Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page(sangaline.com)
sangaline.com
Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/
314 comments
Obligatory pimping of a tool I use (not mine, though): http://hckrnews.com/
Shows stories which have hit the front page ever, in the order of their posting. If it's currently on the front page, the link is orange. If it's not, it's black. It's very interesting to watch how frequently highly upvoted and commented posts turn black, while their temporal peers remain.
Anecdotally, there appears to be trend of positive/neutral news about YC companies remaining on the front page the longest, the latest shiny technology sticks around for awhile longer than average, and pretty much any negative news disappears almost instantly.
For example, as of this instant in time, there is an article about Angular2 which remains on the front page while more highly upvoted and commented articles about laptop security, AT&T discrimination, and a Nintendo Switch CVE discussion are all gone from the front page.
Shows stories which have hit the front page ever, in the order of their posting. If it's currently on the front page, the link is orange. If it's not, it's black. It's very interesting to watch how frequently highly upvoted and commented posts turn black, while their temporal peers remain.
Anecdotally, there appears to be trend of positive/neutral news about YC companies remaining on the front page the longest, the latest shiny technology sticks around for awhile longer than average, and pretty much any negative news disappears almost instantly.
For example, as of this instant in time, there is an article about Angular2 which remains on the front page while more highly upvoted and commented articles about laptop security, AT&T discrimination, and a Nintendo Switch CVE discussion are all gone from the front page.
As much as I like HN, I'm not a big fan of the secrecy around moderator interventions - what gets censored, what posts get re-titled, etc.
I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]".
Some websites manage to fight spam while remaining reasonably transparent (eg. StackExchange, where pretty much everything is documented - flags, closing reasons, edits, etc.).
I can understand they might want to keep the ranking algorithm and anti-spam techniques secret, but stuff that are manually censored by a moderator should be indicated as such, maybe by some automatic message like "This post was removed due to [reason]".
Some websites manage to fight spam while remaining reasonably transparent (eg. StackExchange, where pretty much everything is documented - flags, closing reasons, edits, etc.).
The site is being crushed by traffic right now -- but without reading the article, I've also found that some stories that I thought were important that were scrubbed from HN's front page just about as soon as I saw it (when I doubled back to read the comments)...
While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated. Maybe it could even be automatic, whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front, they could leave a comment and it'd show up on some page?
[EDIT] - After reading the article, if a mod did indeed take down the post because it discussed reverse engineering the rank algorithm, I think that's pretty naive. Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it.
I say this naively myself, as I've never had to maintain a ranking algorithm with these many users who depend on it (or any at all for that matter), but surely the problem isn't intractable?
While I realize I'm not entitled to explanations, some transparency would be appreciated. Maybe it could even be automatic, whenever a mod removed something forcibly from front, they could leave a comment and it'd show up on some page?
[EDIT] - After reading the article, if a mod did indeed take down the post because it discussed reverse engineering the rank algorithm, I think that's pretty naive. Security through obscurity isn't a thing, and the better response is just to make a better algorithm, not try and suppress knowledge about it.
I say this naively myself, as I've never had to maintain a ranking algorithm with these many users who depend on it (or any at all for that matter), but surely the problem isn't intractable?
I can comment on the "Books that Aaron Swartz read, loved and hated" story. OP posted that link to HN and it made the front page. The story was soon flagged by the community (people viewed it as Amazon affiliate spam) and it fell off the rankings. When the moderator dang noticed that the story had been flagged, he decided to restore it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840869). So yeah, that explains why this particular story fell off the front page quickly but does not have any [flagged] or [dupe] tags attached now.
I've learned that it's best not to jump to conclusions based on what you think is true (however sound your analysis might be). Always ask the other side(s) for an explanation. In this case, you could have sent an email to the mods asking for an explanation. If you find their response unsatisfactory, go ahead and write a post explaining why.
I've learned that it's best not to jump to conclusions based on what you think is true (however sound your analysis might be). Always ask the other side(s) for an explanation. In this case, you could have sent an email to the mods asking for an explanation. If you find their response unsatisfactory, go ahead and write a post explaining why.
Other theories:
- This is a bug / happens randomly; you just noticed it because you were looking (i.e. as you analyse this data); all the posts it's happened to before and since went unnoticed. That's supported by the evidence of your analysis; most of the results don't look any different to other posts.
- It's not the link, but the related activity. Presumably if you're running analysis on HN data, there are a lot of HN requests coming from your machine. Maybe any posts made by your IP are therefore treated as suspect (i.e. the sort of protection you'd expect to avoid automated posting or upvoting... just without that extra sophistication). Perhaps the other posters had something similar... Would be good to see if any of those posts were by the same author; as that may add weight to this theory.
- Other variables... Maybe the algorithm has rules which cause this behaviour under some conditions; e.g. posts made the previous day (not 24 hours ago; but rather before midnight UTC / something like that) lose weight when midnight hits; so posts made moments before suddenly lose enough score to knock them off the top spot; whilst those which had more score before midnight, or were posted just after survive... Many other possibilities such as this may exist; and we'd only know by looking at those variables in the data... What else is common about the posts which are in your post's club vs those which aren't?
- This is a bug / happens randomly; you just noticed it because you were looking (i.e. as you analyse this data); all the posts it's happened to before and since went unnoticed. That's supported by the evidence of your analysis; most of the results don't look any different to other posts.
- It's not the link, but the related activity. Presumably if you're running analysis on HN data, there are a lot of HN requests coming from your machine. Maybe any posts made by your IP are therefore treated as suspect (i.e. the sort of protection you'd expect to avoid automated posting or upvoting... just without that extra sophistication). Perhaps the other posters had something similar... Would be good to see if any of those posts were by the same author; as that may add weight to this theory.
- Other variables... Maybe the algorithm has rules which cause this behaviour under some conditions; e.g. posts made the previous day (not 24 hours ago; but rather before midnight UTC / something like that) lose weight when midnight hits; so posts made moments before suddenly lose enough score to knock them off the top spot; whilst those which had more score before midnight, or were posted just after survive... Many other possibilities such as this may exist; and we'd only know by looking at those variables in the data... What else is common about the posts which are in your post's club vs those which aren't?
I didn't understand why the guy's PayPal story was removed from the front page -- the one about PayPal seizing a $40k USD balance without warning, allegedly due to a 2% chargeback rate over several years of doing business and hundreds of thousands of dollars in successful transactions.
I thought that the point of HN was auto-moderation? Perhaps now that HN has seen great increases in popularity, the quality of content has to be more carefully controlled, lest the quality of posts on the HN front page slowly enter a death spiral towards that of reddit.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
I thought that the point of HN was auto-moderation? Perhaps now that HN has seen great increases in popularity, the quality of content has to be more carefully controlled, lest the quality of posts on the HN front page slowly enter a death spiral towards that of reddit.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” ― George Carlin
A few months ago I wrote a tool that scrapes HN and detects moderator activity (and provides interesting stats in general). I posted it twice and it didn't receive much attention, and the database storage requirements starting to get out of hand, so I killed it. It seems like an appropriate time to bring it up again. The source code is here:
https://github.com/SirCmpwn/hn-transparency
Some screenshots:
https://sr.ht/WBEt.png
https://sr.ht/30Tv.png
If there's interest, I can put this back up and start pruning old data so it's more maintainable. The data I collected shows a lot of questionable moderator activity and a lot of abuse of flagging. I'm also unhappy with HN sending all comments on paywalled posts (which are against the rules) to /dev/null, when they're usually at least willing to talk about things.
https://github.com/SirCmpwn/hn-transparency
Some screenshots:
https://sr.ht/WBEt.png
https://sr.ht/30Tv.png
If there's interest, I can put this back up and start pruning old data so it's more maintainable. The data I collected shows a lot of questionable moderator activity and a lot of abuse of flagging. I'm also unhappy with HN sending all comments on paywalled posts (which are against the rules) to /dev/null, when they're usually at least willing to talk about things.
Historically, the mods have not killed a post for discussing Hacker News meta, although on occasion they apply a penalty to meta submissions. (the original post only had 32 upvotes, which is enough to get swallowed)
Indeed, HN recently allowed a post that advocated gaming the system because it encouraged debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362
A conspiracy theory, even backed by data, is not the best application of Occam's Razor.
Indeed, HN recently allowed a post that advocated gaming the system because it encouraged debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362
A conspiracy theory, even backed by data, is not the best application of Occam's Razor.
Don't forget that HN tries to detect vote fraud.
So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.
So some articles might simply disappear because the OP asked too many friends for upvotes or because of false positives.
It's very interesting to note the number one pulled story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276.
If you take a look at the comments, it's theorized there that the story got pulled not because of moderator action, but because people abused the flagging mechanism. Given the content, and given the principal person under discussion, this seems pretty likely to me.
If you take a look at the comments, it's theorized there that the story got pulled not because of moderator action, but because people abused the flagging mechanism. Given the content, and given the principal person under discussion, this seems pretty likely to me.
The list of stories the author claims "have moderator fingerprints on them" does not seem to have any kind of common pattern at all which would support such a claim.
Edit: to be clear, with common pattern I mean the topics of the submission (obviously they have one common pattern, which is dropping out of the front page quickly). They do not reveal some secret agenda moderators might follow or something like that.
Edit: to be clear, with common pattern I mean the topics of the submission (obviously they have one common pattern, which is dropping out of the front page quickly). They do not reveal some secret agenda moderators might follow or something like that.
Apparently I'm going to go against the flow to say that I'm perfectly fine with the way HN is moderated. In fact, I think the moderation is probably the reason why I come here. If magazines, TV shows, and journals have editors, it seems completely natural to me that a quality website should have one too.
More often than not, keeping a community from turning into 4chan requires some heavy moderation (reddit's AskHistorians comes to mind, with entire threads nuked at once), and it's often a thankless job. I'm happy that HN managed to keep it's overall spirit, and I thank the mod team for that.
More often than not, keeping a community from turning into 4chan requires some heavy moderation (reddit's AskHistorians comes to mind, with entire threads nuked at once), and it's often a thankless job. I'm happy that HN managed to keep it's overall spirit, and I thank the mod team for that.
I predict that one of the biggest issues in tech over the next few years will be 'silent moderation.' Tech companies like to present the illusion that it is all 'just an algorithm' but that is deceptive.
Silent curation and other practices like shadow-bannning are unethical and symptomatic of a mentality that seeks to avoid confrontation. If things go well we'll see more transparency over time. A good start for a site like HN would be to create another page that shows just the titles of the submissions rejected (no links). People can google for those titles if they are interested.
Silent curation and other practices like shadow-bannning are unethical and symptomatic of a mentality that seeks to avoid confrontation. If things go well we'll see more transparency over time. A good start for a site like HN would be to create another page that shows just the titles of the submissions rejected (no links). People can google for those titles if they are interested.
I wrote in detail in 2013 about how the Hacker News algorithm works and the penalties that can drop stories from the front page. My analysis was based on reverse engineering the algorithm from observed behavior and comparing with the published Arc code. This latest analysis seems kind of reinventing the wheel.
http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
Interestingly, my 2013 article also suddenly dropped off the front page. Apparently it somehow triggered "voting ring detection" and was penalized. (I'm not part of a voting ring of course.)
http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
Interestingly, my 2013 article also suddenly dropped off the front page. Apparently it somehow triggered "voting ring detection" and was penalized. (I'm not part of a voting ring of course.)
I don't think I understand your figures correctly, because none of them (except the last) seem to show any significant drop. There's a drop of about 10 positions in one of them but I wouldn't call that particularly significant, and it even climbs back up after twenty minutes or so.
http://hnrankings.info is a nice UI to see this happening in real time.
Here is an example of three submissions, two flagged enough to get kicked off the front page (for poor use of sources on a contentious topic) but not get marked as 'flagged':
http://hnrankings.info/13714928,13714987,13715552/
Here is an example of three submissions, two flagged enough to get kicked off the front page (for poor use of sources on a contentious topic) but not get marked as 'flagged':
http://hnrankings.info/13714928,13714987,13715552/
I find this sort of conspiratorial meta complaint boring and (IMHO) off topic. I didn't flag it, but I'd understand if others did.
I'm pretty happy with the way HackerNews handles posts and can only recommend to them to aggressively moderate in the future, too.
There are way to many toxic users, trolls, shills, astro-turfers, voting rings, paid advertising, political organisations, disinformation campaigns, and other 'special interest' parties on the Net to be able to do without strong moderation.
There are way to many toxic users, trolls, shills, astro-turfers, voting rings, paid advertising, political organisations, disinformation campaigns, and other 'special interest' parties on the Net to be able to do without strong moderation.
> The stories that Hacker News removes from the front page (sangaline.com)
is : http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-new...
is : http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-new...
Conversely, I've wondered how some stories (e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857880) hit the top of the front page with only a few points.
Edit: Thanks all. I get it now :)
Edit: Thanks all. I get it now :)
Could it be that moderators see things we can't, eg vote manipulation and astro-turfing?
I had, in the past, found that a post was deleted. I was so enraged by that action that I had abandoned HN for almost a year. It wasn't my post. But, I found the action arbitrary. I do understand that it is important to keep the spirit of HN and actively discourage posts that might take HN the same way as infinite other internet forums. Since the guidelines cannot be clearly interpreted, there will always be some controversy about what should or should not have been removed. This case is different though, because the post was down-voted out by the community.
Interesting. Another aspect of HN that I've noticed are stories that are not censored but actually promoted. Some time ago, I've noticed that some stories were few hours old and had 4 votes yet they were in top 15 position on HN. I never understood how that's possible without some kind of manipulation.
I've collected some of these anomalies. Peruse them and analyze them in this album:
https://imgur.com/a/6OvnE
Maybe OP can find a pattern in these.
I've collected some of these anomalies. Peruse them and analyze them in this album:
https://imgur.com/a/6OvnE
Maybe OP can find a pattern in these.
Mention "unions" or "professionalism" or anything that involves giving the actual value that a developer produces to the developer and the story will disappear very quickly. Maybe that's because of the mods or maybe it's because of the flagging by readers who have the pro-state-capitalist argument so ingrained in them. Whatever it is, it biases Hacker News in a bad way.
This is why we are working on Mineranker, an open source newsfeed and ranking platform: https://github.com/francisypl/mineranker
If you are interested in more open newsfeed ranking systems, check it out.
If you are interested in more open newsfeed ranking systems, check it out.
It's probably a combination of flagging and other factors. Obvious the mods aren't going to want to make their algos transparent. Flagging removes story completely but perhaps mods have the power to bump a story off the page but without flagging it.
It seems to me that the stories (all headlines read as controversial, as do the texts that I dug into) are removed due to flagging by users.
It would seem to me that if you're looking to grind your political axe, this is not the best place to do so.
It would seem to me that if you're looking to grind your political axe, this is not the best place to do so.
Does anyone know why some posts have a rel="nofollow" in the link? (not just these no-comment ycombinator promotional posts)
I asked this before and a mod said I should ask again via mail, but never got a response from [email protected].
I asked this before and a mod said I should ask again via mail, but never got a response from [email protected].
The [flagged] annotation only shows up on stories that are heavily flagged, i.e. enough to kill the post. User flags have downweighting effects long before that.
Story rank on HN is determined by upvotes, flags, software, and moderators. Moderators downweight stories to the degree that they don't fit the site guidelines. This doesn't happen by upvotes alone, unfortunately; certain stories routinely get tons of upvotes regardless of how good they are for HN—e.g. anything sensational, indignant, or meta. If we didn't have a compensating factor, those stories would dominate the front page every day and HN would no longer follow its primary rule: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Of course that means HN is subject to our interpretation of what counts as "intellectual curiosity". HN has always worked that way; before we did it, pg did, and he trained us to do it so it would work as before. There's no way around the need for moderator intervention on a site like HN—the clue is in the word 'moderator' itself: left to its own devices the system runs to extremes and it needs a negative feedback loop to dampen it.
When YC is involved, we do this less than usual as a matter of principle. When HN itself is involved it's a little bit different, because the hypnotic power of all things meta causes HN upvoters to go into an upvoting trance. Meta on forums is basically crack, so we routinely downweight such posts—but only so much, to compensate for the crack effect. That's what I've done here, which is why the post is now at #7 rather than #1. It should probably be lower, but I want to illustrate the point that we intervene less, not more, when judgments about ourselves are involved. As a further example, a moderator actually turned off software penalties and user flags on this post this morning, which is probably why it went to #1 in the first place. That's more than I would have done but it shows how seriously we take that principle.
None of this is new information, btw. I've posted about it plenty over the years and am always happy to answer questions.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date...
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858850