HN Lament

ColinWright · on Sept 2, 2011

It's not clear to me that people are submitting stuff, not realising that it'll never be read. I wonder if you've conflated having an item flagged dead as opposed to being hell-banned.

The only instances I absolutely know of people being hell-banned were pretty clearly appropriate. When I've occasionally turned on "Show Dead" and looked down the list, I've pretty much agreed with them being inappropriate, off-topic, repeats, or otherwise of little value.

Having said that, I have seen what appear to be instances of vengeful downvoting, and cases where I really haven't understood why something has been flagged, but I've not seen the nastiness you describe.

And even so, I'm no longer finding much to interest me here. That's why I'm doing two things. The first is to create a personalised filter for HN items. That's starting to pay off - I'm seeing mostly stuff that interests me, and less of the - to me - uninteresting.

The second is to create a different place for people that caters more readily to a wide range of interests, while still providing each person with things that they find valuable and interesting. That, too, is starting to work.

If you're interested in either project, reply to me here.

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ADDED IN EDIT:

It was some time ago that PG increased the ranking penalty resulting from flags, but certainly it doesn't take many flags for an item to fall quickly from the front page, if indeed it ever gets there.

The problem is that with such a hugely diverse "community" here now, for every submission, there will be a substantial number of people who consider it "off-topic". My concern isn't the topicality, my concern is the complete lack of content or depth of so many items.

ig1 · on Sept 2, 2011

A single flag on the new page pretty much kills an article.

Typically the way that a story gets upvoted is that if it receives enough votes in the first 30 minutes of being posted (typically <10) it gets to the front page, once it gets to the front page far more people see it and vote for it so it gets to stay there.

Essentially it comes down to luck whether a link gets enough votes in that first 30 minutes to hit the front page. If someone flags an article in that first 30 minutes before it hits the front page then it almost certainly never will. Very few articles get enough votes on the new page to overcome the flag penalty.

It means it's trivial for anyone to kill an article they don't want to appear on the front-page (i.e a negative article about their startup or a positive one about a competitor).

noahc · on Sept 3, 2011

I'm not sure I completely agree with this argument, but I think it is worth putting out there. It doesn't matter if a single article gets killed. We have too much information already, so not seeing a single article will probably mean very little.

However, seeing spam is really annoying. So what we want to do is maximize for minimal amount of annoyance on the front page. What a single flag does when it kills an article is minimizes annoyance on the front page for the most people.

I think the real question is what should we be maximizing?

DanielBMarkham · on Sept 3, 2011

To advance the discussion a bit further, I think we need to ask ourselves whether the system exists to filter raw input into the best result, or to create something new that didn't exist before.

If the reason is simply a filter, then "maximizing" is related to the function of the filter, that is, we look at the flow from the submission to the placement on the page. If the reason is creation, then we have to look at the flow from a random participant in the system, whether submitter or reader.

I think many folks look at the system's purpose as if it were to find the best material on the web. Personally I don't understand this. There are dozens of stories online about any one topic, and aside from wasting my time chatting, only a very few topics everyday provide something I can use. What's to say the CNET story is better or worse than the TechCrunch story? A vote? When I look at the front page, I want something that provides a change in my habits. Something unexpected that provides real value. I don't want some groupthink result that tells me what favorite media outlets or what fanboy material is most prevalent today. Yes, I understand that as long as we have voting we will have some form of popularity contest, but shouldn't there be a high degree of creative chaos involved as well? Or just a popularity vote among rehashed stories of the day? Does the system exist for the average reader's value, or to perpetuate a form of groupthink among participants? (I've probably overstated my case. Apologies)

As a hacker, I'm interested in becoming a better hacker. I want to participate in things that help me be a better person. What everybody thinks is cool is okay too, but it's not a primary consideration.

DanielBMarkham · on Sept 2, 2011

I was so puzzled when I got flagged that, for only the second time in many years, I emailed pg. Asked him what happened. Hell I thought it was a system bug. It had five votes in something like 20 minutes, then it was flagged. It went from being like 17th place to not appearing anywhere that I could find in the first 500 headlines. It wasn't just punished -- site volume was so high it was effectively gone.

That means any one person veto power over whatever you create, simply because they can, because they've been around. With a huge number of folks on-site, the system just can't work like that.

ColinWright · on Sept 2, 2011

The problem is that spam and genuinely inappropriate items need to be flagged and deleted quickly, but people now seem to flag things simply because they don't like them, disagree, or are grumpy.

I flag stuff that contains nothing to make me think. I frequently upvote things I disagree with provided they have some depth and make me think.

But so much stuff here is now complete fluff.

The balance is difficult. What should a flag mean? What should the effect of a flag be? Certainly it should penalise the ranking, and certainly enough flags should result in an item being deleted, but what is "enough"?

It's a problem. Personally I don't see it getting fixed - I'm not convinced the existing structure can be fixed. That's why I'm doing something different.

_delirium · on Sept 2, 2011

Strangely, the pure spam doesn't seem to get turned dead very quickly, which is as you point out part of the difficulty with just changing the threshhold. A few times a day, something selling New Jordan Shoes or with an all-Chinese subject line leading to a not-HN-related-at-all ecommerce site, will stay on the New page long enough that it only falls off naturally due to age.

saurik · on Sept 4, 2011

So, I always browse Hacker News using "showdead" (and have since I started using the site): there are definitely ghosts walking among us that have no clue they have been hell-banned; to be clear: "people are submitting stuff, not realising that it'll never be read".

Yes: a lot of the time, when a comment is marked "[dead]", it makes sense that that comment is dead. However, you cannot use this to determine whether the instances of hell-banning are appropriate, as most comments that are marked "[dead]" are not dead because they were posted by someone who is hell-banned: that one single comment is dead.

Sometimes, though, a comment is actually useful (occasionally even, the most useful response), and you wonder "why is this dead?": the result of seeing someone who has spent the last few months talking to the small handful of people who care enough to use "showdead", not ever realizing it or being told it, is kind of sickening.

At some point, I decided to start leaving tabs open with these people (my really pathetic way of bookmarking stuff), so I could one day find them all and write an article about "why you have to be careful when you implement hell-banning", but unfortunately (as this is a really pathetic way of bookmarking things), I can't find some of my better examples, despite spending the last two hours searching through current and archived browser states.

However, I do have at least one example for you: this comment has a response from a user named "Pooter" that I found interesting--in fact, multiple people found interesting (enough that someone actually asked after it)--and yet the user is hell-banned, so I don't get to see it. This user is /still/ posting stuff, and probably /still/ doesn't realize they are hell-banned.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2519863

Now, when you look at this user's comment history, it is not at all clear to me that he deserves to be /hell-banned/. Yes: some of the things he says are not terribly useful, but if you check the threads there are other users who say the same things and are simply slightly downvoted; in some other cases these alternative comments are standing fine.

But what is really bothersome is that sometime this is the only user who went out of the way to correct someone else, and Pooter is actually right:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2872773 <- in fact, iOS has support div scrolling for years, maybe even since the beginning: Pooter is right

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2846808 <- while I'm not certain who I agree with there, I think Pooter's argument is a reasonable one, especially if you connect it with his other rebuttle: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2843802

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2808094 <- this comment is downright insightful: I am fully in agreement with it, and I wish I had been there to say it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2755767 <- while he didn't need to say "This is a stupid idea.", his reasoning for why the idea is not "very good" is sound.

When I come across these cases, it really makes me wonder what is going through the minds of the people who are making these moderation decisions. I mean: Pooter is abrasive, but I've spent a bunch of time over the last few days staring at HN users (and tagging them: I got sick of not remembering who is who, so I've built a user tagging framework), and there are people with many thousands of karma points who cause a lot more strife with a lot less useful content than Pooter (or the other people I swear I have sitting in tabs somewhere on one of these numerous web browsers :().

Mz · on Sept 4, 2011

and there are people with many thousands of karma points who cause a lot more strife with a lot less useful content than Pooter

Unfortunately, there will always be an "in" crowd and there will always be people like Pooter. I wish we could find a way to encourage people to be genuinely respectful of all members of a community. Often, the people in the "in" crowd become some of your worst members over time as it becomes impossible for anyone to have a reasonable disagreement with them and it becomes a huge issue about ego and so on. I've been a prominent person on a forum or email list and hated it. Prominence makes it very difficult to have meaningful conversations with people. People tend to divide up between those who want to adore you and hang on your every word and those who want to kick the living shit out of you simply because it's you, often pissing all over you about some point that their comment history indicates they actually basically agree with. Most human communication is very much about things like pecking order and other social considerations, more than about meaningful ideas and so on. Hacker News is better about that (about making it about ideas and content, not social status crap) than most places and it is one of the reasons I participate here while having dropped out of so many other forums/email lists. But there is still plenty of that here.

I wish I had some brilliant suggestion to further improve it. I don't at the moment. But I very much appreciate you taking the time to post this.

pasbesoin · on Sept 4, 2011

I can relate to this through personal experience (in a galaxy long ago and far away).

Early on in HN's life, emphasis was placed (in early comments) on removing (well, reducing) the emotional aspects and focusing on the information. At the time, it seemed the majority of the HN population embraced and welcomed this attitude.

(And what emotion did manifest, was more welcome for its genuineness and respectfulness. For example, people really did celebrate each other's launches -- often in a rather informed and informing fashion.)

Emotion is a principal item that concerns me about the original post that started this thread. There's too much of it.

I don't have a solution to HN's current situation, either. But getting amp-ed up about it won't, I think, help.

Some time ago (after forgetting, for a while), I switched on show dead. The newest/ page probably, on average, had (well) under 25% dead items. Since then, the number of dead items on newest/ has grown to often be well over 50% of the page (over 75%, not infrequently).

I agree with almost all of those post kills. It's utter crap: Irrelevant, promotional, having nothing to do with the real ("traditional", whatever) HN community.

And I see that as indicative of HN's overall situation. It's no longer a niche market. The world has found it, and unless the door is closed (not that I have a means to suggest of making that a solution), they will come in and picnic and litter and trod the grass until there is nothing but a mostly bare field, where one can hardly find the remaining grass for all the people standing in the way.

HN started as a self-selecting group. And I suppose it will re-incarnate somewhere, in some fashion, through a similar course of events.

As they say about X, the first rule of X is that you don't talk about X.

(But someone, hey, email me when you know what X is.)

I don't mean to sound arrogant, nor do I think I'm a particularly valuable member of the HN community, myself. But the signal to noise level has started to drop below the threshold that keeps me interested. And I notice a lot of the older, and in my experience more insightful user ID's, appear only infrequently now if at all. (And then, it can be more work than I can muster the will for, to find them -- or the more interesting newer user ID's -- amidst all the rest.)

Community versus publicity. Maybe there is a fundamental choice, there. Or the need for at least two tiers -- two buses of connection and traffic.

Mz · on Sept 4, 2011

I really enjoy figuring out the social dynamic stuff (which often comes across as "gossipy" and gets me in lots of hot water) and I'm an excessively emotive person and just want to give the world a hug and buy the world a coke. I've worked really hard at learning to tone that crap down. I have also learned (the hard way) that getting two people like me together in a public forum is just a train wreck waiting with baited breathe to happen. I go out of my way to minimize the whole "love explosion" insanity that can blow up in your face when you get two idiots like me together in public. In other words, I agree with your concern about emotionalism and will add my own observation that even when it's "positive" stuff, excessive public emotionalism tends to turn problematic.

The human brain can follow the complex social interactions of roughly 150 people in a community setting. On the internet, where roughly 20% of members tend to be "active" members, this means that forums above about 700 members start having issues with the sense of community dying and so on. I suspect that the solution for this is to do what many older IRL cultures have done and introduce more social formality -- in other words, consciously and formally introduce practices which explicitly show respect for people in situations where you don't know them all that well and never will. HN is basically the population size of a small city. Given that the degree of interaction with others is higher in a forum than it would be for a similar population size grouping IRL, I think it is the social equivalent of a city much larger than the numbers here seem to suggest to the minds of most people. By that I mean I think of it as being more like New York city rather than a city of 80K or 100k size.

I sometimes end postings with "peace" as my closure. I have a friend who says that sounds passive-aggressive and wants me to stop that. It's something I began doing on smaller lists to reduce ugliness since I tend to be really controversial. In that setting, it did have at least some success in terms of getting people to be less reactive and hostile over disagreeing with my often unconventional views. I do think it's not having quite the same degree of success here. If I can come up with something better, I will happily move on. For now, it's the best I've got. I don't have any ready-made answers for these issues. American English dominates the internet and lacks some of the formal 'respectful' language options found in other languages like Japanese. I don't speak Japanese, but my understanding is that it has a rich variety of ways to say "you" or "me" which express subtleties of formality and the character of the social relationship for which English has no equivalent. I suspect that these types of problems in online forums are compounded by the fact that the internet is dominated by English and it's mostly American English to boot. So the linguistic means to show cultural formality simply aren't there.

pasbesoin · on Sept 4, 2011

> to boot

Change that to "aboot" (Canadian), and you have an instant solution. (Those infallibly polite Canadians... ;-)

In that "long ago and far away" that I obliquely mentioned, I rescued a drowning owner/moderator. Then promptly, politely twisted the arms of 3 or 4 other long term members with whom I'd established personal relationships, to become co-moderators. Set up an out-of-band channel for conversation (with a default record, for reference) amongst the same. And broke the single forum into about five sub-forums that addressed the predominant, general trends of interest of existing conversations.

We also had to start clamping down on the "everyone is welcome" attitude that we had tried very hard to foster, promulgate, and shepherd. Some people simply are not present in the community for the sake of the community, and/or are so disruptive or toxic that the only solution -- especially given the limited resources of volunteer moderators and the limited patience and attention of the majority of the audience -- is to toss them.

If you think you are a softie, you should see the kind nature of many -- the majority -- of people who inhabited this community. Nonetheless, past a point, hugs just couldn't cut it. And when that was recognized and... respected (as opposed to "enforced", as a motivating attitude), the mood of the place actually improved and people could once again feel a bit more trustful and express a bit more care.

The environment was also, even more so, self-selecting. And it benefited from an enduring lack of mainstream publicity. (Its few "breakouts" actually became crisis points to manage.)

With any community, eventually you have to draw boundaries. And break the whole into manageable pieces.

As you mention, whatever the technology, ultimately you are up against the limits of human cognizance. A community needs enough structure to keep and present "human-scale" pieces, contexts, scopes.

Whether those structures are static or dynamic may be a question that's currently being addressed and experimented upon, on-line. As for HN, we'll have to see what pg and crew adopt in their ongoing approach to this.

Mz · on Sept 4, 2011

Oh, I wouldn't characterize myself as a 'softie'. It's one of the reasons my "give the world a hug"/sunny personality gets me in all kinds of hot water: I'm apparently a dragonlady, so when people conclude I'm a softie and publicly ask my opinion of them because they want to soak up all my LOVE, I give them my unvarnished opinion (just trying to be helpful -- I mean, you asked for honest feedback didn't you?) and make scads of enemies for all eternity. Um, yeah. (My son's kinder explanation: The sunshine is nice to soak up from afar but don't stand too close to the sun or you get burned.)

Anyway, nice chatting with you. I think I have a very important appointment with a game. :-)

pasbesoin · on Sept 4, 2011

Ok, I've a nice tan now, and will step away before I begin to burn. ;-)

cx01 · on Sept 4, 2011

All of Pooter's posts have five hyphens on the last line. So maybe this triggers the spam filter.

dlss · on Sept 11, 2011

You might consider reading http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.htm... before making comments like this in the future.

diolpah · on Sept 2, 2011

I have some personal experience in this matter. My prior account(haploid) was silent-banned for, presumably, daring to question the orthodoxy that parenting is the best accomplishment one can achieve in life.

I don't know if this meets your criterion of "clearly [in]appropriate", but I would hope that expressing an unpopular opinion would not.

ig1 · on Sept 2, 2011

I've started spending more time over at http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ it's much closer to what HN used to be than HN is now.

Pheter · on Sept 3, 2011

It seems ironic that a lot of users moved from Reddit to HN, and now HN users may move to Reddit.

revorad · on Sept 2, 2011

I think it's largely just a function of growth. There are enough people here now that a tiny tiny fraction of them flagging can easily kill stories. Same problem with random comment downvotes. This will continue to be a problem unless we have categories, but that's also not without its issues.

Meanwhile, what was that picture? :-)

chc · on Sept 2, 2011

I think you kind of misunderstand what flagging is and it leads to you fear it unnecessarily. Flagging tends to be used as kind of a downvote, since HN lacks proper downvotes on articles. It reduces a post's ranking and, if flags accumulate much faster than upvotes, will cause the post to be killed. AFAIK, it doesn't ban you, your site or anything else, and certainly doesn't cause a magic hellban out of nowhere.

rawsyntax · on Sept 2, 2011

A few weeks ago I had an article dead'ed after getting 10 upvotes. And now all my submissions are marked dead seemingly permanently. So what am I todo except stop contributing to HN

dlss · on Sept 11, 2011

> to do

nirvana · on Sept 3, 2011

I'm constantly seeing posts from hell banned users who are contributing. Here's an example I saw just this minute (you may not be able to see it if you don't have show dead turned on.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2930421

Since I see these posts and the spam and I've left it on for several weeks this way, obviously the spam that is getting thru with showdead on is not enough to make me want to turn it off. In fact, except on the new posts feed, I rarely see spam at all.