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[dupe] Ask HN: Why?
31 points by TheAlchemist 39 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 43 comments
@Dang, Could you explain publicly on HN the reason why all the articles and discussion threads about DOGE / Musk are immediately market as dead and silenced ?

We all know that HN wants to keep the topics as tech oriented as possible. Which is a good thing.

In normal times. But we're not living in normal times. Tech elites, like Musk, Sacks, Thiel are taking over US government. Tech enabled propaganda is in full swing, to the extent few of us can grasp entirely.

To take the latest example, one of the latest DOGE employees, apparently made some very racist remarks recently.

However, within 24 hours, Musk managed to manipulate the public opinion to believe that it was actually the journalist reporting this awful behavior that was 'doxing' the guy. The vice-president of the USA chimed in saying the guy should be re-hired, and he will be, according to Musk.

All of this is absolutely mind blowing and I frankly could not find words to describe how I feel about it.

What I do know though, is that a lot of this is done with active precipitation of Tesla / SpaceX / Xai employees who do follow HN.

My question is, WHY any article about DOGE / Musk is immediately banned and silenced ?




The moderating strategy that normally makes HN on-topic is both fundamentally biased against and easily to exploit by bad actors to downplay this kind of breaking news.

Dang has unflagged several posts and has explained "the algorithm" clearly throughout the week, so this seems a little unfair. Though I personally remain disappointed that there seems to be no concern that "the algorithm" is clearly being abused here to suppress coverage of, at best, one of the largest security breeches in American history or, at worst, a potential coup of the world's largest superpower. And that I've not seen arecognition that unflagging a post is like splinting a broken leg - still a broken leg. It robs a thread of several hours of natural growth and still biases the ranking, so the abusive flagger gets their way. I would guess their opinion is in the ballpark of "that's the way the cookie crumbles".

I don't think I've seen Dang say if they're revoking flagging privileges - I doubt it? And they seem pretty adamant on not making exceptions to the moderation system, so that's that... Though it seems reasonable to me there should be a temporary whitelist system they could use to make flagging require manual review if a post meets a condition, I'm also not an HN moderator with analytics and years of practice.

WRT many of the flags, there are admittedly a lot of duplicates. Heck, this thread is a duplicate, but I can hardly blame that when the flagging is as ridiculous as it is right now.

Also, @dang doesn't really work IIRC. Moderators tend to not want to be spammed easily.


> clearly being abused here to suppress coverage of, at best, one of the largest security breeches in American history

Worst suppression ever with several front-page threads about it that were not flagged.

Something you also need to understand: there are dozens of "new" developments to a story like this every day. But they don‘t warrant another whole thread.


Yes, because Dang unflagged them manually. Those threads still sit dead for hours, as I explain in the very comment you replied to. This biases against those posts and prevents many people who check once daily from ever seeing them.

Just because we have a competent moderator doesn't mean they aren't abusing forum mechanics to suppress those threads? Nobody claimed they were entirely silenced.

And it is entirely disingenuous for you to sit here and say this didn't happen to the very first posts on the topic.


Yes, because Dang unflagged them manually.

There's lots of manual moderation and tweakage on HN, every single day, big news or no big news. That's its completely vanilla, normal mode of operation. You might have just noticed this because of this particular outlier set of stories but it's not some sign of 'biases' or even abuse (although surely those things happen as well quite often, you can just email them in if you think you've come across something like that - that's also 'manual' moderation).


Apologies, I'm not sure what's you mean with this reply to that quote.

To be clear, I don't think the moderators are biased here, just that HN naturally works against controversial topics and that there are a lot of people who are abusing the flag feature for anything that goes against their ideology / role model.


I'm saying this isn't 'abuse', much of the time and that manual intervention alone is not evidence of abuse or even of something going wrong. The assumption the flagging must be ideological itself tends to be strongly coloured by the views of the assumer.


I'm not saying the manual intervention is evidence of abuse, I'm saying HN moderation is working as intended and abuse being mitigated does not mean abuse was not attempted, or even partially successful. As a response to them saying that just because a bad actor was thwarted, they aren't a bad actor. A caught thief is a thief all the same.

I personally believe the flagging of these posts is abuse, though. I don't have analytics or a need to meet a criteria of proof, but I do have common sense and an awareness of how this cult following works. The guy [Musk] did a Nazi salute on stage for God's sake, I'm not a fool as to what kind of crowd that attracts... I'm a fool in other ways, naturally!


I think 'common sense' can be deeply deceptive in high-dudgeon situations and this is is pretty high on the dudgeonmeter. There's tremendous fatigue with repetitive current events stories and their generally low-quality threads and that was there long before the latest storyburst.

Here's an example: When Trump was shot, flaggers nuked pretty much every instance of the story off the front page. It wasn't corrected till the next day. Do you think it's likely Nazi sympathizers did that? Or ideologues of some kind? It's hard to imagine what kind. Much more likely, just people thinking 'oh god, not more of this shit, not here', whatever their other views.

The other thing is, you're indirectly/unintentionally saying dang has been straight up lying to us about the nature of these flags (i.e. that there's no obvious evidence of brigading, etc) for days. I'm sure he makes mistakes, has biases conscious and unconscious like the rest of us but I don't think he presiding over the place perched on a throne of lies.


It's dudgeonometer.


El dudgeonino, if you're into that whole brevity thing.


I don't really understand how you're misconstrueing what I'm saying. I didn't say there's brigading. I didn't say dang is biased or "on a throne of lies". I said he's clearly explained how the system works and it's operating as intended, but that the intended system has flaws. And that the topic invokes bad faith flagging, which leverages those flaws.

I admit I was shitty to them a week or two ago calling them "complicit" for the effect of the flaws, but that was just me being shitty and I have not said that HN mods are doing something wrong here. I just defended them all repeatedly? Let me be excruciatingly clear: Dang and the team have done a great job all things considered, despite what disappointments I outlined above. It's hard, unappreciated work, and their communication has been helpful.

WRT to the attempted parallel: some submissions are flagged for good reason. Hell, this post should be flagged because it's a duplicate. But I'm not fool enough to not understand the context of these discussions. And, once again, the context is that a saluting, meming gamer Nazi billionaire is achieving the libertarian dream dismantling the US government using the fascist dream of zero oversight executive overreach using AI wielding, racist tech bros fresh out of college.

Seriously, I couldn't think of a better targeted demographic to abuse the flagging system to suppress any negative coverage of this being bad in our community.

If your goal here is to convince me that this whole situation has NOT been exacerbated by those abusing their flag privilege, you should honestly just move on. Not even dang has insight into the mens rea of a flag and I've had the displeasure of many of my peers being this particular brand of nasty.


dang has insight into the mens rea

Neither do you though? It's just not at all obvious to me, other than 'I think it's nazis because nazis are bad' (and nazis are, without question, really bad - no argument there), why one ought to assume that this is nazis, but every other time it happens (nearly daily) it's something else.

you should honestly just move on

done.


The fact you reduce everything I say to absurdity or some complete falsehood is against HN rules too, if we're being pedantic. Maybe you could stop?

I don't think it's authoritarians "because Nazis are bad". I think it's authoritarians because it's a story about authoritarians having authoritarians do bad authoritarian things and there are a disproportionate ratio of authoritarians or authoritarian sympathizers on this forum (and our careers) and this action is blatantly inline with the behavior of the petty authoritarians who are trying to seize power and I'm not an idiot?

And, no, this isn't exclusive to this scenario. And, shockingly, there are more than two scenarios on this planet. You're not being clever, you're being dismissive and rude.


I think the takeaway is we have our answer, this isn't the site for the kind of open bay area adjacent discussion you/others assumed it was. It has been clearly pointed out it has always been a very curated discussion, we just didn't notice/understand. This is how flagging works here (you/me wrongly assumed flagging was required to meet your/our definition of good faith).


> If the reasons are benign and not to suppress awareness and discussion -- in short, not people thinking themselves the lords of others -- then nobody would have a problem with people opting out with something like "ignore thread flags" option.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42933217

what gives? easy way to put the money where the mouth is, no takers, ever.

> I'm sure he makes mistakes, has biases conscious and unconscious like the rest of us but I don't think he presiding over the place perched on a throne of lies.

It doesn't matter. Just like the identity or motivation of the people doing the flagging doesn't matter. This is what it actually is, and HN is one of the places to discuss issues like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42979187 -- and that was all fine and well before SV got into bed with fascism, after all. Attracting people who are curious and passionate about technology (and its impact on the world) was a welcome thing, in between the YC job ads and whatnot. Such stories about a young Kremlin "maverick" would be read and discussed with much interest. But when people have even more expertise, are likely to know of more related things, then suddenly it's off-topic? Hah. I'd say the opposite is the obviously the case: this is where push comes to shove and a lot of lip service flies away like chaff in the wind.

> just people thinking 'oh god, not more of this shit, not here', whatever their other views.

And how do you square the deluge of all sorts of sophistry, the posters of which usually don't reply to corrections, doing mental gymnastics to claim there is nothing to see here, talking about "the far left" constantly and all that? They're just what we see, but the rest of the iceberg is "most likely" of some entirely different material?

Maybe, maybe not. People's reason from being unhelpful range from bad motivations to weakness, because saying "oh no not more of this" is just that. There is literally a "hide" button right next to "flag". That's what you do when you don't want to see something. I see a lot of stuff I don't care for and I would NEVER think of making it impossible for other people to discuss it.

And whenever one of those "most likely" people says that that they flagged it because they don't want to see it, not once did they respond to my question why others shouldn't be able to discuss it, either. One tried something extremely handwavey and then didn't respond when asked what that actually is supposed to mean. That's a clear signal to me, it's pretty undiluted even.


From your linked comment: who never followed up when I challenge them.

That one seems really straightforward - people don't owe you receipts for their views or explanations for their motivations. The aspirational goal of the place is conversation, not interrogation.


> That one seems really straightforward - people don't owe you receipts for their views or explanations for their motivations.

Everything "seems straightforward" when you just make up what seems convenient without actually inspecting what is there, or the "aspirations" of the comments I'm referring to. People do owe themselves there being receipts before they speak, absolutely. This is not a diary, this is making claims in public. Of course they have to stand up to scrutiny, or get retracted. What else? What do you consider intellectually honest where that isn't the minimum?

If I ask what is the thought process here, and there is only evasion, because there is no thought process, or I ask what some wishy washy phrases means in practice, in the actual context it was used as an argument in, and I get nothing, then that's because there was just this wishy washy phrase. The respective people can prove that wrong. You can't do it for them. Why even try? Why even go there?

If I say "what you just wrote is racist so the opposite is true" and you ask "how so?" and then I don't reply because it was obviously bullshit, then that's not some high-fallutin' principled stand for good faith conversation, it's really just people trying something, failing, not acknowledging that, to keep doing it. It's the opposite of good faith discussion.


People do owe themselves there being receipts before they speak, absolutely.

No, they don't. Especially not here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...


Sure, it's a watercooler, with Blockwarts that seek to prevent any discussion of the giant yellow bulldozer outside the window, but when you ask them if they don't have to work sometimes, they never make the case why other people can only talk about what they like. They just stare, and then interrupt again.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

The person I replied to picked the part from a link I did NOT quote, ignored what I did I quote, everything else I wrote, and said "this one is easy". And then even that "one easy thing" was just a straw man. They used the phrase "owing receipts" to refer to something I said, misrepresenting or rather simply not caring about the contexts that did refer to, instead making up a straw man, what they preferred imagining it to be.

I obviously ignored the straw man, and re-used their word "receipts" instead of repeating my original phrasing, but it's the same thing. It means what it actually means, not what the straw man made it out to be.

Don't say random shit. That's implied in not posting shallow dismissals, random shit is a subset of shallow dismissal.

And if you can't rephrase what you said, or how it's applicable or relevant, because you haven't thought about it at all, because it's literally just a knee-jerk "no u" or some slogan, then no, of course you shouldn't say it. I mean, I don't care, I can easily refute it. But for me it just takes up space to refute something that would have been prevented by being parsed by the author first, instead of me parsing it first.


Nope.


Good thing I wasn't asking ^^


The problem with discussing American politics is that they tend to suck the air out of the room. Once you let them in, they dominate the feed, regardless of the topic of the forum.


The reality is American politics is of crucial importance for the entire world, and the moment we are experiencing may prove to be the most important inflection point for the next century.


We have newspapers. American politics don't need to fill every online discourse. Other people have other things to talk about.


I don’t think these things are considered “politics”. They are tangible things with tangible consequences. It’s affecting real people, and the world in some cases, and I don’t think people consider it just “politics”.


Categorise them as you wish, but from the outside, they are American politics. Like every cycle of American politics before it, Americans are certain that this time it's different, and the entire world has to constantly hear about it.

Sure, it's important, but there are other places to discuss it.


If that is true, then perhaps you should be doing something about it in meatspace? Say, donating to and volunteering for one of the groups which is engaging in legal action for or against DOGE and Musk?

Perhaps the single biggest problem with recent American politics is that millions of people feel that web sites full of stories and talk, by (at most) ordinary American citizens, somehow constitute "action".


Getting the word out is not mutually incompatible with taking action.

Collective action is more important than individual action. And right now, collective action is being hampered by suppression/manipulation of what people see on social media (not just HN).


Agreed.

Also, why do they need to discuss it here? There are plenty of threads on reddit with 97 million active users. HN is orders of magnitude smaller. It would be like posting politics threads on r/programming or r/startups.

As a foreigner, I hope HN doesn't lose its soul.


HN has been around the block more than once. This is not a new phenomenon and this will not be the last time we see it. May I suggest the search bar at the bottom of each page to find the answer to your questions and those like it.

Here's a post from @dang to begin your hunt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572

What is it you wish to gain from having more of these posts not moderated that you cannot get from the related posts which appear on the front page each day?


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981600


That's easy. Still waiting for dang post on that though.


There have been a pile of dang posts on this, several people have linked them.


Could you please include the links ?


They're in the thread I already linked?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977160

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

You can just walk backwards though dang's recent comments for piles more.


[flagged]


It's been one of the biggest recent discussions and the links there provide a lot of explanation of how moderation works, etc. I'm not sure how to respond to this, maybe you don't like the explanations, which is fine, but "none of this explains" seems plainly inaccurate.


Links provided are just links to other discussions.

What I'm interested in, is why all topics about DOGE / Musk are currently silenced ?

Can you post a link to a direct explanation by dang ?


How is a thing that's had several gigantic threads being silenced? Like, how can I link you an explanation to a thing that seems obviously untrue? The links to those discussions are in the links. The dang links themselves contain piles of other links, old and new. The other comments in this thread also provide additional explanation and yet more links. Maybe you can ask about specific things in them, when you've had a chance to check them out? Otherwise we seem to be going in circles.


We have had plenty of those stories unflagged on the front page. There is no reason to have three Musk stories every single day. And no matter how strongly you feel about it, I‘m fed up.

May I recommend Metafilter? They discuss almost nothing else than current American politics, you‘ll feel right at home.


[flagged]


The events have been the most discussed thing on the site.


Because you just drop that into one big bucket, "the events", and then e.g. every single tiny coding thing is it's own thing, instead of the "coding" bucket. And even then I'd say it's a stretch.


There are plenty of other web sites full of discussions by people who share your worldview. Insisting that HN play host to "more is better" content that you personally favor may not go over all that favorably.


HN guidelines:

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

I'd say "someone made a racist remark" stories are politics and happen every day.




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