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by GuiA
4323 days ago
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> Incidentally, I'm curious as to why I saw this link on the front page of HN from my phone, but when I jumped on the desktop to comment, I was unable to locate it anywhere on at least the first four pages of HN. Now it seems to be back on the second page. Yeah, that's happened to me very consistently over the past few months. I'll see a link on my phone in the first 10 positions, switch to my desktop (where I'm logged in) to comment on it, and it has just disappeared from the front page. Given the frequency at which I observe this, I suspect the mods do this (maybe programmatically, maybe not) with articles that are likely to be "controversial". |
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We do this (no need to suspect—it's not a secret) but the greater effect comes from user flagging.
Why do we do this? Because hot controversies automatically get upvotes due to being hot and controversial. If there were no countervailing factor, HN's front page would consist of those, plus celebrity stories, trends of the moment, and the like.
The site's mandate is for stories that are intellectually interesting. That's far from the most powerful kind of interesting, so it needs to be protected from the other kinds.
Moderators doing this is not a perfect solution or even a good one, but it works, and has worked this way for years. We're definitely interested in finding a better solution long-term, though. In the meantime, I think most (though not all) of the users flagging stories are doing so responsibly and with the mandate of the site in mind.