
Ask HN: Is flagging being used as a form of censorship? - Cieplak
This post had incredible momentum and was rapidly approaching #1, but was suddenly erased:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12328142<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;muchweb.me&#x2F;systemd-nsa-attempt<p>Does this story violate content policy in any way?<p>Snowden&#x27;s documents suggested that significant resources are being spent to manipulate online discourse.<p>Nevertheless, we must discuss and avert security issues to protect ourselves and our customers, while our government is actively subverting our security.
======
dang
"Censorship" is like "terrorism", a pejorative that's relative to what people
like. So if you like a post and it gets flagged, you can use "censorship" to
express not liking that it got flagged.

When users flag a story, that's the community immune system rejecting it. It
might be hard or annoying to see why users would reject something you posted,
but in this case it's fairly easy to explain: it was dramatic without being
substantive (and combined several flamewar topics to boot). Such stories
mostly don't do well here. That's a good thing.

Please, though, don't add meta-drama posts on top of drama posts. At that
point you're just adding noise, and we're trying to prop the signal/noise
ratio up here.

~~~
BenoitP
On January 2011 I read about Bitcoin as a lurker on HN.

I thought it was quite a novel idea, but needed to prove its worth to the
world. I didn't want to take part in it, use it, as I saw no direct benefit to
me; and without an underlying economic activity, buying Bitcoins was a purely
speculative Ponzi scheme. I came to learn - through HN - about Silk Road and
how people were using it to animate their illegal endeavours. Bitcoin had
economic sense, so in April I bought 50 euros worth of it, to give it a try.

Price went from 7euros/BTC then to 500euros/BTC now. It has been, and will
ever be, my single best return on investment. You just can't beat 70x. HN has
literaly made me richer.

Had I invested 1k euros 2 months earlier, my _life_ would have taken an
entirely different meaning. It has taught me the importance of being bullish
on novel ideas.

HN made me discover the Oculus Rift; HN made me see the unbelievable rise from
the kickstarter to being bought 2B$ a year and a half later. I have been
trying out a lot of great things thanks to HN.

To me, it is an early warning system about the best the future can offer.

\-----------

It seems to me that the bitcoins of nowadays are getting buried in noise, or
are no longer here. Frontpage is covered with common law, societal problems,
short lived news events, click bait, and my-framework-is-better-than-yours. I
am not diminishing the importance of general news, but this is not the venue
for it.

Where is the good stuff? Why don't I hear more about initiatives like RISC-V
(which is arguably hardware's linux moment)? Why don't I hear more about way
to do some CRISPR editing mysaelf as a side project (which is arguably DNA's
linux moment)?

HN is pivoting slowly towards mainstream general tasteless news; and my source
of living in the future and doing interesting things in it is drying up.

\-----------

So, my plea to you, Dang, is: could we have public, explicit, ruthless, white-
list-style, displayed-right-next-to-the-post-button definition for flagging
content?

My take on it:

* It must be about the future getting materialized.

* It must have a strong technical aspect, on which HN members can readily start to work on.

* No news events of any kind, even nation-wide ones like terrorist attacks.

* No societal articles. Not even about the gender gap, which is greatly affecting us all.

* No baseless day-dreaming about what the future could be. (How many of these can we have about "AI"?)

~~~
dang
That's a good story and an illustration of HN's influence at its best. There
are many such stories, which is wonderful. Our job as caretakers is to
optimize for curiosity, so we want as many of them as possible. People's
visions of what HN should be are not all fully compatible, so going far in one
direction would be to choose a local optimum over a global. In some ways the
global optimum (or our best approximation thereof) satisfies no one, which is
a little weird if you think about it.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true though:

> HN is pivoting slowly towards mainstream general tasteless news

That's one thing we're in a position to prevent and that we put a lot of
effort into. Perceptions of how HN used to be in the past are pretty
unreliable; there seems to be a strong nostalgia bias in most such reports.

------
greenyoda
I'm guessing it was flagged because there was nothing of substance in the
article. The author provided no evidence that systemd is malware or that the
NSA was involved in its writing. So it's just idle speculation with a click-
bait title. If I would have seen the article, I would have flagged it for
those reasons.

Also, the "[flagged]" prefix indicates that it was killed by user flags, and
several users would have had to flag a 19-point article to kill it. I'd hardly
call that "censorship" (unless you think that multiple HN users are acting on
behalf of the government).

Finally, the HN Guidelines say that if you have questions about moderation,
you should e-mail the moderators rather than posting. So don't be surprised if
this post also gets flagged.

~~~
4ad
> unless you think that multiple HN users are acting on behalf of the
> government

It would be naive not to think that multiple HN users are acting on behalf of
the government, and I am not talking about the US government only; all
governments do this on every popular site.

The question is whether there are enough users, or users with a significant
impact so that any of this matters.

My personal opinion is that this is the case here, at least when it comes to
stories about the NSA, surveillance, Turkey, Russia, etc. There are quite a
few prominent members of the community which I personally consider government
shills (and no, I won't name them, make up your own opinion).

I won't even say this is necessarily bad thing. It's inevitable, so don't take
it as a criticism of the site and/or community (more than someone can
criticise that water is wet).

~~~
zzzcpan
Agree on that. And it kind of becomes too obvious once you start reading HN
regularly.

~~~
dang
I doubt that. This (apparent) phenomenon is more easily explained by people's
difficulties tolerating strongly opposing views. That sounds odd, because we
all think we're good at that, but really we're not.

Having strongly opposing views in your face is unpleasant, even a sort of
painful, and we react to this by constructing stories about how the opponent
isn't just wrong but bad (disingenuous, dishonest, astroturfing, a shill). The
alternative is to accept that honest, smart, committed people might hold an
opposite view to yours, but because our own views are so strongly held, that
feels much less likely than it should.

In other words, claims that HN is rife with shills, etc., seem mostly to be
un-self-reflective indications of how diverse the community is.

------
11thEarlOfMar
Flagging is done by the HN community as a kind of self-policing. Some of us
are more aware of and sensitive to the guidelines[0] (and more likely to
enforce them) than others. So a post can be popular, but also violate
guidelines blatantly enough that folks flag it. I think your question gets
more interesting if a submission violates guidelines, but the readers who
choose to flag it are actually the ones also opposed to the content on its own
merits, and use their flagging rights to jettison the post.

I've seen the same situation where posts get several up-votes shortly after
posting and land on the front page before disappearing suddenly. It made me
curious whether up-votes can override flags in some ratio, or, whether there
is a fixed trigger count that drives [flagged], or, if flagging simply gets
the attention of moderators who make the call whether to [flagged] a post or
not.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
dang
Your description seems accurate to me. Upvotes do counter flags (and vice
versa). Once the flags go above a certain threshold, [flagged] appears. That's
always something users do, not moderators. Moderators sometimes downweight
posts as well, but using a separate mechanism. Flagging does get the attention
of moderators, even before the [flagged] threshold is reached. If there are
enough flags to also kill a post, you'll see [flagged] [dead]. The software
only kills a thread if it isn't very active, though.

Does that answer your questions?

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
Yes!

But then begs another...

Moderators may 'downweight' a post... I'm curious what types of submissions a
moderator might downweight. 'Popular but violates guidelines', or 'Popular but
too distasteful/offensive', or 'popular and really funny, but not consistent
with HN ethic'.

How much subjectivity is there in downweighting and to what extent might it be
perceived as censoring, if any.

------
11thEarlOfMar
Also, I'm a bit put off that OP changed the 'Ask HN:' question after I'd
commented. Formatting and spelling is fine, but the question changed
significantly from (when I commented):

===

This post was briefly on the front page in the past hour, but was suddenly
erased:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328142)

Does this story violate content policy? Or do the ideas threaten the military-
industrial complex?

===

To:

===

This post had incredible momentum and was rapidly approaching #1, but was
suddenly erased:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12328142)

[https://muchweb.me/systemd-nsa-attempt](https://muchweb.me/systemd-nsa-
attempt)

Does this story violate content policy in any way?

Snowden's documents suggested that significant resources are being spent to
manipulate online discourse.

Nevertheless, we must discuss and avert security issues to protect ourselves
and our customers, while our government is actively subverting our security.

===

HN courtesy dictates that after the fact modifications be indicated with
'EDIT:' or some such wording.

~~~
Cieplak
I apologize, I will ensure my posts are immutable going forward.

PS: I also made the edit very shortly after the post, so I think the eventual
consistency issue worsened my mistake.

------
carsongross
Too late, this article is flagged to.

Thank goodness for [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/)

~~~
cwisecarver
I saw it when it was live but only noticed it was flagged because of
[http://hckrnews.com](http://hckrnews.com). It's really the only way to browse
at this point. So many flagged or dead stories (some that even have value) I
never would have seen otherwise.

~~~
greenyoda
If you want to see all the flagged/dead stories, you can also turn on
"showdead" in your HN profile. That will make them appear on the "new" page
when you're browsing HN. But the vast majority of dead stories are spam.

~~~
carsongross
Most dead stories I see on hckrnews.com are worthwhile.

~~~
greenyoda
It looks like hckrnews shows only stories that have been upvoted, even if you
select "all" (I couldn't find any stories with less than 3 points). That would
exclude most of the junk that you'd see on HN's "new" page (like ads for
escort services, etc.).

The disadvantage of that filtering is that you'd never have the opportunity to
upvote good stories that nobody else has upvoted yet.

------
douche
Happens all the time. It only takes a handful of people to flag something
early for it to get blown down the rankings and effectively consigned to
oblivion. Some of the more interesting and technology-focused stories do
appear to rub some cohort the wrong way and disappear rapidly.

You could get tin-foil-hatty, and think that the NSA or CIA has a handful of
interns that are paid to watch reddit and hn and influence opinion. But it's
probably just as likely that there are enough civilians whose livelihoods
depend on inconvenient discussions not occurring.

------
Hydraulix989
Whoever wrote this had a point: Any time I do something even slightly
nefarious, I reboot into Linux.

~~~
Cieplak
Systemd embeds its own web server:

[https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-
jou...](https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-journal-
gatewayd.service.html)

~~~
falcolas
... I didn't realize that. Can it read email yet, so we can just say that it
finally fulfills Zawinski's law?

------
dragonwriter
Flagging _is_ a form of censorship.

OTOH, "Censorship" isn't, inherently, a bad thing.

