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The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

(daringfireball.net)
479 points jgruber | 5 comments | 27 Mar 25 00:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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whamlastxmas ◴[27 Mar 25 11:13 UTC] No.43492368[source]▶
Moderation on HN is probably the most transparent you’ll find anywhere aside from Wikipedia, and HN is better than WP in terms of unbiased moderation. Dang and team have a stellar reputation and the idea that they’re covertly blacklisitng a personal blog is really silly.

OP’s submissions are likely not popular because of a mixture of them being not that interesting or useful and also contentious. Contentious submissions get massively reduced in visibility automatically. And stuff like an iPhone review significantly after other mainstream reviews is just not that interesting.

replies(1): >>43494030 #
jgruber ◴[27 Mar 25 14:27 UTC] No.43494030[source]▶
My thesis is that HN would like you to think their moderation is highly transparent, and it's very clear that the core HN audience believes that to be true, but that in fact it is not transparent at all.

If the problem is with my writing "being not that interesting or useful and also contentious", how then do you explain Daring Fireball ranking #3 here from 2007-2021 but dropping to #78 from 2021-2025. Do you think my writing was that much more interesting and useful (and less contentious?) for the first 14 years of HN but changed suddenly in 2021?

Or do you think HN's hidden admin moderation changed suddenly around 2021?

replies(2): >>43494164 #>>43500974 #
1. ryandrake ◴[27 Mar 25 14:41 UTC] No.43494164[source]▶
I think the overall conclusion from this investigation must be: We'll never know because at the end of the day it's HN's site, and they are the only ones who know how moderation works. They have the logs and (presumably) the materialized dashboards showing what's going on, and we only get a peek at it when the lead moderator (dang) pulls back the curtain a little. He is very friendly, and actually very, very prompt at responding to questions (both over E-mail, and in-thread) but I've always thought the responses about moderation activity are pretty opaque. Any time something that looks like shenanigans gets mentioned, it's always vaguely attributed to "user moderation" or "automated algorithms" such as the flamewar detection, with very few admissions of HN staff putting their thumbs on the scale (in either direction). Best case, if it's true that everything is due to user moderation, it would appear the site is pretty vulnerable to organized brigading (for or against specific topics).

So we'll never know for sure. Please keep writing. I visit here -and- have your site bookmarked because I appreciate the pro-Apple take on tech news, too.

EDIT: Aaaaaaand, in the time that I typed this comment, the article predictably went from normal to user-flagged.

replies(1): >>43500771 #
2. philipkd ◴[28 Mar 25 02:22 UTC] No.43500771[source]▶
Maybe a dumb question, but how can you brigade against on Hacker News if there is no downvote of submissions?
replies(1): >>43502229 #
3. theshrike79 ◴[28 Mar 25 06:39 UTC] No.43502229[source]▶
When you get enough karma, you can "flag" submissions. If enough people flag a submission, it gets buried and won't show up on the front page anymore.
replies(1): >>43520472 #
4. philipkd ◴[30 Mar 25 01:42 UTC] No.43520472{3}[source]▶
And just to clarify, if enough people flag submissions, but not enough people, then it can get buried but not get the "flagged" tag? Because very few of the DF posts actually seem to get that tag.

But maybe even some light flagging, plus high engagement-to-view ratio (esp. if engagements go many levels deep fast), may cause some "unwanted" content to be buried.

replies(1): >>43539852 #
5. JohnBooty ◴[31 Mar 25 20:53 UTC] No.43539852{4}[source]▶

    And just to clarify, if enough people flag submissions, 
    but not enough people, then it can get buried but not get 
    the "flagged" tag?
As far as I know, this has not been definitively stated by the mods, but it seems very plausible.

As far as I'm concerned it's either that, or explicit moderation action to downweight links to DF and other selected domains.