We occasionally turn off the flags on political/ideological stories when certain conditions are met, such as: (1) there aren't too many of them; (2) the story contains significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...); (3) there's some overlap with intellectual curiosity; (4) we think HN can maybe discuss it substantively; or last but not least, (5) the community is insisting on discussing it. The latter can show up in various ways, such as when the story keeps getting reposted (often from different URLs) or we get lots of emails about it.
Political or ideological opinion pieces rarely meet any of these conditions. That doesn't mean they're bad articles, but it does mean we would reserve the turning-off-flags move (which ought to be fairly rare) for articles that do.
Thank you for the explanation. As a long time community member, I have seen this principle and agree with it. I am asking how the principle applies to the 60 minutes story so that multiple articles were on the front page, despite all being flagged? This does not seem very relevant as the 60 minutes story was not even killed, but delayed to await additional investigation. Seems like it violates the numbers you mentioned 1), 3), and 4) and 5)?
I can't tell if you're implying some connection between this site and A16Z, but as far as I know there's no connection. Though pmarca used to post here years ago.
It's hardly secret—it's on the /lists page which is referenced in the footer of every page on HN.
It simply isn't the frontpage, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. How you guys turn this into sinister suppression continues to escape me.
Edit: perhaps this will help:
HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister. It's essential to the operation of the site.
The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. As a matter of fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.
I had to rely inline above because of some questionable circumstances but not here to debate that part at all.
But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.
When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
You might want to use a more accurate word like 'obscure' in that case.
At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.
From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.
I don’t think that actually engages with literally any of the points I’ve made but sure, I wasn’t expecting anything else. Like I said earlier it seems from where you’re sitting everything is going great and there’s nothing to answer for.
I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.
If you knew how bad HN regularly makes me feel, you would be attributing very different sentiments than those. The point isn't that HN is perfect or even very good. It's that your objections are ignoring what the site is for. Improving the site means making it better fulfill its mandate, but you're not arguing from that place at all, and in fact are (implicitly) arguing that we rip out that mandate and replace it with a different one.
I haven't looked up the number of users who visit the /active page because I don't accept the premise of your question. Of course fewer users look at it than the frontpage; otherwise it would be the frontpage. This is just another variation of the mandate argument.
You're not making me feel bad! I just mentioned that HN regularly makes me feel bad as a way of letting you know that I definitely don't think this place is perfect.
I'm not disinterested in answering your questions—that's why I've been replying repeatedly! Nor am I interested in making hand-wavey responses; that would be a waste of time. We must be working with different assumptions, though, because I feel like I'm answering your questions and you feel like I'm not.
If you want to try again, I'd be happy to, but maybe we could take a different approach? I would like to know what principle you care about here. What principle are we failing to abide by, that you think we ought to?
I get the irony, but its a bit meaningless since we can't compare the quantity of these (yet) uncensored posts with those that have been taken down, and thus aren't visible.
More importantly, other commentors here have already admitted to flagging this entry. The way flagging exists now rewards one-sideism and partisan behaviour - all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters. A counter-flag option would balance things.
> all it takes is a relatively small group of discontented people to take down a story that is otherwise interesting to the vast majority of posters.
That's not accurate, because if a story is interesting to the vast majority of users, it will get lots of upvotes—and lots of upvotes is enough to defeat a small number of flags. In that sense, we already have the counter-flag option you're arguing for.
That's good to know, thank you for the explanation.
Stories don't always get the chance to gather the sufficient amount of up votes before being nipped in the bud by dissatisfied flaggers though, depending on the time of day. Some of them, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887, clearly had great interest here and got a large number of upvotes that was, nonetheless, insufficient to prevent the flagging.
That's true. Then again, however, if a story is important enough to the community, it will get reposted—sometimes many times, either with the same URL or a different one. It's not so easy as people assume for flags to suppress that kind of story.
The submission you linked to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46357887), however, was not that kind of story (i.e. one which the majority of users want to see on the frontpage). Rather, it was the kind of story that some users want to see on the front page, but not the majority of users*.
It's the latter class of story which is more vulnerable to flags. That's generally what we want in a flagging system, and I think most HN users would agree with that in principle (though not of course in specific cases where the story is something that one personally finds interesting).
I think they were all flagged to varying degrees. That's partly why I asked for clarification - there are so many things your question might mean that I wasn't sure which one to answer!
When we say "interesting" we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest or curiosity. For example, there is social curiosity (the sort that powers celebrity gossip). There is political curiosity (wanting to know how one's side is doing against the other side). There is sexual curiosity (no comment needed). These things all have their place, but not here. On the other hand, there can also be overlap with intellectual curiosity, in which case it's fine, though the bar is higher in some cases than others.
Political or ideological opinion pieces rarely meet any of these conditions. That doesn't mean they're bad articles, but it does mean we would reserve the turning-off-flags move (which ought to be fairly rare) for articles that do.
Does that answer your question?
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