I think we're not being let in on a silent war happening here. It seems bogus points are being assigned to submissions and they are then being killed. It started several hours ago.
This is most likely what's happening. I submitted an interesting book review. The kind that would get routinely ignored on HN. It immediately got 8 points. Very odd. I expect it to die any time now.
I've rarely had submissions killed. But I was surprised when mine got ten points within moments of posting it. That made me suspicious and since then it's the likely reason for submissions being killed: Someone is giving everything bogus points.
You guys are more on the ball than I am. When my post got instant upvotes I thought, "How pleasant that so many people are interested in dataflow computation".
Probably HN's software is detecting the suspicious voting and killing the posts.
It went up like a rocket and disappeared just as fast. I didn't submit it so I have no clue whether or not the submitter gamed the system but it sure looked weird.
Given the subject of this thread that's actually an on-topic link :)
There is- or has been- something very strange going on lately. At the height of the GeekList mini-controversy last week the HN thread discussing it[1], which was in third place on the front page, was flagged and killed. The second discussion that was created[2] was also killed. Then I posted a blog entry[3] which also got to the front page, then was also flagged and killed. At that point I just gave up, because what can you do? It seems like the flagging mechanism is far too powerful- just a few reports and the entry gets shunted back seven pages. A few more and it's gone entirely.
It's worrying for two reasons: one, that original Geeklist discussion had some great points being made, and a lot of users were obviously engaging with it before a minority decided to dispose of it. Two, there's a clear minority on here that would like to see discussions about sexism in tech removed from HN.
I presume those articles were killed due to not wanting to feed the attention troll. Killing content-free controversy is a good feature of the non-democratic moderation - yellow journalism is designed to draw users in and make them passionately care about superficialities. Preventing further comments on a deadened article does really suck, but given the development status of the server, thats the breaks (btw, is HN actually still running on mzscheme-372, or is there a better implementation of Arc these days?). I've had showdead on for a while, and the sheer majority of dead comments are spam, one-liners, and duplicates (when you submit the same comment twice, the second one is automatically deadened). Occasionally I will see someone who's been hellbanned for a few marginal comments and it's clear that they're still trying to contribute - those are the real travesties.
Then perhaps submissions need downvote buttons- because what you are describing is not what the "flag" button is for. I don't like the idea that a group of users are deciding what is "superficial" for me- if I'd arrived on HN an hour later than I did, I would never have seen the GeekList post and been able to make up my own mind.
AFAIK, Flag is for spam or something that is soooo OT that it should have been submitted to Reddit because it doesn't fit here from any intellectual or technical point of view (say, general politics). In all my time, I've used Flag maybe once -- and it was for spam. Using it as an Editor for something that is otherwise of interest is abuse, in my own opinion.
Actually that's precisely what flagging is for - getting a human moderator to look at the story and decide whether it is worthwhile. Information transmission and copying are easy, filtering and management are hard. There are a billion things going on in the world right now. What interesting stories didn't get HN exposure because someone else seized the moment for 15 minutes of twitter-fame?
Actually that's precisely what flagging is for - getting a human moderator to look at the story
Do you know that is what happens? Because I don't think it does. I imagine an algorithm is applied that weighs votes/views against flags and acts accordingly- I haven't seen anything suggesting that a human moderator is involved here.
I know for a fact that duplicate comments, hellbanned accounts, and banned domain names are automatically killed on submission. I'm pretty sure I've seen comments after a popular story being killed where a moderator is saying why they killed it. Whether the algorithmic methods apply to popular stories I've no idea, but front-page killings aren't frequent enough that an automated method would be desirable. I also figure there are a bunch of early-YC users with adminlike powers. Once you have a financial partnership with someone, trusting them with elevated privileges on a tangential news board is small change (for example, YC startups can post clearly unreviewed job ads).
I don't doubt that yc.starups can post job ads without a middleman. But what about the content makes it clear they were not reviewed? Profanity? Nudity? Ugly kitten clip art?
What are the tell tale refinements that demonstrate a job ads has been reviewed?
Maybe around several months ago there were a few right in a row that were clearly written without thought to how they'd be perceived (sorry, I don't remember actual details and it doesn't look like they're archived). Nothing outright offensive, just immature sounding. Think 'brogrammer' but less deliberate.
There are sites that are automagically banned by software and those are made Dead as soon as they are submitted. And the HN community itself does a very good job of selecting what's worthwhile by UP voting -- not by flagging.
Edited this post after I learned Mindsight has actually been here twice as long as I have! Oops.
This is exactly what happens on a daily basis. If you post something that is against the beliefs of the masses of HN (even when it's not a troll), you will get flagged and down voted.
The result will be a homogeneous community. I know I will leave eventually because of this. The same thing has happened to the main Reddit.
As far as I can tell, when people complain about being downvoted for expressing an unpopular view, that's usually not what happened. Usually it's that their comment was rude. Occasionally it was just mediocre. Most of the time their position per se wasn't particularly unpopular.
What one ought to do is take one's lumps like everybody else and figure out how to make better comments. The worst thing to do is complain about it. That is guaranteed to earn downvotes, as it should on any site optimizing for signal/noise ratio.
Genuinely unconventional or unpopular comments tend to get downvoted by some and upvoted by others until they come out close to even. The reason for this is that many users, me included, make a point of giving a compensating upvote to posts they feel were treated unfairly, irrespective of whether they agree. Only posts with negative votes attract this kind of fixup, so they end up about even. A corollary is that if your comment stays downvoted, odds are that a fair-minded jury of your peers found it to be rude or be poorly expressed. Another corollary is that genuinely unconventional comments are often easy to overlook, because they're indistinguishable (in rank) from bland ones.
The conclusions are: when downvoted, resist complaining; ask yourself how your comment was rude or could have been better expressed; and when certain that everyone else is wrong, bite your tongue anyway. Just remember what they say about wasting your time and irritating the pig.
I've noticed that there's a new kind of "political correctness" which, quite paradoxically, maintains that complaints about sexist and racist behavior cannot even be discussed (on the grounds that political correctness is somehow more abhorrent than the behavior that is being critiqued)
I would guess that any given technology-related topic is deeply deeply boring to a significant slice of the HN readership but we don't flag them just because cloud computing or database design is not a personal interest. We know that if it's a subject we find boring we can just not read it. It's the "sexism in technology" posts that are reflexively flagged and to me that suggests something more than boredom is at work, perhaps an unease with the whole topic. As if certain people can't even stand the idea being discussed anywhere around them.
There have been plenty of sexism in technology posts recently, many of which were not flagged and got many up votes and spent some time on the first page.
But something with a stupid subject line ('OH HAI SEXISM' or whatever it was) is going to be flagged very quickly by lots of people. Especially if there have been lots of sexism in tech threads recently, especially if there have been threads about the same company recently.
By "boring" people don't mean "not interesting to me"[1] they mean "unlikely to generate useful or interesting discussion". People tend to know exactly what they think about some subjects (Abortion, circumcision, "middle east problem", etc.). Thus, discussions about those subjects tend to have people talking at each other, not listening to each other, not sharing information. There are many places to have those discussions. It's nice that HN is free of that kind of discussion.
It affects our industry and a number of people care about such issues. Would you say that SOPA articles should be killed because politics are boring (or a waste of time)?
After the first one? Yes. This is the reason I unfollowed r/technology over on Reddit, it's the same stuff (ACTA and SOPA and PIPA! Oh my!) day in, and day out. I appreciate being informed about badly written laws that could impact the internet and its users.
What I don't appreciate is echo-chamber hand-wringing over how horrible a certain law is, day in, and day out. Yeah, I agree with the folks saying the laws are crap, but there's not going to be any productive discussion there - just a group bitchfest, which while cathartic, gets precisely nothing done.
Put another way, it gets boring after the third time or so.
"Politics" is not "political correctness". Don't let the similarity in words confuse. Sexism in technology has nothing to do with politics (or only in the most broad sense of the word, in which case everything is "political")
In my opinion it is essentially a political issue. Isn't all politics essential debate about what is right and wrong. Is it right if farmers get subsidies? Is it right to enforce trade embargoes? And so on. Some issues might seem to us to be so clear cut that it seems obvious what is right, but judging by the discussions, not everybody agrees.
It doesn't state that politics are off topic. It states that most stories about politics are off topic. Two very different things.
edit: For example, Language Log will often go into detail on campaign trail gaffes from a linguistic perspective. That's in the realm of politics, but I think you'd agree it fits on HN.
If you think about it, the relationship of the GeekList incident to HN was pure coincidence. Some company had a video with a scantily clad girl in it. That's the content of that news item. Would you have considered it related to HN if the company would have been making beer, or hovers, or cars, or whatever? The only assumed relationship was that the company carried the word "geek" in it's name. It's 2012, so I wouldn't even assume that every HN reader is automatically a geek anymore - in fact, does geek even still have much of a meaning?
But anyway, the point is: that story really was not HN material at all. The policies for HN clearly state to refrain from political discussions.
Would you have considered it related to HN if the company would have been making beer, or hovers, or cars, or whatever?
Of course not. But it wasn't about any of those things, it was about a tech startup where "all bad-ass code monkeys around the globe can communicate, brag, build their street cred and get found". It's a site both made and used by exactly the type of people that make up the HN audience. How could it not be relevant?
And I'm confused by your comment about political discussions- the GeekList discussion certainly wasn't political.
Don't blame me or others for what one company does. That is just ridiculous. Even if they claim they represent "us". They don't represent me, so I felt entitled to flag their story. It certainly doesn't provide any statistics on the sexism of geeks. It is just a bad anecdote (a company claiming to cater to geeks behaves in a sexist way -> all geeks must be sexist).
Why on earth do you think I am blaming you? I'm not. I'm not suggesting that their actions represent the actions of "geeks", either. All I am saying is that GeekList is a company made by techies and used by techies- and article about them might be of interest to techies. I don't think that's a giant leap in thinking. Aside from anything else it was an instructive tale on how (not) to deal with customer complaints.
Disagree, because the context and discussion very much related to people working in various subsets of tech industries. The problem of sexism in, say, IT services varies tremendously from that in, say, advertising.
I agree that there were too many Geeklist articles, and that these ones deserved to be killed.
But the fact that Geeklist is a tech company is a distraction. The real issue is how to deal with customers - even shouty sweary customers. "Don't get baited by your customers; especially over Twitter" is about the only useful thing coming from that thread.
(Anything else, such as "don't use semi-naked women in advertising" is too political (ie, unlikely to lead to any useful interesting discussion) or too obvious to mention.)
The ban on political articles on HN is needed. When I first started here I thought it'd be great to see the comments to political threads. Surely HN would be a place where people could put aside partisan politics and give thoughtful reasoned responses, backed by evidence, leading to rational discussion. Unfortunately not. Political threads pretty quickly collapse into bad-natured bickering.
I'd speculate that women seem to have no trouble entering that industry, much less succeeding, and they're not taught (explicitly nor implicitly) from an early age that advertising is "for boys" because "copywriting is hard" or some such.
Speculation on my part, and I won't hesitate to agree that far too much advertising is sexist. But then I'd end up on an off-topic rant. :)
That's like saying that an article about a merger wouldn't be relevant if the company was making beer or cars or whatever. Of course it wouldn't, unless there was some extenuating circumstances. When the company is a geek startup targeted at developers, I would think the presumption would be that it is relevant, unless there are extenuating circumstances.
It's incredibly difficult to make any kind of meaningful analysis, you're right. Perhaps I was giving the HN community too much credit by suggesting that only a minority would be misusing the flag button.
I had the same thing happen twice earlier today. I hit a huge milestone on a product I launched on HackerNews about two months ago, spent a few hours writing a blog post about it and lessons learned, and posted it on HackerNews around 11am EST.
Within 50 minutes it had 17 points and had climbed up to about #13 on the front page when all of the sudden it disappeared [1]. I signed out of my HN account and checked the comments link and sure enough the page was blank, indicating that it had been killed.
I was talking to a friend on GChat at the same time this was going on. He reposted it, thinking that it was killed because of an algorithmic fluke (which was probably true) [2]. The new post gained 9 points in 10 minutes and then was killed as well.
The only thing I can think of is that because that friend upvoted the original post (and he's upvoted some of my previous posts), combined with how quickly it shot up the front page, somehow caused it to be flagged and automatically killed.
I'd still love to repost it both to share my product's milestone and to get feedback from the community, but I'm afraid it will be killed again. Any recommendations?
I'm all for stopping spam and voting rings, but it shouldn't be at the expense of legitimate posts.
Edited to add: I noticed a lot of the new posts around the same time had several points within a few minutes of being posted. Almost none had 1 point, which I thought was odd. I think someone might have written a script to upvote articles from multiple fake accounts, thereby causing HackerNews's voting-ring algorithm to mistakenly identify the posts as spam.
Wow, what a waste. That's a really good post and it is a pity that it became the subject of this nastiness. Maybe you could petition PG for a re-run? I'm sure lots of people would like to read what you wrote.
I'm not too worried about my post; as others have pointed out this seems to be happening to a lot of legitimate submissions and that's the bigger problem.
We can only speculate as to what actually happened without some sort of analysis from pg, but hopefully it's something that's not too difficult to fix. We'll see what happens.
I realize its not the best thing to happen to HN but do we really think its fair/appropriate/considerate to "petition" pg every time someone's submission is flummoxed?
If the algo is killing good content we want on HN, then pg either has to fix the bug (I'm going to go ahead and assume this is very hard) or just manually fix the individual stories.
This has been happening to me recently as well, last month I blogged about a project that people have generally been finding interesting , posted it on hacker news and it climbed up to the top of the front page then suddenly disappeared
I had seen this before and made sure to not post links to the submission anywhere (apart from on the post itself, as a replacement comments)
It got five votes in 3 minutes -- I know HN'ers love Apple talk, but that's a little fast. And the submission is not in the top 100 of submissions. It could also be that I'm just autobanned for some reason.
edit: FWIW, about half an hour ago, the submission was revived. Thanks(?)
It sounds like people are using bots to upvote other peoples' stories so that they get autokilled, thus making it more likely that their own stories reach the front page.
That's...brilliant. Sort of reminds me of my concern about bots artificially inflating google rankings for competitors to get them banned. (Which apparently turned out to be unwarranted.)
EDIT: By "brilliant" I mean brilliant in that twisted security breaker kind of thinking that slightly creeps most people out.
EDIT2: As the post below points out, in retrospect it's pretty weak. But then, most things of this nature seem pretty weak in retrospect. In my opinion the fact that it's so weak is the whole beauty of it. It's a simple oversight that wasn't obvious until pointed out.
That concern is probably warranted, someone can get banned for a unnatural backlink profile. To be reconsidered they have to go through all their bad backlinks and either have them removed or tell google why they can't have them removed. A few blog networks and someone could potentially knock out a competitor for some time.
Meh, it's weak at best. Because HN follows zipf's law, you can fix 85% of problem just by making it more difficult to flag submissions by the top 250 or so users.
Plus it's just annoying. The yc partners are supposed to be reading applications this week, and now they have to deal with this crap.
Interesting. There was a post about different data analyzed towards Benford's law which caught my attention - about a year ago I think. Would you mind elaborating what you mean by 85% of the problem can be fixed in relations to zipf's law (I thought I was aware of the law, but perhabs I'm missing some intuition since I don't quite get your point?).
The #1 HN user has 10x as much karma as the #10 user. The #10 user has 10x more karma than the 100th user. The #100 user has 10x more than the 1000th, etc. Essentially the vast majority of highly upvoted submissions come from a tiny group of already trusted people, so by fixing the problem for just 1% of users you are actually fixing the problem for ~85% of content. It's almost impossible for a bot to make it into this group, and if they do then it's trivially easy to ban them.
Your fix is self perpetuating in a bad way. If only the top 100 users can get on the front page, only the top 100 users are going to get upvotes. It's impossible for real people to make it into this group.
Hacker news could easily be made more self sustaining for pg an co. Plenty of people would probably volunteer to be a maintainer. If not, one unobtrusive ad would probably be enough to hire one.
Very interesting. Definitely a war going on. There's a lot of articles here that are obviously placed by lobbyists. They get killed and then reappear posted with another account. Like all the "Toxic Sugar" stuff lately, which also got placed several times over the last year.
I've been refreshing and I saw yours go dead. I have never seen so many posts on the New page get points like this. Someone is clearly hacking HN. I hope it can be stopped before this site is ruined. As it is, everything submitted today that was worthwhile will not be seen by the HNers. No chance for those submissions at all.
Edited to add: Oops. Not dead. Was thinking of a different submission. But that it got points along with every submissions surrounding it is proof that a hack is happening today.
me: "I've read in your essays that you (and yahoo) chose to store all your information in files rather than a database. I am curious if you would make the same decision now that excellent oss databases are available (mysql, postgresql, etc)."
PG: "I'd do the same thing. It was a huge win to use alists (a lisp construct) and just write them to files. Then if anything went wrong, or data formats changed, I could just munge the raw files. Nothing was wired in."
Thank you for answering. At the same time however, I'm not really sure what to think about that. On the one hand future proof is a massive win. On the other no rollbacks seems like a risky way to operate. I hope he keeps regular backups of the data files.
Well of course. I don't really care about the Karma. If I got spammed to death I'd just make a new account. I was just wondering because it seems like an odd design decision. I wanted to know the rationale behind it.
No, I mean the spammer/cracker megadownvoting you into oblivion.
(And if you come to any other conclusion as to what's behind this after seeing that, I'd love to hear it.)
EDIT: Well, like another poster stated, they could have been linking a whole bunch of spam links with attractive titles to exploit the HN link glitch to garner the dude the 900+ downvotes. But I'm not sure you can get 900 clicks that way...
Yeah, seeing Polls submitted under various accounts and at least one person losing karma points makes me wonder if that's likely too. If it's done, we'd be able to appeal because it wasn't done for legitimate cause by those with the power at HN.
Wow. Maybe he needs a blog or linkblog. I think one day I did 5 and I felt bad but I thought all were germane to hacker interests. Generally I am not submitting everyday.
What worries me now is this. Recently some people showed how points could be assigned to posts by clicking on a link. Now I wonder if maybe some of us have been somehow infected and are somehow contributing these points without knowing? Is that even possible?
You can't imagine why Eve would want to trick Alice and Bob into upvoting one of her submissions she had an interest in?
Or you can not imagine why Eve would want to trick Alice and Bob into upvoting other submissions so that they got killed and her submission received more attention?
Really? Think about the exposure a fledgling starup can get from being on page 1 for an hour or two. I think a post from malda said HNed was the new /.ed...
I read with showdead on, so I always see the comments from the hellbanned.
If I think the comment is worthwhile, I upvote it anyway. I don't know if it does any good, or if it maybe eventually leads to them being unbanned, but I try to help out if they're contributing.
See first hints here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788069
And someone else noticed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3788740