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dang ◴[] No.23835613[source]
All: HN has been seeing a dismaying increase in nationalistic flamewar. This is not allowed here. I know it feels important when you're caught up in the intensity of such feelings, but it is not interesting, which is what HN is for. Worse, it has the effect on interesting discussion that tank battles have on a city park.

If you don't have something thoughtful and substantive to say, please don't post until you do. Drop denunciatory rhetoric—it's tedious and evokes worse from others.

Remember that the community is divided on divisive topics and that the person disagreeing with you is probably not a spy, but just someone who disagrees with you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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dang ◴[] No.23835804[source]
This is a stub comment to collect replies in one place. That way we can collapse it and prevent too much offtopicness at the top of thread.
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dicomdan ◴[] No.23836601[source]
Can you present evidence of moderation not having a one sided bias? Every time I see anything critical of the US / Europe / Canada and other liberal democracies it's sitting at the top, no matter how unsubstantiated. While every time there's anything that puts CCP in a bad light there's strong moderation because it's "not interesting" (even though this particular event is objectively very noteworthy in tech world and beyond).
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dang ◴[] No.23837351[source]
> Every time I see anything critical of the US / Europe / Canada and other liberal democracies it's sitting at the top, no matter how unsubstantiated

The key word here is "see". The problem is that we mostly see what we're primed to notice—which is basically whatever we most dislike—and we simply don't see (or don't weight as heavily) all the cases that don't feel that way. This creates a feeling of "every" or "always" (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835843 in this thread), which is a true statement of what you've seen, but only because your seeing is extremely conditioned by your passions on the topic. (I don't mean you personally—we all seem to have this bias.) People with opposite passions see literally the opposite picture. Moreover, the degree to which the picture you see feels unfair and unbalanced is a function, not of the raw data stream, but of the intensity of your passion, regardless of which direction it points.

For evidence, if you search my comments you'll find examples where I've admonished users for flamewar in the opposite direction, as well as for flamewar on other topics, including nationalistic flamewar about other countries (India is probably the second most common case; Russia was up there for a few years and still flares up at times).

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dicomdan ◴[] No.23837866[source]
Thanks for the response. If you claim there's no bias, would you be willing to release the full list of posts that have been nudged / downranked from the front page by moderator or trusted users as part of a "HN transparency report"?
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1. dang ◴[] No.23839521[source]
The idea of a total moderation log comes up from time to time: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I think it would be a mistake—it would drain our resources while convincing no one. People who see "every" comment they disagree with "always" at the top, and "every" comment they disagree with "always" flagged and removed, are not looking objectively.

I don't mean to pick on you personally!—these are common feelings, rooted in cognitive biases we all share. But the patterns they claim are not even close to true, so anyone who wants to be convinced by evidence can just look at HN in the first place.

Beyond that, there's plenty of transparency available through HN Search and the moderation record of https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang. Anyone who looks through the record can find numerous examples of us moderating opposite views in exactly the same way, if they want to. The litigious type of user tends not to want to, and although that group is small in numbers, their capacity to consume moderator time and energy is prodigious. It steals a lot of resources away from other users and from the things we need to be doing to improve the site in general.

By the way, I don't claim there's no moderation bias. How can we know what unconscious biases we may have? I'm just saying that certain stock allegations about it are incorrect and have clear explanations.

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2. dicomdan ◴[] No.23840071[source]
Does it mean every thread that is downranked by moderator or superuser will have your comment in it that will show up in search results visible to everyone in the community? Or are there threads that are promoted or demoted silently?
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3. dang ◴[] No.23840408[source]
It does not mean that. HN is a curated, moderated site; it always has been. Moderators do lots of things that aren't commented.

There isn't any class of things we do that is secret, though.