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That's not an accurate description of what's happening, and we're not going to redesign the site in response to political winds, gale-force though they are right now. Actually that would be the worst moment to do that.

It 100% absolutely is, you're just too deep to recognize it.

It's what's happened across Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook over the past decade. You've all built platforms intended for social discourse but instead built extremely brittle systems subject to gamified manipulation by showing people which opinions reward and punish them. And those are then manipulated at-large by outside groups responsible for elevating a particular way of thinking about a given topic.

Conversations do not need a algorithmic popularity mechanism.

That's just not an accurate description of HN based on what I know, but of course it's indeed possible that I'm too embedded to see clearly.

Edit: some of these points can be refuted by data though (albeit not public data, which means people have to take our word for it, which many are understandably reluctant to do). For example, flaggers of these stories are by and large longstanding community members who have participated for years on HN in lots of threads about lots of topics, etc. That doesn't prove they're not flagging at the behest of outside groups, but it does make it unlikely.

Make it public. Upvotes/downvotes/flagging should have usernames attached to it.

tptacek 499 days ago

That would be a disaster of epic proportions. Every thread, no matter how innocuous the topic, would devolve into perpetual feuds about which kinds of people were upvoting and downvoting which other kinds. These sorts of shitstorms were pretty common on HN, in the long-long-ago, and even then all we were revealing were comment scores, not voting attribution.

Then we remove upvotes and downvote entirely. Web2.0 online discourse (visibility is controlled by recommendation algos keyed on upvotes/downvotes) is fundamentally broken.

wswope 499 days ago

I think many users would be willing to hear a long-form version of your take on the subject (maybe in a fresh meta thread for visibility?), but your comment as-is feels like a shallow dismissal of legitimate concerns.

You’re not really offering any insight into why or how you reached the conclusion that you posted. As a user on the outside, it sure looks like the site structure has begun to buckle in the wind.

Sorry - I spent hours yesterday writing about this at length, so in my mind I've already done that, but you're right, of course. Let me dig up the links for you...

Edit: there's a shorter version at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922234 and two much longer ones at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 (including a later reply). If you (or anyone) read those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

wswope 499 days ago

That’s entirely understandable - I’ll dive into your profile to read those thoughts.

I second the suggestion to have some sort of metathread, stickied comment on hot political threads, or other consolidated way to present your collected thoughts so that a larger number of users see it and can benefit. Like you said, the winds are blowing hard, and you might go a long way to quelling the moderatorial waters by addressing the whole site as a collective.

Past efforts to do that kind of thing haven't worked, so I'm a bit down on the idea. What ends up happening is (1) the meta communication stirs up a flurry of objections, some relevant and many not; as well as people passionately restating what they feel about current affairs and/or how much they dislike what some other comment said; and at the same time (2) most people still don't see it, so it ends up not having the desired effect and just taking a ton of time.

Somehow, no matter how often we repeat something, the set of users who hear it always has measure zero (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787443). That's why I mostly stick to answering specific comments with detailed explanations, and hope that at least some other users will see it.

tptacek 499 days ago

There's something a little interesting in the measure zero observation; we've run into it in a couple places too. For instance: we now do voice calls ahead of our last hiring exercise (it's a little bit counterintuitive and needs some prep) because no matter how carefully we wrote about it, even with highly motivated candidates (many of whom we statistically end up hiring!) nothing we write seems to sink in. We have an API quirk that works the same way, too.

There should be a name for the effect.

-- https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-net...

computerthings 499 days ago

These aren't "political winds". This is all a bit too much "we're all looking for the guy who did this", when it comes to Y Combinator and "tech bros" in general.

> Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

> The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

That HN is for stuff not discussed in the news is basically disproven daily. The other thing I keep hearing that "if we allow this, the front page would be only about politics", I don't believe it anymore. It's like the stone that keeps tigers away. People may genuinely believe in that stone and that they're guarding the village, but I think it's bull and having to entertain this superstition takes up more resources than the occasional tiger attack would.

I know disabling flags is probably not feasible, since real spam does get posted. but we have "showdead" for comments, why can't we simply have the same option for threads? Then those who want to discuss these things can do it, at the price of also having to wade through actual spam. Anybody else would be unaffected. If the goal is not to suppress awareness and discussion, that can be very easily proven with such a feature, and the best time to implement it would have been a long time ago IMO.

I haven't read that article but those bits you've quoted strike me as mad, and certainly have nothing to do with how we run Hacker News.

computerthings 499 days ago

To be honest, it's such a long article I couldn't find a good passage that summarizes it, so I went for the most stark bit. Because it's really quite mad.

But it wasn't my intent to claim you run HN like this either way; but I'm making the educated guess that people who think the above isn't mad, but quite exciting, would be both likely to use this site, and prone to abuse flagging to suppress discussion, and/or awareness of the article that would be discussed.

dang 498 days ago

Ah I see, and yes that's a mistake I make rather often (assuming that a comment is about moderation when it's actually about the community). But tbh I don't have this impression of the HN community. I don't think we have that many users who feel that way, and certainly we have many more users who would strongly disagree.

computerthings 498 days ago

I don't know what "many" would be here, but it's obviously too many, since the flagging of these topics is really constant. And that flags are used by people because they are "annoyed by" or "don't care" about these things is stated by people all the time, who never followed up when I challenge them. So that doesn't give me the impression of good faith. If the reasons are benign and not to suppress awareness and discussion -- in short, not people thinking themselves the lords of others -- then nobody would have a problem with people opting out with something like "ignore thread flags" option.

Votes are a far bigger problem than flagging because it takes a pavlovian approach to what ideas are allowed. Flagging is important to remove spam and wholly inappropriate content. And if you revoke the ability of users who flag content based on a personal disagreement, that user simply loses that ability.

computerthings 499 days ago

I suggested to add the ability of users to have their view of HN unaffected by these flags. Without that, HN simply has no ability to defend itself against abuse of users who take it upon themselves to play censor.