>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.