HN Lament

[DanielBMarkham]

I really don't want this to be yet another of those "HN is going to hell, folks!" posts, but I'm at a bit of a loss at how to continue. So, like always, I'll talk to myself by writing. You are welcome to join in. Or not.

One of my many side projects is a cute little photo blog. I won't name it, because if I do somebody will just accuse me of trying to promote it, and I'm not.

It's been around for about a month. My goal? To tag my funny photo collection and share with people. I also put things on there I want to remember.

Today I found a cool picture that involved programming, protesting, and outsourcing. It's not a "funny picture" but it grabbed my attention. I couldn't attribute the damn thing, so I posted something like "Anybody know what kind of protest this is?" But it occurred to me that traffic was so low I was unlikely to get a response.

Speaking to a friend, I mentioned maybe submitting it over here. You guys love coding, love protests, and love talking about stuff like this. Surely you've seen the picture and could have fun explaining it.

My friend was adamant: "Don't do it! If you post that over on HN, they'll flag it and ban your site forever!"

I'm like what? Why wouldn't they just let it slip off the new page and ignore it? Why wouldn't somebody just post a comment like "Here's where they got it from, Daniel. It's related to X" and that would be it? After all, it's just a picture and a question, it's being submitted from somebody who's been here over four years. There are no ads. It's not attributed, but hell, that's why I had the question to begin with.

In short, it's something I think would interest hackers. I might be wrong, but hell, been wrong a lot before. It's nothing new.

But, you know, he's right. Looking at the new page with ShowDead on, there are dozens of real people out there submitting stuff that nobody will ever see, and they don't even know it. Any kind of article that can be perceived to have be some kind of trick ("they'll say you're just blog spamming!") will not get ignored -- nope -- that'd be too nice. It'll be flagged. We must assume the worst and we must punish immediately.

But that's not all. Just last week I submitted an article about startups. I wrote it myself, it was highly on-topic, and I have written many similar articles over the years. It got five votes fairly quickly -- it was a good read -- and then somebody flagged it. That's right. They didn't comment on what I did wrong or correct me or anything. I pissed in somebody's cornflakes and this was payback time. Over the years how many people have I pissed off? Now I have to try to figure out when to submit when none of them are online? That's fucked. A couple of weeks ago I said something slightly unflattering about the Chinese government. I was refreshing the page to see if there were any new replies (I am anal like that) when I saw somebody come in, downvote my comment 3 times, then go and downvote the last 3 comments I had made. I wasn't trashing anybody, I just probably wasn't as PC as they liked.

So here's my simple question: is this what we want the site to be? Have we reached the point where if you piss off a few percent of the population, you can never submit things? Do we want to have third-world people hungrily trying to get attention for their blogs while we secretly just waste their time? Is anybody taking a look at the poor saps who add reasonable comments to the discussion, think they are contributing, yet nobody can see what they're typing because they've been banned without their knowing it? Have we reached the point where anything that can possibly be spun a bad way will automatically be assumed to be deceptive? The front page is full of gossip, meanwhile we have to plead with people to be nice to the new startups that are posting because it seems you can't submit anything here without some snarky response? Is that what being a hacker is all about?

I'm just asking. This isn't the kind of community I joined. I'm just wondering what happened to it.

It's a lament. Probably not a lot to add.

[ColinWright]

It's not clear to me that people are submitting stuff, not realising that it'll never be read. I wonder if you've conflated having an item flagged dead as opposed to being hell-banned.

The only instances I absolutely know of people being hell-banned were pretty clearly appropriate. When I've occasionally turned on "Show Dead" and looked down the list, I've pretty much agreed with them being inappropriate, off-topic, repeats, or otherwise of little value.

Having said that, I have seen what appear to be instances of vengeful downvoting, and cases where I really haven't understood why something has been flagged, but I've not seen the nastiness you describe.

And even so, I'm no longer finding much to interest me here. That's why I'm doing two things. The first is to create a personalised filter for HN items. That's starting to pay off - I'm seeing mostly stuff that interests me, and less of the - to me - uninteresting.

The second is to create a different place for people that caters more readily to a wide range of interests, while still providing each person with things that they find valuable and interesting. That, too, is starting to work.

If you're interested in either project, reply to me here.

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ADDED IN EDIT:

It was some time ago that PG increased the ranking penalty resulting from flags, but certainly it doesn't take many flags for an item to fall quickly from the front page, if indeed it ever gets there.

The problem is that with such a hugely diverse "community" here now, for every submission, there will be a substantial number of people who consider it "off-topic". My concern isn't the topicality, my concern is the complete lack of content or depth of so many items.

[ig1]

A single flag on the new page pretty much kills an article.

Typically the way that a story gets upvoted is that if it receives enough votes in the first 30 minutes of being posted (typically <10) it gets to the front page, once it gets to the front page far more people see it and vote for it so it gets to stay there.

Essentially it comes down to luck whether a link gets enough votes in that first 30 minutes to hit the front page. If someone flags an article in that first 30 minutes before it hits the front page then it almost certainly never will. Very few articles get enough votes on the new page to overcome the flag penalty.

It means it's trivial for anyone to kill an article they don't want to appear on the front-page (i.e a negative article about their startup or a positive one about a competitor).

[saurik]

So, I always browse Hacker News using "showdead" (and have since I started using the site): there are definitely ghosts walking among us that have no clue they have been hell-banned; to be clear: "people are submitting stuff, not realising that it'll never be read".

Yes: a lot of the time, when a comment is marked "[dead]", it makes sense that that comment is dead. However, you cannot use this to determine whether the instances of hell-banning are appropriate, as most comments that are marked "[dead]" are not dead because they were posted by someone who is hell-banned: that one single comment is dead.

Sometimes, though, a comment is actually useful (occasionally even, the most useful response), and you wonder "why is this dead?": the result of seeing someone who has spent the last few months talking to the small handful of people who care enough to use "showdead", not ever realizing it or being told it, is kind of sickening.

At some point, I decided to start leaving tabs open with these people (my really pathetic way of bookmarking stuff), so I could one day find them all and write an article about "why you have to be careful when you implement hell-banning", but unfortunately (as this is a really pathetic way of bookmarking things), I can't find some of my better examples, despite spending the last two hours searching through current and archived browser states.

However, I do have at least one example for you: this comment has a response from a user named "Pooter" that I found interesting--in fact, multiple people found interesting (enough that someone actually asked after it)--and yet the user is hell-banned, so I don't get to see it. This user is /still/ posting stuff, and probably /still/ doesn't realize they are hell-banned.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2519863

Now, when you look at this user's comment history, it is not at all clear to me that he deserves to be /hell-banned/. Yes: some of the things he says are not terribly useful, but if you check the threads there are other users who say the same things and are simply slightly downvoted; in some other cases these alternative comments are standing fine.

But what is really bothersome is that sometime this is the only user who went out of the way to correct someone else, and Pooter is actually right:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2872773 <- in fact, iOS has support div scrolling for years, maybe even since the beginning: Pooter is right

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2846808 <- while I'm not certain who I agree with there, I think Pooter's argument is a reasonable one, especially if you connect it with his other rebuttle: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2843802

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2808094 <- this comment is downright insightful: I am fully in agreement with it, and I wish I had been there to say it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2755767 <- while he didn't need to say "This is a stupid idea.", his reasoning for why the idea is not "very good" is sound.

When I come across these cases, it really makes me wonder what is going through the minds of the people who are making these moderation decisions. I mean: Pooter is abrasive, but I've spent a bunch of time over the last few days staring at HN users (and tagging them: I got sick of not remembering who is who, so I've built a user tagging framework), and there are people with many thousands of karma points who cause a lot more strife with a lot less useful content than Pooter (or the other people I swear I have sitting in tabs somewhere on one of these numerous web browsers :().

[DanielBMarkham]

I was so puzzled when I got flagged that, for only the second time in many years, I emailed pg. Asked him what happened. Hell I thought it was a system bug. It had five votes in something like 20 minutes, then it was flagged. It went from being like 17th place to not appearing anywhere that I could find in the first 500 headlines. It wasn't just punished -- site volume was so high it was effectively gone.

That means any one person veto power over whatever you create, simply because they can, because they've been around. With a huge number of folks on-site, the system just can't work like that.

[diolpah]

I have some personal experience in this matter. My prior account(haploid) was silent-banned for, presumably, daring to question the orthodoxy that parenting is the best accomplishment one can achieve in life.

I don't know if this meets your criterion of "clearly [in]appropriate", but I would hope that expressing an unpopular opinion would not.

[ig1]

I've started spending more time over at http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ it's much closer to what HN used to be than HN is now.

[Pheter]

It seems ironic that a lot of users moved from Reddit to HN, and now HN users may move to Reddit.

[revorad]

I think it's largely just a function of growth. There are enough people here now that a tiny tiny fraction of them flagging can easily kill stories. Same problem with random comment downvotes. This will continue to be a problem unless we have categories, but that's also not without its issues.

Meanwhile, what was that picture? :-)

[chc]

I think you kind of misunderstand what flagging is and it leads to you fear it unnecessarily. Flagging tends to be used as kind of a downvote, since HN lacks proper downvotes on articles. It reduces a post's ranking and, if flags accumulate much faster than upvotes, will cause the post to be killed. AFAIK, it doesn't ban you, your site or anything else, and certainly doesn't cause a magic hellban out of nowhere.

[rawsyntax]

A few weeks ago I had an article dead'ed after getting 10 upvotes. And now all my submissions are marked dead seemingly permanently. So what am I todo except stop contributing to HN

[dlss]

> to do

[nirvana]

I'm constantly seeing posts from hell banned users who are contributing. Here's an example I saw just this minute (you may not be able to see it if you don't have show dead turned on.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2930421

Since I see these posts and the spam and I've left it on for several weeks this way, obviously the spam that is getting thru with showdead on is not enough to make me want to turn it off. In fact, except on the new posts feed, I rarely see spam at all.