I think it isn’t mod actions but rather the very likely fact that there is a small, but large enough group of flaggers who will act in unison to remove any such post from the front page. If you want an affirmation of the efficacy of the moderation system, what you should want is transparency into the voting behaviors of the population. If you see a heavy voting correlation between flagged posts and either a specific set of users, voting timing (these types of posts get flagged much earlier than those that lean the other way politically), or both, then there is cause for concern that the algorithm of HN’s self moderation tools is being gamed. My bet is that it’s not the mods doing anything, but rather that there is already a critical mass of flag happy users that are controlling what gets to stay on the front page. I think it would be very interesting to see a write up on this topic, but it’s highly unlikely because I think it would violate privacy and user expectations of anonymity.
Very tenured apparently. I certainly can't unflag and I'm relatively active on a mature account.
I do wonder of boosting the flag threshold for posts to double that of a downvote would change much. Probably not depending on the flag threshold and of this truly is coordinatied
This post, and many many others, ought to have been unflagged.
So, so, so many popular and active stories about Musk and DOGE and Trump have been removed this past year, while at the same time Garry Tan and PG were cheering them on on their Twitter feeds.
People who call this out too much get banned. For super unrelated reasons, apparently.
Dang has explicitly disallowed any and all posts talking about the weaknesses of the flag system. IT'S PROTECTED.
Let me see if I can outline how we approach this in a way that might make sense to you...
People use the word "transparency" to mean different things. Here are the ways in which I think it's fair to say we're transparent about mod actions: (1) we explain the principles that we apply, frequently and at length; and (2) we're happy to answer questions, including about specific cases.
In our experience, the current approach is a reasonable balance between the tradeoffs. It's true that we don't see all the comments like the ones you posted here, and we can't address what we don't see. It's also true that, as volume has grown, we've found it harder to reply to absolutely every question. But it's still eminently possible to get an answer if you want one—especially if you're asking in a way that signals good faith*.
(*I add the latter bit because some people use the format of "asking a question" as way of being aggressive and in such cases we may respond otherwise than by taking the question literally. That's pretty rare though.)
The problem is that a relatively small group of people (flaggers) just veto what we see and don't see. This made sense when we relied on flagging to just remove spam, useless posts, etc. but its now being used to remove anything that goes against MAGA.
I'm pretty sure that if you sqldump the list of flaggers of this and other posts (like the MN posts) you will find it's not a uniformly distributed list of users.
You've replied before I even had a chance to add a second sentence! Edit: admittedly it is taking longer than usual...
I've answered that point many times, e.g. recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818. If you take a look at that and have a question that isn't answered there (or here), I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
I haven't had a chance to look at the flaggers of these recent stories to verify that they fit the same pattern, but the pattern is so well-established that it would be shocking if they didn't. Btw, when you say "anything that goes against MAGA", the converse is the case as well (possibly even a bit more so). And when I say (quoting the comment I just linked to):
> There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.
... I didn't add that we do this the same way in either political direction, because that goes without saying, or ought to. But I'm saying it explicitly here.
This is a really rough spot, giving users the tools to remove visibility from a post will eventually get abused. I would genuinely be interested in some form of anonymized stats on the individual accounts and the posts they are flagging but that's a whole deal.
Am I wrong that there used to be a flagged option on the lists page, or am I missing where that is?
Honestly I don't ask for anonymized stats but rather public stats.
If you flag a post, you are inadvertedly trying to push a hn post away.
That's fine if the current moderation finds it okay and I respect HN moderation but once again another post gets flagged & dead.
If someone flags a post, they should have a reasoning why. So have it public, so that its easier to call people out if they are being unfair and it would make people more aware of who they are flagging and actually why.
Flagged articles should just list the usernames that flagged it--in a queryable way so anyone could do an analysis and see who is operating in bad faith.
Phrasing political flaggers as "those who care about the quality of the site" already shows the hand here. You can argue downvotes are for disagreement, bit Flags are for slop and spam, not blocking what I don't agree on.
Flags are basically me waving my hands in the air calling for a mod. That's not something I do unless I feel it's outright harmful to the site. I'm a late commenter so I pretty much never have to flag postings (mostly just comment responses that come straight out of Twitter).
>>When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.
I have observed that any post that is negative about Musk gets flagged. Almost 100% of the time. In that regard, it has certainly occurred to me that someone with Musk's wealth would find it trivial to hire millions of people to monitor and attempt to influence his image on social media - and imo it would be quite surprising if he didn't have massive numbers of people whose full time job was to do precisely that.
In that regard, I find it obnoxious someone of his wealth should be entitled to such personal privileges on HN. I don't mean to imply HN is actively supporting that - just that I believe HN should be taking affirmative steps to prevent the removal of 100% of things that would annoy Musk from ever reaching the front page.
dang, first thank you for the moderation explanations
Besides those who flag political posts they don't agree with (which is a problem), I see a conflict in the comments between
those who think HN should be "politic-frei" because this is a "tech site" and "if I wanted to read about politics I'd go to reddit",
and those who agree this is a "tech/science/expand-curiosity-about-the-world site", and that's what makes HN a great community, but that it's sometimes, and especially recently, not possible to disentangle politics and tech. Musk/DOGE is a great example. No one asked Musk to drag politics into tech, and I wish I never had to read any articles about it and we could just talk about EVs and SpaceX, but he did, and so it's important to be able to talk about the impact which that has on tech, and on society, because this directly impacts us who are involved in tech/science. Tech/science does not exist in a vacuum.
>I flag them because they're trying to establish the use of a highly subjective and derogatory term as fact.
Fascism isn't a subjective matter. We have loads of definition and the article makes a serious argument. If the quality of the article matches the subject matter, it's not flag worthy.
That's why I don't flag on ideology. I flag based on if 1) this inspires curiosity and 2) does not inspire hate (which is usually built into 1. You can't be curious of your biases are clouded by prejudice).
>or because I point out the legal basis for justifying an LEO's use of lethal force, etc.
There's a time and place. I'm very critical of Charlie Kirk, bit I gave it a week before o really went full hog on my tjoughts and actions. I have to look it back up, but I believe here I left it at "no one should be assassinated for their thoughts, even if those thoughts don't follow the golden rule" and left it at that.
Now, months later I will happily say that it quite the coincidence that so many Kirk articles here weren't flag while calling the situation what it is still gets flagged.
> Fascism isn't a subjective matter. We have loads of definition and the article makes a serious argument.
The article makes an argument because it cannot follow a consensus-accepted decision tree. We have many conflicting definitions from multiple sources, and there is all sorts of room to debate whether any given incident actually evidences some point of some definition. It is dictionary-definition subjective.
But more importantly, trying to fit something under a definition doesn't change what the thing actually is. Labelling things as "fascism" encourages lazy argumentation, and makes one prone to motte-and-bailey fallacy and the noncentral fallacy. For one example, people are now going around referring to ICE as "gestapo", prompted by this "fascist regime" framing. The central defining feature of the actual Gestapo is that they were secret. ICE agents are not hiding themselves in general, and even on the relatively unusual occasions that they are in plain clothes on video footage, they are not thereby doing anything that would be out of order for, say, local law enforcement.
This rhetoric also primes people to perceive "1A violations" when people are arrested for reasons clearly other than what they were saying, or "4A violations" in cases where a warrant is not legally required, or "10A violations" when federal law enforcement officers attempt to enforce federal law and happen to be within a state (or DC or Guam or whatever, you know what I mean) when they do so (as if there were any alternative). And it primes people to perceive ordinary law enforcement actions that have always happened and were always expected to happen in similar circumstances, in other developed countries like Canada as well, as some kind of fascist oppression. Most importantly, it has always been a federal crime to obstruct federal law enforcement; and 1A clearly does not and never did empower people to physically block the path of LEO to wave a sign in their face; and nothing ever legally empowered people to resist arrest.
> I flag based on if 1) this inspires curiosity and 2) does not inspire hate (which is usually built into 1. You can't be curious of your biases are clouded by prejudice).
I am not flagging based on ideology when I flag submissions like this one. I am flagging because they do not inspire curiousity and do inspire hate. Labelling people with terms like "fascist" (including vague political outgroups) is hateful. The fact that I can get responses like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768495 and (in another thread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754655, and the fact that I can get flagged on comments like (in another thread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46749406, makes the lack of curiousity-inspiration clear. As does the fact that every attempt I make to point at legal code and case law goes ignored in favour of people telling me that I'm out of line for daring to contradict their assessment of who is or isn't a fascist. Cogent arguments against the article's point of view are summarily rejected; threads fill with propaganda about "summary executions" (in ignorance of what self-defense law actually says) and pithy statements that don't seem to require any clear argumentation as long as they come to the right conclusion; and the ingroup gets more and more worked up.
>There's a time and place. I'm very critical of Charlie Kirk, but
People were openly celebrating the assassination; and they were spreading propaganda that blatantly misrepresented many different things he said, in many cases coming across as if they had had talking points prepared. And they also baselessly tried to associate the shooter with their political outgroup, despite that narrative barely making any sense.
Outside of HN, I saw all sorts of people call for more political violence, say that certain people "were next", etc. It was the first time in nearly a decade of being on Discord that I ever felt compelled to report anyone's messages to Discord Trust & Safety.
None of that should be accepted in the first place. To say that "there's a time and place" to call out such egregious behaviour is appalling.
You may notice that neither I nor anyone else justifying the shooting of Renee Good here on HN have been speaking ill of her. I have in fact been careful and explicit in not ascribing malice to her (because any resulting case is about Ross' perspective, and Good's mens rea is not relevant to an LEO's self-defense claim.)
(May I please also just say that it's especially galling to hear current appeals to 1A used to defend protesters who were impeding officers and resisting arrest, from the same political direction as the people who were happy that someone engaged in an act of protected speech was shot and killed by a sniper who politically disagreed with that speech? I didn't record any instances of the same person making both arguments, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it happened, either.)
I don't at all mean to come across as angry or belligerent. I simply want to explain why it hurts to read these things, and why I think they aren't in keeping with the intended spirit of political discussion on HN.
> quite the coincidence that so many Kirk articles here weren't flag while calling the situation what it is still gets flagged.
This is not about sides. This is about the tenor of rhetoric in submissions and comment sections (and the reasonable expectation of how comment sections will play out based on the submission).
They flag what goes against the topic of the website, and the HN guidelines. Not everyone wants every website to be about US politics, and that is not a right wing conspiracy.
So the explanation for this removal condemning the ongoing fascist revolt in the US is where?
At least that's what it looks like to an outside observer from elsewhere in the world. It's been fascinating as an outsider to watch your republicans suddenly unsure about the second amendment after the last few days.
The issue isn't the flaggers per se. It's that moderators show no interest to seriously investigating flagging patterns.
Its very similar to ICE. Obviously they are guilty, but I place the real blame on lawmakers' hesitancy to tale actions to reel this in. They have the power to do so and won't even investigate the issue in ways the public cannot. That's complicicy.
There's no uncertainty. Republicans now openly assert the 2nd amendment belongs to supporters and defenders of the regime, and no one else.
The movement opposes equality because equality stands opposed to their need for hierarchy. It is a domination and submission movement. It boasts about its application of double standards. Double standards are not logical fallacies, when they use them they are virtues. To enjoy for themselves what they deny to others is a display of dominance.
I think generally the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war.
The issue, of course, is that literally anything can be "political", and moreover by trying to actively avoid political discussions you sort of tacitly endorse the status quo.
It's a tough line to draw, and I'd be lying if I said where I knew where to draw it; HN is a fun forum specifically because the moderation is generally very good. They're not perfect but they do try and shut things down before they devolve into flame wars and personal insults. If there weren't aggressive modding, HN would devolve into 4chan or 8chan, and it wouldn't be appealing to me after the age of ~17.
It is a difficult issue. For the longest time, the status quo-favoring position of not complaining about anything divisive too much worked well because the status quo had been relatively unchanging - most people grew up with it so everyone took it for granted, and even most types of pushback was far more reserved than what we see today.
But now that the status quo of Western countries had begun rapidly shifting into something completely different, the other side of that initial ruling is starting to bear fruit. I really think that at this point they should revisit this policy - not to abandon moderation, but make amends that try to distance this place from the current political establishment. What was yesterday's implicit favoring of the boring consensus is now a defined position that's supportive of whatever the current powers do. But, being more cynical, given how close HN is to Y Combinator, I'm not sure if that option is on the table.
The main reason to avoid flamewars is to protect the atmosphere on HN but you can't make the case that if the world is on fire we can just sit here and pretend it isn't happening and discuss the latest tweak to react as though it is the most important thing in the world.
I've long argued for a 'other' category as one overflow method or a homepage that is generic and subject specific pages for those that only want LLM news or Apple. I'm sure we could agree on a 10 level 'top' set with 'All' the default. That's one step closer to Reddit of course, but with the growth that HN has seen over the years you can't continue to pretend that the 'small town' measures still apply to this big city. A lot of this really is just about scale and you need to adapt to scale.
We would have curtailed the AI discussion years ago of preventing flame wars was the primary issue. I do think that they simply cling to outdated sentiments that politics is "dirty laundry" to take out instead of properly cleaning hoise.
I've been frustrated by the flagging (because fascism is so real right now) but I've been a moderator in the past and I know it's impossible to keep a large majority happy. It's hard for me to criticize the mods much.
Yeah, I’ve been a mod on a relatively small Discord server (~60 users) and even in that scope it can be difficult to keep people happy with stuff I’ve done.
Best way to mod is to strive to keep discourse civil (by setting up a policy) but at the same time let people talk about what hey want to talk. Not letting them talk because they may fight or disagree is a patronizing behavior.
Makes enough sense. I'm not a mod of that server anymore because I got an in argument with the server's owner, and decided to leave, so I haven't gotten to practice my mod stuff in awhile.
> the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war.
You're correct that we like to avoid flamewars, but not correct to say "anything involving politics". We don't try to (or want to) avoid politics altogether—a certain number of threads with political overlap have always been part of the mix here*. For (reams of) past explanations see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
What we want to avoid is HN being taken over by politics altogether, and thereby turning into an entirely different site. We want HN to adhere to its mandate, which is to optimize for intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). That certainly includes some political discussion, but (a) not beyond a certain threshold, and (b) not every kind of political story or article. (For example, opinion pieces are usually less of a fit than stories which contain significant new information, and so on.)
Unfortunately, this way of doing things inevitably generates conflict. For politically passionate users, that "not beyond a certain threshold" bit is far too little—especially in turbulent times, as now. Apart from that, there's no agreement on which particular stories deserve to be on the frontpage, and even if there were such agreement, there's still no way of making sure that the most deserving stories get the spots (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306).
Everyone has the experience of being frustrated when a story that they care about gets flagged or otherwise falls in rank. When feelings are running hot, people jump to the conclusion that we're secretly on the opposite political side, or trying to suppress discussion on a particular topic. That's not the case at all—it's all explicable by the principles that we've been repeating for years—but that none of that changes how it feels.
Then there are the users who feel like HN has gotten too political and is a shadow of its former self—this also has always been with us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
Let me just preempt this by saying that I think you and tomhow do a very good job at moderating, and I'm just some goober on the internet sitting on a high-horse, so take what I say with as much respect as possible.
Hacker News is my favorite forum in no small part because this forum's users are, on average, a lot more educated than the average internet user. If not formally, a lot of the people here still do value learning and education as a whole. Those environments aren't organic on the internet, and it is largely due to efforts from folks like you to cultivate this audience and I do not want to dismiss that.
The concern, then, is that when the educated people can't discuss (and let's be honest, argue about) politics, then the only people who will be discussing politics will be the uneducated people. Politics is inherently contentious and we can't make progress (however you want to define it) without occasionally hurting feelings.
Now, a perfectly valid counter to this is "we're not stopping you from discussing contentious political issues, you're welcome to discuss it on one of the many other forums on the internet, just not here". That's fair enough, but it can come off as a little arbitrary, because virtually anything can be deemed "political"; I could argue that disagreements with type systems or the ISO standard of C or complaining about SQLite could be construed as "politically motivated".
I do realize that a line has to be drawn, though. The last thing I want is for the forum to devolve into 8chan or The Drudge Report or something, so while I don't completely agree at where you draw the line, I do understand why it is drawn.
I think a useful litmus test for these kinds of stories is: do the people who most actively participate on them believe there's a conversation to be had, with multiple perspectives, not all of which agree with theirs? That's what this site is for.
If not, they're wrong for this site; more than wrong, corrosive. The stories themselves aren't bad (I have a lot of strong political beliefs too), but they're incompatible with the mode of discussion we have here: an unsiloed single front page and a large common pool of commenters.
(For the record: I don't believe there's a productive conversation to be had about ICE in Minnesota and wouldn't care to argue with anyone defending their actions. All the more reason not to nurture threads about it here.)
PS: I'm a longstanding "too-much-politics-on-HN" person, and even I'm a little annoyed that Jonathan Rauch's piece won't work here, if only so I can annoyingly noodle on the varying definitions of fascism. But flags are the right call here.
>For the record: I don't believe there's a productive conversation to be had about ICE in Minnesota and wouldn't care to argue with anyone defending their actions.
Funny because I'm probably very radical about ICE and I can still find subtleties on how to reform this. I've never been "Defund the police", quite the opposite. I believe LEOs should have standing, qualities, and training that makes them stand by their emergency peers. Truly the best of the best. Getting that badge should be a similar thrill to being accepted into a top college. They should have years of schooling before truly starting to gain their title.
Getting into a firefighting isn't easy, so why should an LEO see of as a career as a backup for failing to graduate high school? That's where all this falls apart. And now the standards barely get these ICE goons a month of "training". That needs to change.
But with current times, that's not a topic I can discuss on X nor Bluesky. That makes it all the more frustrating that HN plugs its ears on such subtlety instead.
> do the people who most actively participate on them believe there's a conversation to be had, with multiple perspectives, not all of which agree with theirs?
When I see a submission like the current one, I get the impression just from the title that the OP doesn't believe it.
The easy fix is to let go of the unsiloed concept and to add a couple (<10) main subjects and an 'all' page. That way whoever wants to can discuss what they want and flags can go back to their original meaning.
> I think a useful litmus test for these kinds of stories is: do the people who most actively participate on them believe there's a conversation to be had, with multiple perspectives, not all of which agree with theirs? That's what this site is for.
I think this is a poor litmus test, because there are plenty of stories on HN where the majority perspective is going to be either agreement or disagreement. For example, zero day exploits, leaks, anything related to Tesla circa 7-8 years ago etc. The notion that every conversation needs to have multiple perspectives is a common fallacy; I think we can agree that things like companies ignoring security holes is bad for example and someone saying 'actually, it's good' isn't actually adding anything productive.
> If not, they're wrong for this site; more than wrong, corrosive. The stories themselves aren't bad (I have a lot of strong political beliefs too), but they're incompatible with the mode of discussion we have here: an unsiloed single front page and a large common pool of commenters.
That ship sailed long ago with stuff like the Google Manifesto or companies like Palantir. People rightfully point out ycombinators (and by extension, HNs) connection to the current political environment which means people here, especially long standing users, will find themselves more and more agitated.
For me at least, these kind of stories are increasingly unavoidable because they aren't just things I read on the internet, they're directly my life. Schools have gone into lockdown here in Seattle when ICE activity flares up, stores I've gone to have needed to prepare and think long and hard about what to do when ICE knocks at the door. Naturally this means people are going to gravitate towards stories here that are directly related to their life, and when those stories get squashed people start to notice the disconnect. People might go on HN to avoid these stories, but I literally cannot avoid my life.
>> I think a useful litmus test for these kinds of stories is: do the people who most actively participate on them believe there's a conversation to be had, with multiple perspectives, not all of which agree with theirs? That's what this site is for.
This would disqualify more than half of AI/LLM/<insert_tech_person> stories. This seems like a cope out. It is our inability as tech people to embrace the discomfort that is not rational and engage with it.
>The concern, then, is that when the educated people can't discuss (and let's be honest, argue about) politics, then the only people who will be discussing politics will be the uneducated people. Politics is inherently contentious and we can't make progress (however you want to define it) without occasionally hurting feelings.
I completely agree. That's why ultimately I abandoned the mainstream stuff (outside of YouTube. Yay monopoly) for discussion and go to Tildes for a lot of political talk. But Tildes is small by design and will have some blind spots.
I feel denying a quality article like this (or rather, upholding the minority's rule of denying) cracks into the idea that these policies work to keep HN high quality. Especially when what's on the front page right now is "I ported typescript to rust in a month with Claude!". These don't feel quality driven.
For what it’s worth, I visit HN before my first coffee, and I am fine with not getting a faceful of US politics first thing in the morning. If I need that I can look in any other direction already. I visit this website specifically because it talks about other things.
Tying your flagging behavior to your first coffee is abuse of flagging. There are at any given time 100's of people drinking their first coffee, if that's the criterium then HN will become a wasteland.
The limit should be outright fascism. It's not a tough line to draw if you've any inkling of 20th century history. The USA isn't sleepwalking, it's goose-stepping into a fucking nightmare.