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Ask HN: Objecting to stories being killed
74 points by tc on July 3, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments
I concur with the value of keeping meta-discussion on HN to a minimum, but sometimes it really surprises me when a story gets killed.

At one point, you could object by commenting in the thread under an existing comment. That often caused moderators to reverse the kill if a legitimate point about relevance was raised. It seems this has been disabled.

This came to mind today when I noticed that the stories of recording studio engineers about the experience of working with Michael Jackson, about his work ethic and management style, was killed after 77 points [1].

If anything, that set of stories is the very most relevant, and definitely the very most interesting, of all the things about Jackson that have been posted here. The stories are told from a very 'hackerly' perspective, and the peripheral environment of the stories -- recording studios and the related technology and business environment -- are interesting to many people in this audience. The comment thread had some interesting tidbits, and looked in no danger of going astray. And as a point of comparison, I very much doubt that a much less interesting or timely 400 word blog post about the "value of a strong work ethic" would have been killed on HN.

Anyway, this is all just peanuts in the long term for HN, but it seems we should work out a way of raising a legitimate objection to a moderator kill without resorting to an 'Ask HN' comment such as this.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685603




If a story has enough flags, that alone will kill it, without moderator intervention. I just added a point threshold to prevent this happening to stories that have received a significant number of votes.


It might be better to make that proportional -- e.g. that 20 upvotes needs 30 flags. I think there are enough "junk" upvotes (catchy title that people upvote without reading, somebody's favorite topic, but didn't read the article, new users that aren't quite used to the HN vibe, etc.) and now a sufficient number of users that getting 10 votes probably isn't all that hard.


What I'd actually most like changed is that dead links become unclickable. The fact that a link doesn't belong here doesn't mean I don't want to see what it was.


Try e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=686224


Or http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47550


pg has said in the past that it's because of spam. allowing the urls to stay live in that case would give them unwarranted google juice.

EDIT: pg says it's because he doesn't want people following spam links. i stand corrected.


It's not page rank (links are nofollow till they get 5 karma) but traffic. I want spammers to realize they get so little traffic from HN that it's not worth posting here.


Yeah, I recently had to post a completely irrelevant reply in a dead story to ask someone who had gotten there in time to paste me the link.


Without diving into the code, can you tell us the algorithm? Does it scale based on upvotes? Such that a 200 vote story is harder to kill than 70? Or is it just that once a story passes 50 upvotes it can't be programmatically killed?


At the moment it just has a threshold of 10 points.


Thanks Paul.


I found the story very interesting, but I agree with the removal of this story. It wasn't Hacker News, it was an interesting story about Michael Jackson. I would have been very happy to read that story on Reddit.


Could you elaborate on what is HN if not things that hackers find interesting (particularly "very interesting")? Not to be pedantic, but:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Also keep in mind that some of us no longer follow Reddit, so we might prefer if HN took a slightly broader view than Erlang innards.


Could you elaborate on what is HN if not things that hackers find interesting (particularly "very interesting")?

In my opinion something is on-topic if most hackers would find it interesting, and most non-hackers would not. Otherwise you might as well just drop the "Hacker", and call it "News".


Very true, but then much of the marketing and entrepreneurial fluff that gets posted here is neither news, hacking, or especially useful from a business standpoint. A few people treat HN as their personal viral marketing vector.


I believe the referenced story qualifies under that metric. In part, it's revisionist history -- and thereby anti-mainstream. And I very much doubt that the TMZ crowd would even be interested in parsing stories told from such a business/technical perspective. But that's neither here nor there.

In all actuality, I do sympathize with the rational for your proposed metric. I'm just pointing out that the nuance and angle of a story can push something distinctly into that category in cases where simply reading the title might lead one to have a "Not HN!" spasm.


Well, I may be a programmer but not all things are programming related. I happen to like speaking in French, but I don't come here to hear about that.

So, although I found the article interesting, it wasn't what I come here for.


Switching a forum from a narrow to a broad interest is a problem for people who have narrow interests. You have an alternative (use several fora), they don't.


I wanted to elaborate on why i posted it here...

Mostly that the high signal to noise with this community and the way it better expresses the stuff i'm currently thinking about. However, in specific regard to this thread- and as others have pointed out - the topic for me specifically highlighted the hacker like work ethic that MJ seems to have exhibited, which I very much enjoyed reading.

I do feel that some of HN has turned into a first post mentality, which is a shame - especially as i've seen on front page two posts which were essentially cnet and yahoo both posting the same story.

So I'm all for more varied content - God knows an echo chamber would suck - but with the knowledge that we're here to share information and knowledge that has improved or enriched our lives. Anything else is just showmanship.


When 10% of HN really likes a submission, it goes to the frontpage. Then if 10% of HN really dislikes it, the submission gets killed.

That some stories then get un-deaded is testimony to the faultiness of the system.


Aren't submissions killed through flagging? It's the community that kills posts, rather than the moderators. I haven't looked at the code, but I think it's something that is automatic. Some clarification on that?

Preface: I love meta-conversation. It's like introspection and from introspection, there is growth...

I am with you. I thoroughly enjoyed the post. I like knowing that MJ was a very nice man and very genuine. He was an authentic person in a sea of frauds and bluffers -- a breath of fresh air.

Anyway, this is just a problem with community. Communities are just aggregates of the individuals. I lurked at HN for a long time before I decided to join in and try to add value. I like HN because the community here values truth above all. There was a desire to have open conversation and see all sides of an argument and really dig deep into a topic to figure out what is going on.

I think the MJ issue is one of those. It's an interesting story. A long life of hard work, sacrifice, a rollercoaster of a life. His is the kind of lesson we can learn from.

But the community here is very ... narrow minded I would say. It's young. It hasn't "Learned the hard way" so to speak. It's quick to adopt new technologies. It's slow to learn from the past. This community wants change. It wants something different. But Michael Jackson stories have quickly become "the same." This community wants to get away from that.

Anyway, I'm just rambling here. Flag me if you want, [dead] my comment. I'm just talking. I don't have an agenda, but it seems more often than not, agendas are being pushed here. Propaganda.

Some of the agendas around here: Open Source, No SQL, Anti-Microsoft, Anti-higher education, Programming language elitism, environmentalism, healthcare reform, pirating copyrighted material, and getting rich quick to name a few. Some are my agendas, some aren't, but anything contrary to these positions is ignored or flamed for community selection bias. There are people in the group who are not like that, of course. I appreciate lots of comments on both sides. Some of those things I mentioned above I dont like so much, but I tolerate them. Nothing is perfect right? Really my goal is to find truth, but it seems like truth is becoming less of an agenda around here. Logical and rational conversation is becoming [dead] as well.

As the community gets larger, it's going to approach "main stream." And there is a mainstream even among programmers, the l33t ones. I feel like I'm talking to myself 10 years ago. I thought I knew a lot more than I did. I'm not wise by any measure, but I see myself in hacker news, so I can reflect on it with some hindsight, because it is a lot more like myself 10 years ago when I was ... more naive, more optimistic. I didn't know that change isn't always good back then. I was invincible. I could fix the world. I can still fix the world though. :)

Anyway, none of this matters. I'm just occupying brain waves while I am in transition, so I come here to entertain myself. Perhaps that is the crux of it. Hacker News is about entertainment -- entertainment of a "different" sort and that's why pop entertainment is flagged. Michael Jackson is part of that.

I have noticed over time, that to have constructive conversation, you must first agree, then explore. That happened a lot here. "Yes, that's possible, let's see.. let's think about that a little bit." But less thinking is happening and more "regurgitation" is the norm. It's normal I suppose. The only solution, if you find that what you are looking for is starting to "go away" is to start another community or find a new one.

Ask yourself, "From what did this community start?" That nerve is the focus from which dendrites sprout and axons connect and so I'll get off my soap box after I say, I still love hacker news. I think it's still the best aggregator out there. It's a pretty smart community. It humbles me all the time and that's what we need in life is a little humility. I wander around in the "real" world and I feel too smart for my own good. I come here and I feel dumb and it's awesome. It's good to know that there are people like this community out there.

EDIT: Wow... this topic was on the front page, then dead, then on #2. It is an example of itself.


Some of the agendas around here: Open Source, No SQL, Anti-Microsoft, Anti-higher education, Programming language elitism, environmentalism, healthcare reform, pirating copyrighted material, and getting rich quick to name a few.

Yes, and as you note below that, not all participants here sign off on all of those agendas. I might characterize my view of higher education as "skepticism about credentialism," for example.


One of the reasons some of these stories get killed is that it makes it easier to get along peacefully without forcing this or that political/economic "agenda" on anyone.


My understanding is that flagging a submission brings it to the attention of the moderators, who decide whether or not to kill it.


the problem with flagging, is that it kills any controversial story, maybe add to the algorithm that if a story has more than X upvotes, that flagging gets disabled?

Most stories get flagged into the oblivion before they reach that threshold, so it'll be an easy way to keep interesting discussions from getting removed


Well said, pj! Thanks for such an illuminating commentary.


A bigger problem is the ongoing, secret, and unaccountable knocking-off of contributors who've done nothing wrong, often on a loose suspicion of them being other people. This is doing an incredible amount of damage to this site.

I mean, really, what percent of HNers would've wanted time_management banned? Less than 5%? 2%?


"I concur with the value of keeping meta-discussion on HN to a minimum, but" decided to post a thread of pure meta-discussion. Are you sure you concur with that value?


He felt he had to resort to it.

You can be generally opposed to something, but accept it as the least bad option in a specific situation.


What proportion of meta discussion here, do you think, comes from people who felt that, just this time, they had to resort to it?

Also, what proportion of student cheating do you think is by students who are generally opposed to cheating, but feel they really had to do it just this one time?


In some cases, either could be necessary in order to improve a situation.


There's also politically correct censorship going on, amazingly. This morning I submitted this: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-englis... . It was dead on arrival, marked [dead] immediately, presumably because that blogger is "divisive" and "racially insensitive". Please read that and judge for yourself if it is interesting.


I would think that about 90% of Sailer's articles are too trollish for HN. (Consider the title of his book about Obama: "America's Half-Blood Prince".)

This article, however, made a very salient point, which I have heard from other people as well, particularly in regards to the conflict in South Ossetia. (Basically, he says that the American media is too sympathetic to English speakers around the world.)


Can you point to one of his articles that is trollish, instead of just unPC?


There are a number of articles with this sort of tone:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/051016_football.htm

"Or, possibly, the reason that teams with a higher number of white reserves have been winning more games is because whites are better team players about sitting on the bench without complaining about not starting. Perhaps white back-ups are less likely than black back-ups to poison the atmosphere and ruin the team spirit."

How could you possibly argue a point like that? It's pure trolling.

Anyways, I don't know if he's trolling a whole 90% of the time, but certainly < 10% of his articles are appropriate HN material.


http://paulgraham.com/say.html


Yes, and thank you for reading the article. It is an interesting and important point.


i'd say it's a lot more likely it was killed because of the political slant. very few political articles are allowed to live around here, because they lead to divisive and unproductive arguments.


Allen, everything from that domain is autokilled. Try it yourself. Here's one you can submit: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/01/reasons-for-being-cheerfu...


From the guidelines:

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

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Stories about politics have a very high threshold to clear to be on HN, because there are many other places to discuss politics online, and few others to discuss the core HN topics.


Yes. But the article is question doesn't seem to be about politics: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-englis...


I suppose reasonable minds can differ, but it doesn't delight my mind. I should be deeply interested in such an article, as an American who reads a foreign language (Chinese) and has lived abroad, but maybe precisely because I have that background I've seen better.


Of course you don't have to vote it up. But why was it killed?


I gave that answer up-thread. I think people interpreted it as a political post. (Personally, I had nothing to do with flagging that thread. I didn't even notice it until it was dead and the metadiscussion began.)


What is the political slant of that article?


We told you it's not good for HN by flagging it. We're disagreeing with you, because we believe it doesn't belong here. Now you come here and presume we disagree with the contents of the article and suggest we are morally inferior, because we have unethical reasons for flagging the article. You're not just wrong once, but twice.


No, the article was auto-killed. The blogger is probably blacklisted for being racially insensitive or something. Yet here is an example of one of his posts that did well on HN and generated much interesting commentary: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280544


The blacklist is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044


It wasnt auto-killed. Very few domains are on the blacklist AFAIK.


I just tried submitting another article from his blog and again it was [dead] by the time I was redirected to the 'new' page, i.e. a few milliseconds. Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686436

Try posting something from his site yourself, like this one: http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/01/illuminating-map.html


ouch, ok sorry your right.. Looking at his material it looks like he qualifies for the stringent blocklist guidelines.


Which item in the guidelines does this blogger's writing violate?


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

Im guessing given the outspoken-ness of the guy the material would tend to end in flame fests ;)




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