
What happened to the HN article on Ethereum? - gphilip
This one: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7492731<p>It was the second or third article on the frontpage when I commented on it an hour back, but now it is gone: from the front page, the first couple of pages, and from the &quot;newest&quot; pages.<p>I can see the article by clicking on the link, but otherwise it is as if it doesn&#x27;t exist anymore. It has 63 points and is 2 hours old, so it &quot;should&quot; be somewhere on the frontpage ... . What happened?
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Ursium
Hi, Stephan from the Ethereum project here.

I must say that seeing that link taken down was surprising, since Ethereum is
at its core a programming paradigm for decentralized applications + a
distribution mechanism.

In fact, the only 'thing' Ethereum borrows from bitcoin/altcoins is the
implementation of decentralized consensus at scale, which we believe is
applicable not just to currencies, but also the law, entrepreneurship,
governance and many other fields.

If people here would like to help us improving our messaging, feel free to
post here!! We're really appreciative for any advice, straight from the
horse's mouth :)

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dang
It has been posted several times in the last year, so I buried it as a dupe.
In such cases we don't kill the item, so discussion can continue.

Normally, we'd kill this post, though, because you're supposed to ask
questions like this by emailing us rather than posting it on HN itself. Since
the sudden appearance of a new moderator in the threads is a novelty, we'll
leave this one open for now.

~~~
gphilip
Thank you for the answer.

Sorry for the post; I had quickly checked the guidelines before I posted, but
I (think I) missed

"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions
about Y Combinator, or to ask or complain about moderation). If you want to
say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."

(I thought this missing post was some kind of bug in HN but, for some reason,
I didn't think of it then as "a thing I would want to tell you".)

~~~
dang
I have written software that shows me the prior submissions from a given
domain. I use it to decide whether to bury or kill stories as dupes. (You
can't rely on URLs alone for this.) Looking at this list makes it easy to
determine whether a story has already had a significant discussion within the
last year.

Perhaps one day we can add it to the server and give people a way to check
this for themselves. (Edit: we eventually did this. Click on the site name
after a title.) It'd also be a neat way for users to find old threads. HN's
archives are rich.

By the way, duplicate detection, which on HN is porous and largely an honour
system, has been much misunderstood. In my opinion, it's one of several design
master-strokes that PG came up with when he made this site. I should write
about that sometime.

~~~
gphilip
> Perhaps one day we can add it to the server and give people a way to check
> this for themselves. It'd also be a neat way for users to find old threads.
> HN's archives are rich.

In the meanwhile: I find the new algolia hnsearch _very_ useful and pleasant
for this purpose. Typing in a few keywords from a story (and very often: from
just the title) which I would like to submit, _immediately_ tells me whether
it has been submitted (and discussed!) in the recent past. This is great for
"personal" use, and perhaps algolia hnsearch has an API which you can leverage
for moderation?

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waterlesscloud
It's currently at position 119.

My guess is it got flagged enough to drop.

It's annoying that an interesting new tech is flagged down off the front page,
but HN has an anti-cryptocurrency contingent.

Doesn't speak well for this community that this happens.

~~~
tptacek
HN has an anti-cryptocurrency contingent? Besides me and Patrick? From my
vantage point, HN not only encourages cryptocurrencies, but also (through YC)
has a profound financial stake in them.

It is weird that anyone would have flagged the Etherium story. The Moderator
should pull up the list of people that did that.

What's more likely, though, is that the story was promoted by a voting ring.
HN has what I perceive to be a bit of a hair-trigger voting ring detector,
which is understandable, because it's pretty intensely targeted by rings.
There are some pretty simple things you can do to get your story penalized
this way. The best advice for avoiding the problem is to try and make sure
your story rises to the front page naturally; think of HN like a pinball
machine, and the detector as a "tilt" sensor.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Patrick is the loudest, but yes, there is a fairly sizable (but shrinking)
anti-cryptocurrency contingent here. It's not unusual for cryptocurrency
stories to get flagged down, though it's not as common as it used to be.

A voting ring is possible, I suppose. Certainly possible that the detector
thought there was one, though the story had dozens of votes and comments
before it dropped off.

It actually went from #2 to nowhere that I could find it and then showed back
up in slot 119. I've seen stuff temporarily vanish like that before (all kinds
of topics), not really sure what causes it.

I've recently seen things that behaved like comment voting rings, but that's
probably a lot harder to detect, and I can't say for sure it's happening from
the available data.

~~~
tptacek
Sharp drops off the front page are usually either (1) the ring detector, (2)
the flame-war detector (not here, though) or (3) aggressive flagging. But as I
understand it, (3) really only works with stories in their infancy; by the
time a story gets as many upvotes as the Etherium story got, it's hard for
flags to make a dent. Believe me, I've tried, many times. :)

I'd be willing to bet on (1), the ring detector.

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natch
Fascinating stuff, I'm glad I saw your post, because I had missed that.

Probably it just scrolled off the top few pages... things move pretty quickly
on HN sometimes.

