
Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page - foob
http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/
======
dang
The story the OP is complaining about was flagged by users. Moderators never
saw it (edit: wrong, we put 2010 on the title by mistake, see downthread [1]).
Had we seen it, we would have turned off the flags. There's a long tradition
of people looking at HN data and posting about it. Edit #2: since the 2010
thing was our mistake (an accident of sleep deprivation by the looks of it!)
I've invited foob to repost the original article using the second-chance
mechanism described at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)
and the links there. I think he's planning to do that tomorrow.

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 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/?query=by:dang%20downweight&sort=byDa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20downweight&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20countervail&sort=byD...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20countervail&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20constitutional&sort=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20constitutional&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20curate&sort=byPopula...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20curate&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13858850)

~~~
ethbro
If you don't mind answering, is there a reason [flagged] doesn't show as soon
as it starts to downweight?

~~~
jrs235
Do you want it show right away? I assume that showing it right away (as soon
as possible) will only cause it to fall off even faster and fewer people
bother to look at it and possibly upvote it.

I assume that similar to HN meta stories resulting in upvoting trances, seeing
[flagged] leads to ignoring the submission.

------
falcolas
Obligatory pimping of a tool I use (not mine, though):
[http://hckrnews.com/](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.

~~~
onewaystreet
> 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

For front page rankings time matters more than total votes. A submission with
10 votes can be ranked higher than one with 50 if those 10 votes came in
minutes rather than over the course of a day. It's not surprising that
controversial submissions that get less up-votes (and more flags) don't get
ranked as high.

~~~
stymaar
> For front page rankings time matters more than total votes

Yes, but it's not the only thing at stake because you often see more recent
and more up-voted posts being below older and less up-voted ones.

------
laurent123456
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.).

~~~
rimliu
I've got my account (with 9+k point) banned. Which is, of course, annoying,
but the most annoying thing was the comment left by moderator "we banned". How
about "I banned"? Faceless corporate "we" does not look well. There was also a
lie about warning which never happened, but hey, "not lying" is not in the
guidelines, so… And while some of my comments might be harsh I sometimes
wonder if overzealous moderation leads us to creation of some kind of Stepford
here.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
To be fair, sometimes this is a security feature so that folks don't go off
hating one individual moderator. I've seen this in games more often, but I
imagine it works out here as well. It sucks for normal folks, but sometimes
that's the way it works.

~~~
throwaway743824
If they want to 'protect' the moderators they should use more neutral language
focusing on the actions. You can easily say "This account has been x" instead
of "We've x this account" or "x has been changed to reflect y" instead of
"We've changed x to reflect y". It's less personal, but that's the point.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I think that works best; a moderator is / should be only a member that happens
to be responsible for maintaining the site's user behaviour policy and
tidiness of articles posted, and thus decisions shouldn't be an "I" or "we"
thing, but "the site". Of course, that's an utopia and no amount of rules will
cover every situation.

~~~
rimliu
It may sound stupid, but it'd make me feel better if moderators still used "I"
even if otherwise completely anonymous. Still add human touch and personal
responsibility to the act even if there is no way to call some particular
person out.

------
hardwaresofton
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?

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> 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.

Obscuring an algorithm or making it more tedious to reverse may not make it
perfectly secure, but that's not the goal. It's not like actual information
security, where loss of the encryption keys means your product is broken or
your database is on the Internet. You're just trying to minimize the workload
on humans who act as a back-up for the few posts that slip through.

If an email spam detection algorithm was public, spammers could precisely
craft their content to slip through. If the heuristics for showing a CAPTCHA
were public, bots could automate their requests to avoid it. If a ranking
algorithm was public, people who might financially benefit from the front-page
traffic could force content there through vote rings and sock puppets.

If the algorithm is secret, far fewer will be able to do so, and this small
fraction of abusers can be handled by humans.

~~~
ballenf
Once it's public (even unofficially), people will begin to rely on the current
implementation and then complain if it is ever tweaked or changed. They build
towards the value it grants and then complain that the value was arbitrarily
stolen from them.

~~~
leephillips
That's for sure. I rarely visit SEO websites or forums, but the few times I
did I saw lots of complaints from people who seemed to think that Google owed
them something after tweaking their page ranking algorithms.

------
ploggingdev
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](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.

~~~
stordoff
FWIW, the post does acknowledge that:

> There are also a few articles that are thinly veiled affiliate spam. For
> example, the ShelfJoy links about books that Aaron Swartz and David Bowie
> loved fall into this category. They get called out in the comments for being
> very low-effort lists of Amazon affiliate links.

~~~
ploggingdev
OP uses this story as an example of having "moderator fingerprints on them"
i.e moderators censoring posts, which is not true. What happened was the
opposite : the moderator uncensored a post flagged by the community.

~~~
azrazalea
Well, the author tried to account for that by saying that normal flagged posts
don't go down near as fast.

If what is being said in other threads is true, high karma accounts clicking
flag could push a post off the front page without showing the "flagged" tag,
then that could be an explanation instead. Which would then mean that maybe
these high karma users have too much power.

~~~
jacquesm
> Which would then mean that maybe these high karma users have too much power.

And on top of that are allowed to use HN as a platform to ask other users to
jump to their aid in flagging stories they don't like.

------
johnlbevan2
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?

~~~
foob
Good points! I use the official Hacker News API [1] and my requests come from
an ip address that is completely disconnected from my personal account. Even
if the API usage were a red flag, there would be no way to automatically
connect it to me.

You're definitely right about there being miscellanious rules in there.
Something that I mentioned in passing in the article is that many stories
exhibit a significant drop in position once they're 15 hours old. If you look
closely at the typical story trajectories you can also see various other jumps
of about 10-30 positions which I would guess are triggered by these various
rules.

The stories listed in the article exhibit very different behavior where they
jump hundreds of positions instantaneously. It's absolutely possible that this
is triggered by some automatic mechanism but if that's the case then there's
an enormous amount of signifance being assigned to the corresponding rules. If
there's some random component to the ranking then I highly doubt that it would
be responsible for jumps of this magnitude.

I try to emphasize in the article that I do think it's possible that there's a
hidden flagging threshold that's responsible and that the data can't tell us
with certainty whether or not that's the case. I just personally find it
unlikely that that's what happened for all of these stories. If you ran a site
like Hacker News then would you put an admin link next to each post that
pushes it off of the front page? I know that I would.

[1] - [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

------
iplaw
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

~~~
jasode
I don't think the Paypal story was "removed". That story is now on page 2.
Yesterday, it stayed on the front page all day. It's decay from the 1st page
to the 2nd page a day later seems comparable to other stories with ~200
comments.

The author's meaning of "remove from the frontpage" means _abruptly_
disappearing from the front page and you still don't see it in the subsequent
6 or more pages.

~~~
tptacek
Right. Stories that get buried fall from the front page to, like, the 50th.
Not to the 2nd.

~~~
sillysaurus3
That's not quite true. "Buried" just means "gravity has been increased."
Sometimes the gravity is adjusted massively, which moves stories to the 50th
page. But it's very common for stories to go from page 1 to page 2. Even more
common is to go from rank ~5 to rank ~29.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
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](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/hn-
transparency)

Some screenshots:

[https://sr.ht/WBEt.png](https://sr.ht/WBEt.png)

[https://sr.ht/30Tv.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.

~~~
nkurz
_I wrote a tool that scrapes HN and detects moderator activity (and provides
interesting stats in general)._

Sounds great! It might be good to distinguish between "moderator activity"
(which to me implies that a human reads and makes a decision) and "moderation
activity" (which covers automatic adjustments such as the frequently faulty
"flame detection algorithm").

 _If there 's interest, I can put this back up and start pruning old data so
it's more maintainable._

Yes, I think it would be very useful to have this available.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
>Sounds great! It might be good to distinguish between "moderator activity"
(which to me implies that a human reads and makes a decision) and "moderation
activity" (which covers automatic adjustments such as the frequently faulty
"flame detection algorithm").

Unfortunately this information isn't made available. More analysis of the data
is necessary to identify trends that can be used to distingish these.

------
minimaxir
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362)

A conspiracy theory, even backed by data, is not the best application of
Occam's Razor.

~~~
Analog24
Presenting the facts out of context isn't helpful. The original post might
have "only had 32 upvotes" but, as mentioned in this article, it received
about 20 in less than an hour. More than enough to get to the front page,
where it was steadily receiving more upvotes until it just vanished. The post
was not "swallowed".

~~~
minimaxir
"20 in less than an hour" is not a fast velocity.

~~~
Analog24
It was enough to get on the front page.

The point is that the post wasn't swallowed in the usual sense. We now know
that the original post fell drastically because it was being flagged by users.

------
laktak
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.

~~~
Shivetya
Does HN actually suffer this? I know its done on Reddit and by who in one
case; just having a family member active in politics gets you good insight how
many sites they try to manipulate.

I was hoping that HN's flag system would sufficient for the community to self
censor. Perhaps we need a flag on comments too, something you can't see. I
would also prefer that posts don't transition through the lighter grays as
they get down voted but disappear completely once the dead threshold is met.
That would prevent some piling on that does happen

~~~
minimaxir
> Does HN actually suffer this?

Oh yes.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749685)

------
moomin
It's very interesting to note the number one pulled story:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741276](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.

~~~
willvarfar
In the comments you link to, dang _is_ the moderator, so he isn't theorizing
when he says:

> It is the usual tug of war between upvotes and flags

~~~
moomin
Good point :)

------
yAnonymous
The main problem I have with this is that similar to Reddit, HN is advertised
as open-minded, free-talking place by the team themselves.

When you then secretly censor stuff, because it doesn't fit your agenda, be it
politically or financially, it makes you look even more like a hypocrite.

Branding yourself liberal while employing fascist methods (censoring and
banning) seems to be a trend, not only on the internet.

~~~
antocv
Ive noticed a lack of Assange, Wikileaks and Snowden discussions up in here.

CIA Vault 7, like 1 thread or something, yeah right.

------
ifdefdebug
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.

------
probably_wrong
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.

------
golemotron
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.

------
kens
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...](http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really-
works.html)

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.)

------
s_dev
Cache/Mirror:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://sangaline.com/post/the-
stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/)

~~~
remotebug
Archive:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20170313124045/http://sangaline.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170313124045/http://sangaline.com/post/the-
stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from-the-front-page/)

------
Sean1708
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.

~~~
foob
Sorry if I didn't make this clear enough in the article but all of the stories
in "Suppressed Story Trajectories" either drop off by hundreds of positions or
disappear completely after their plotted line ends. They all match the
criteria laid out in the previous paragraph. I used a larger y-scale on the
last figure to show the full trajectory because that was a special case where
the story didn't disappear completely and the trajectory after the jump was
relevant.

------
j_s
[http://hnrankings.info](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/](http://hnrankings.info/13714928,13714987,13715552/)

------
eli
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.

~~~
suby
It seems to me that it's healthy if we as a community are able to discuss
issues with how the community is policed. Some may find it boring, but I'd
argue that it's useful.

~~~
alex_hitchins
I agree. I thought the write-up was fair and reasonably level headed.

If something popular (and surely by definition of being on the front page it
is) is suddenly removed, people are bound to be interested in the reason why?
Was the source discredited? Was it just a copyright issue? A simple filter for
spiked stories would be good, just with a note on the reason why.

Of course HN don't have to implement this, but it would be of benefit to the
community.

~~~
DanBC
But the answer is always going to be "users flagged it", or "the flamewar
detector was triggered", or "the vote ring detector was triggered". And advice
is always going to be "if you notice something unusual email the mods to
discuss it, because they can fix it if you send them an email; they might not
see it if you leave a comment in a thread".

~~~
alex_hitchins
My point is you don't notice every post that gets removed and there is
currently no transparancy on the reason why.

HN doesn't have to be transparent, it's just a site with it's own agenda (by
that I don't mean evil agenda, but it is there for a reason) but if you want
to grow the community, I think clearly identifying why things were removed is
a reasonable thing to ask. If every one it marked "flagged by users" I'd worry
that there is no manual intervention.

------
jonathanstrange
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.

~~~
lightedman
"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."

That you worry about these things on the internet instead of real life (like
the ones in our government) is rather telling.

------
PleaseHelpMe
> The stories that Hacker News removes from the front page (sangaline.com)

is : [http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-
new...](http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking-
algorithm/)

------
mirimir
Conversely, I've wondered how some stories (e.g.,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857880](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 :)

~~~
c3534l
Protip: every post hits the front page. Some posts just stay there longer.

~~~
gus_massa
Not every story. But some stories are cherrypicked by the mods to be shown for
a short time in the front page. It's like a second chance for some good
submissions.

Old explanation by dang:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926)

------
Paul-ish
Could it be that moderators see things we can't, eg vote manipulation and
astro-turfing?

~~~
raverbashing
Possible and very likely

------
euphoria83
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.

------
Jerry2
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](https://imgur.com/a/6OvnE)

Maybe OP can find a pattern in these.

~~~
gus_massa
Some stories are cherrypicked by the mods to be shown for a short time in the
front page. It's like a second chance for some good submissions.

Old explanation by dang:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926)

------
omouse
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.

------
crablar
This is why we are working on Mineranker, an open source newsfeed and ranking
platform:
[https://github.com/francisypl/mineranker](https://github.com/francisypl/mineranker)

If you are interested in more open newsfeed ranking systems, check it out.

------
paulpauper
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.

------
aaronchall
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.

------
anotheryou
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 hn@ycombinator.com.

~~~
gus_massa
At some time, the post with few upvotes (perhaps < 5 or something) had the
rel="nofollow" attribute to discourage spammers to get a "follow" until the
post was flagged. I'm not sure if that is still the current criteria or if
they are using some additional signal to enable/disable the "nofollow"
attribute.

Probably the mods don't want to disclose the complete criteria, because it may
change constantly without warning. Try to send again an email again, but I
guess you will get in the reply only a general idea of the system.

If you see something horribly misclassified, try sending an email to the mods.

~~~
anotheryou
Thanks, that's reasonable and makes sense!

------
aaronhoffman
@foob, thought you might be interested in this "visual front page" of HN
[https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/HackerNews](https://www.sizzleanalytics.com/HackerNews)

------
pooptasticpoop
I'm glad I saw this here. HN has some of the strangest draconian moderation of
any website i've ever visited.

Though, i'm continually driven back here because of the insanely high quality
of the comments here.

------
chmaynard
I still browse HN daily, but I lost confidence in the moderators after I
posted an article that trended rapidly with an interesting, useful discussion
and then suddenly dropped off the front page.

I asked the moderators why this happened. Their explanation was that the
article I posted was a duplicate, and therefore created a distraction for
readers who wanted to comment on new material. This struck me as total
bullshit, but I tried to be constructive and proposed a method of merging
multiple threads on the same article. I never got a response.

------
threepipeproblm
>> That’s about 2.1% so it’s not a particularly common occurrence but it is
happening on a daily basis.

I would say that 1/50 front page stories being buried _is_ particularly
common.

------
logicallee
This is called "burying" and it is unremarkable. (This story is likely to be
buried.)

The stories that are buried are not appropriate for the front page. The reason
you come to Hacker News is because it has a better front page, with better
comments under it, than other places. You experience the benefit of this
editorial intervention each and every day.

I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very quickly: this
one.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431)

The quality of the comments was inordinately low and it didn't look like it
would be improving, which is the reason it was buried.

No complaints from me around this. You can email the moderators if you want to
know their reasoning. (I'm not one.)

People here need to understand and be thankful for the extraordinary and
ongoing work that the moderators do every single day to keep this place an
appropriate place for interesting, deep discussion along the editorial lines
chosen. It is not a democracy (see: reddit) but I find the moderators
generally extremely fair.

As far as I understand the moderators bury tons of stories (often political,
link-bait, etc), which do however get traction quickly until they do so. It is
easy to get traction through click-bait.

Generating serious discussion is harder. For example, this title promises "the
stories that Hacker News removes" \-- but is not really about the stories that
Hacker News removes. For example the author does not analyze the comments
under them or see why it derails or is not a good contribution to HN.

It is more of a click-bait title is bait-and-switch, and is designed to
generate easy outrage.

There's nothing remarkable here despite the traction this story is getting. It
is part of the hidden workings that keep HN great. Dan and Scott (the
moderators) do an extremely good and thankless job keeping the principles of
this place alive.

You have no idea how hard they work and I've seen them make difficult and
intricate decisions. (Sometimes as simple as detaching a thread that was
derailing an important discussion.) In my opinion this story does not belong
on the front page.

~~~
minimaxir
> I've had a story buried as it was gaining a lot of traction very quickly:
> this one.
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11920431)

I would have flagged that submission if I saw it since it's flamebait.

~~~
logicallee
That's not what flamebait means, you likely mean clickbait. There's nothing to
disagree with there - all commenters agreed that lightweight sites are great.
The title was also completely true.

But you are right, it was inappropriate. My point is there were 43 upvotes in
a matter of a few minutes (and more coming) but it was not generating good
discussion. The top comment:

>>hyperbovine 269 days ago [-]

>>Loads instantly, looks fine on mobile, the thing(s) you are probably
interested in are linked right from the front page. As usual, Buffet is onto
something here.

>>> walrus01 269 days ago [-]

>>> Looks fine in Lynx, too!

>>> [http://imgur.com/yAEimmZ](http://imgur.com/yAEimmZ)

Which is why I submitted it. I simply thought it was interesting.

However, although all the comments agreed with it (there was no flaming) and
it was getting traction, the comments were simply not very high quality or
generating any good discussion. It simply wasn't worthy of the front page
despite getting voted there organically. I have no problem with it being
buried.

~~~
lorenzhs
I think flamebait is the correct word, because the discussion would have just
ended in the usual "modern web" complaints interspersed with people saying
that these things have legitimate uses, and so on and so on. They're never
productive discussions, just full of ranting and flaming.

~~~
logicallee
But as you can see, no one in the discussion actively disagreed with anyone
else. (No one flamed anyone.) It just wasn't very substantive and the reason
it was buried.

------
grimmdude
Good writeup. Ironic that this story is #1 on the front page now.

------
DanBC
This blog suggest that moderator action must have been necessary, but seems to
say that flags are unimportant.

I disagree. Just a few flags can cause a story to drop off the front page.

~~~
jacquesm
HN is like reddit where the 'downvotes' on a story outweigh the upvotes 30 to
one or so.

------
leot
I've been wondering what happened to this story, which was doing better than
most but didn't appear anywhere on first 15 hn pages.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12557020)

[https://twitter.com/trottiest/status/779036903517491200](https://twitter.com/trottiest/status/779036903517491200)

~~~
dang
It set off the HN flamewar detector. That's a software penalty that kicks in
when discussions get overheated relative to upvotes. We eventually turned that
penalty off on it.

~~~
leot
Interesting. Thanks!

------
UhUhUhUh
Interesting discussion, and therefore, logically, interesting post. Oddly, I
begin to wonder whether a variation on a bet system wouldn't be useful.
Flagging or up-voting don't come with any cost attached. The only current cost
I can see is related to pissing off a group or sub-group, which is not
conducive to productive exchange. Just a thought from someone who has never
flagged anything.

------
c3534l
There's a subreddit for pages that get deleted from their front page. There's
often good discussion around those pages and it's usually for a good reason
they were removed. But sometimes there does appear to be real bias. It'd be
nice if I could see what sort of stuff is getting removed and be able to
discuss why.

------
pvaldes
Some of those links are closed for voting for some reason. It seems that you
can upwote the rest (including this "Stories that HN removes..." thread) but
the vote count will not change anyway. Maybe is just a bug, maybe not. I don't
know.

Updated: Probably just a bandwidth issue. After 20 minutes the vote count is
changing again.

------
qznc
Afaik there is a mechanism to remove flame bait articles. If a link gets too
many comments too quickly, it gets removed.

~~~
turc1656
If that's true, that seems like the sort of thing that would lead to a ton of
false positives getting flagged for removal. I'm sure big news events like the
Wikileaks Vault7 release would generate lots of comments. Doing a quick search
on HN, I see the top posts related to Vault7 have <15 points and no more than
single digit comments.

I find this worrisome. Vault7 is the type of thing that I would expect to
generate significant discussion here.

~~~
jsnell
It's been covered to death here. There were at least half a dozen posts on
that in the last week that made over 200 points (the main one at 2697).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13810015)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13824032)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13844389)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811914)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13813160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13813160)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13840544)

------
timthelion
I've had one post removed from the top spot on the front page:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041)

I origionally posted with the title "For a moment, I thought bing was down" or
something (I don't remember the origional title). The title was later changed
to:

Title: "Bing doesn't support SSL"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576041)

Later, the story was was removed entirely after I wrote the following comment:

" Actually, it's been like this a really long time. I just noticed, that HN
stories which have nondescript titles fare better, so I decided to conduct a
little experiment. 1st spot on the front page seems to confirm my hypothesis.
"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5576342)

I certainly understand why the mods removed the "story", but at the same time,
I felt that the discussion of the "non-descript title bias" would have been an
interesting one to have.

~~~
timthelion
It seems like Hacker News doesn't like hackers, given the downvotes.

------
kristopolous
I had something that was removed from the front page of reddit and hn nearly
simultaneously in 2011 - and I hadn't posted it on either, it was just my
content. I saw it in the logs; some giant cliff.

I've always wondered if there's cross collaboration since then.

------
DanBC
If you notice something weird happening with your submissions you should email
the mods. They're happy to explain what's going on and to have a look to see
if the flags are fair.

------
codr4life
Hacker News is nothing but a censored echo chamber, pretending otherwise at
this point is pure ignorance. Anything that doesn't fit the narrative will be
beaten down or removed.

~~~
icebraining
If it's ignorance, then it's not pretense :)

In any case, I don't necessarily disagree, but I've yet to see good evidence
of the shadowy cabal, rather than user-directed flagging. I mean, just look at
the list in the article: does it point to any kind of "beating down stuff that
doesn't fit the narrative"?

~~~
nol13
I mean at some level, completely understandable/expected that the community at
news.ycombinator.com will have the corporate/VC dick up its ass to a degree.

And not always a bad thing, even if I think this place could use a GNAA troll
every now and then. I don't need 10 cynical articles about big tech every
morning. Those views need to be heard but at some point it's not interesting
to me, that's not the stuff that keeps me refreshing HN while I should be
programming.

------
intralizee
Transparency is nice but most social news sites don't care for it.

If there was a middle ground it probably would be a section where you can
specifically view threads that were removed from view.

------
brudgers
A useful data point missing from the article would have been the moderator's
response to an email inquiring as to the story's history.

------
turc1656
I would like to see a monthly version of this post, similar to the recurring
"Who's Hiring" that happens every month.

------
65827
Was it critical of Google or one of the other mega corps? I've noticed
oftentimes info that is disappears quickly on here.

------
wookoouk
My universities firewall blocked the link :(

------
jacquesm
Nice article. Not so nice to rip the HN comments and display them below the
article.

------
midgetjones
I guess the acid test will be what happens to this post. If the first one was
removed via manual intervention for whatever reason, then this one surely will
be too.

------
fidla
I think it was removed because of the blatant linking to your site, considered
spam by most of us

~~~
minimaxir
Hacker News encourages original content as long as it is high quality/people
aren't spamming it every other day.

------
danso
I didn't find this particular OP to be as enlightening as its current upvote
count suggests, but the previous post that was supposedly disappeared was very
interesting and well-written. Considering how many upvotes this OP gotten, the
purported short-shrift the previous post got was fortuitous ;)

------
najajomo
The rules here do seem to be petty and arbitrary, modding people down and
banning accounts because the management object to the opinions expressed
therein.

~~~
dang
If you're going to accuse us of something that awful you ought to supply links
so (a) we can answer and (b) people can make up their own minds.

------
paulpauper
Posting on a social news site is a privilege, not a right. I've had stuff
removed from Reddit and a few from Hacker News that got flagged after going on
the front page...I've had stories on Reddit that got many upvotes and still
removed just as it was going viral because the mods didn't like it...it's just
the way it goes. It def. can seem unfair at times. No question about it.

~~~
forgotpwtomain
> Posting on a social news site is a privilege, not a right.

I certainly don't share the sentiment. There are lots of places I or other
people can visit and post to, what makes this particular site commend _value_
is precisely the community and user-base it has fostered over the years. Thus,
I believe that this kind of _meta_ discussion does provide considerable value
to the community.

~~~
nottorp
It may be a privilege, but in this case my reading Hacker News is a privilege
for _them_ , and not their right. And I want to know what stories are manually
suppressed in order to decide if i still grant them that privilege.

Also, check out Tim Berner Lee's article about the internet being hijacked by
the likes of Facebook and Google in order to understand why your 'I am
grateful for the privilege' attitude is wrong...

Edit: argh, I attached this to the wrong post. I was responding to paulpauper
of course.

