and user flags.

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.

>LLM stories

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.

I think generally it works well- when there are actual major events like early COVID or Ukraine - HN managed to inform we way ahead of mass media with various interesting sources. But I’m happy to have a “news” thing pop up only a few times a year. You’re gonna have someone be mad about every instance when you moderate

There ought to be a time-based flagging limit, so that people don't abuse the system. I've already raised this earlier.

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.

Flagging requires high HN karma. You get that by being a positive member of the community. Most such people, if a company even has one, would find it against their personal ethics to do that. And dang can see the karma ratio and unflag any actually worthwhile announcements.

I think as people have become more and more aware that flag negatively weights items for rankings, and isn't just a "hey have the mods look at this rule breaking thing", more people have started using it as a downvote button. It was my understanding that HN originally didn't have a downvote feature to avoid the kind of issues that the flag usage is now causing.

Even the highest karma users can lose their flagging privileges, temporarily or perhaps even permanently, if they do it enough times within a time window or if abuse is detected. So from what I understand that issue should be taken care of.

I think you're probably generally correct, but "blaming the algorithm" sure smells to me like a whole lot of camouflage for censorship, which we ought to know by now has as much to do with 'quality' as it does 'shaping the narrative'

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.

The simple solution would be to display a log of all removed/flagged/shadowbanned posts and comments, like Wikipedia does.

Enable showdead in your profile if you want to see dead posts. You can't see deleted posts as the author deaded or asked HN to delete the post. See the HN FAQ [0].

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

Preventing the site from being taken over by incessant meta debates is one of the moderation goals of the site.

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!

I don't care if its a right-wing talking point and I don't care if a company has given themselves permission to censor themselves.

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.

Users are privatizing the 'public square'. We come to HN by choice. I'm sure others use Twitter by choice. And users subject themselves to the TOS by choice.

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.

"If you don't like it, build your own" is another bad-faith lie told by those who love censorship culture.

Not sure why both submissions about work preferences were flagged:

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

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

Users flagged them. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case it might have been the desire to avoid gender flamewar hell, which is mostly always the same and which HN has had more than enough of. Also, one of the submissions was paywalled (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39104886), while the other was just the tweet of a graphic.

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.

Ok, I'm finally getting to this - sorry for taking so long! First let's find the actual HN submissions... here they are:

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...]

dang - thanks for taking the time to respond in detail. You really go above and beyond. I imagine this whole discussion landing like a concrete block on your plate (but hey, maybe you dig this part of the job).

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