

Ask HN: Why the “So long, Reddit” Post Removal? Just Curious - meeper16

It seems to have made a few good points on monetizing a community driven site along with caveats and all the other things that come with it including ethics associated to what&#x27;s being monetized. This is a facinating topic and it should not be squelched.<p>I don&#x27;t think we should pretend the underbelly of the net does not exist.<p>I noticed the &quot;child porn&quot; post was not removed from HN. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9868352<p>Original &quot;so long reddit&quot; article http:&#x2F;&#x2F;braythwayt.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;11&#x2F;so-long-reddit.html
======
dang
Users flagged them. User flags cause a post to rank lower; also, when enough
users flag a post, the software kills it. We review those and usually unkill
the ones that have an ongoing discussion (so discussion can continue), but
don't usually override the rank penalty. That's what we've done with
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872149).

Please don't make posts to HN about HN post rankings. It's off topic, and the
HN guidelines ask you not to do it, but rather to email us at
hn@ycombinator.com. We can't always answer right away, but we do answer, and
if something needs to happen we'll usually take care of it sooner. For
example, we got an email about the same post last night and although I haven't
had time yet to answer the email, I did unkill the post right away. User flags
ended up killing it again (I made a mistake and didn't turn that off), but
that's atypical.

------
braythwayt
Author here. One of the things that brought me back to HN has been that it has
felt less dramatic than in times past. Whether that’s flagging, or moderation,
or the community changing its tastes, I don’t know, but I value it.

I stand by my post as worthy of being written, but that doesn’t mean it
belongs on HN today. It could be that it does not address an issue that the HN
community finds valuable, especially in a startup context.

It could be that it is a good post, but hey, it’s the seventeenth similar post
today. That happens, I recall some talk years ago about bundling posts so that
there could be one discussion, but Hn doesn’t, and there isn’t room for
seventeen posts on the same subject in one day.

It could be that it’s a little heavy on my personal feelings and light on
objective information. That’s fine, a blog ought to contain subjective
experiences, but a site like HN ought to weight towards information on the
whole.

It could be that it reads like an SJW having a hissy-fit and rage-quitting,
and we don’t need that ‘round here.

Either way, I just want everyone to know that I appreciate that some HNers
value its existence, but I am not dismayed that it isn’t going to be on HN.
Regardless of what is happening to this specific post, on the whole I value
the arc (heh heh) of HN’s growth.

~~~
nkurz
What did you mean by your statement "The practical reality is that Reddit
seems to have overtaken Stormfront as the world’s largest White Supremacy
community."

I took it as a probable statement of fact: more White Supremacists use Reddit
than use any other single forum on the web. That is, while the percentage of
total Reddit users that are White Supremecists is likely low (although much
higher you desire), the total number is larger than any other single site
because even a small percentage of a gigantic userbase means there are an
awful lot of racist Reddit users.

Others seem to be taking it as an indictment of the entire Reddit community,
and assume you are claiming that everyone who uses Reddit is racist.

What did you intend by the comparison?

Anecdotally, when I went through recently subscribing to specific subreddits,
I don't recall hitting any overtly racist groups in the dozen or so pages of
offerings I clicked through. I was surprised though by the amount of porn that
was offered to me. It seems likely that by some metrics Reddit must be one of
the largest pornography sites in the world.

~~~
braythwayt
I’d love to discuss this further, but I have a feeling that it’s playing
“dirty pool” to use a discussion about why the post was moderated as a side-
channel for discussing the post itself :-)

~~~
nkurz
Likely a good intuition, although I think it would depend on whether
"moderated" means that after deliberation the moderators decided that HN was
not the right forum to discuss your post, or whether a small minority of
individual users decided that the discussion should be removed from the site.

I was hoping to see an official clarification, but haven't yet seen one, even
though several hours have passed. Maybe this is the one weekend a year that
Dan's briefly allowed out of the dark and damp HN dungeon where he is kept
permanently chained in front the glowing green VT100 that is his only contact
with the outside world? At least that's how I've always pictured him.

------
nness
Perhaps I'm being hyperbolic, but I generally found that most of the recent
Reddit related submissions have served no real purpose other than give people
another channel to complain about Reddit, the closure of the subreddits, Pao's
actions, etc.

Any counter-opinions or questioning of the behaviour of the community,
particularly those comments and actions which are now being identified as
bigoted, receives downvotes or flags.

This might not be the time, or HN the place, to have a constructive discussion
about Reddit's future.

------
nkurz
I don't think these were removed by a moderator. Rather, they are [flagkilled]
because enough individual users flagged the article to pass some threshold.
While it's possible that Dan has reviewed and approved this, I think it's more
likely that he is off duty for a bit, and that original post will be
reinstated when he's back. But we'll see.

In the meantime, could those who flagged either of these posts please explain
their reasons?

~~~
noobermin
I've been on the site for almost two years and I haven't seen something quite
like this[0]. Do you think Darn or another admin (are there other admins)
would reply to this question so we could know for sure?

[0] I don't say it with the connotation that I'm surprised given my
experience, but the opposite: I haven't been around long enough to witness the
response of the community during the heyday of such a controversial topic and
want to know if the admins would actually respond

~~~
meeper16
I also noticed that this very post here was on the front page a few mins ago
and now it's nowhere to be found on the first, second, third or fourth page.
This is strange and begs some answers.

~~~
thaumaturgy
That's what happens when people flag posts, and it's especially common on
posts asking why other posts were flagged -- it keeps too much meta discussion
from taking over.

I didn't flag either of the other two submissions -- mostly because I've got
pretty strict personal guidelines for flagging, and also because most such
content doesn't have a long shelf-life on HN anyway -- but it would be easy to
justify flagging them.

@raganwald is a great guy. I'm really grateful for his participation on HN.
He's articulate and tends to carefully consider his positions. But, I don't
think this particular article from him is going to lead to very valuable
discussion. With all due respect to his experiences, it's a somewhat shallow,
low-effort article. It doesn't say anything new about the balance between
hateful speech and free speech, which really is the conversation that needs to
happen. It doesn't acknowledge that Reddit is often the largest online
community for any subject, including hateful ones. And, if it inspires any
conversation at all, it's likely just going to be a lot of drama between the
"anti-hate-speech" crowd and the "anti-censorship" crowd.

~~~
braythwayt
I agree with everything you’re saying. There is a thing that applies to
scientific theories, a question of whether they are _fecund_ , do they provoke
more insights and thoughts and productive debate?

Some things I write might be very true, or very heartfelt, or very emotionally
powerful, but not fecund. And fecundity is an important criterion for a site
that uses posts as a catalyst for productive discussion.

------
dangrossman
If I had to take a guess, there's more than a few people that are tired of
reading about reddit's staff shuffling this week, especially on sites that
aren't reddit. It only takes a few people flagging a submission to kill it.

------
cma
This was one of the top-rated posts for a while, I'd imagine it spurred enough
people to flag it that it got flagged:

>Karunamon 1 hour ago

    
    
        >The practical reality is that Reddit seems to have overtaken Stormfront as the world’s largest White Supremacy community.
    

>Are you kidding me? Flagged. And shame on whoever thought it was a good idea
to bring this insulting garbage to #1 in the first place.

~~~
meeper16
That was certinaly not the import of the write-up and I think most would
agree. The meat of the article addressed an underlying management and ethical
issue with any community driven site.

------
y2bd
Links to the last two posts which have both been flagkilled:

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872386](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872386)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9872149)

------
orionblastar
Anything that talks about sexism or racism in the tech industry or website
usually gets flagkilled here.

That is because it is more political than technical. This is Hacker News not
Political News.

I made a comment in that thread and then saw it was flagkilled so I deleted my
comment least it get downvoted. What I basically talked about is that racism
exists and we should teach people to be tolerant and empathetic towards other
races. That is Reddit or 4Chan banned their racist areas, they'd just go
someplace else. That some subreddits have guidelines or rules that say no
racism or whatever and enforce it.

