Can any1 explain how HN algo works that this post, which at time of writing has 355p, 180comments while being posted 1 hour ago, isn't even on first page (ranked 31)???
It set off the flamewar detector, got flagged by users, and got downweighted by a mod.
The 'customer support of last resort' genre is common and not usually a good fit for HN [1]. If people feel this story is unusually relevant and interesting, I'm not sure I agree—long experience has taught us that one-sided articles like this nearly always leave out critical information—but I also don't mind yielding in an occasional specific case, so I've rolled back the penalties on this thread.
The issue from our point of view is not about story X or company Y—it's a systemic one: the most popular genres of submission (especially the rage-inducing ones) get massively over-represented by default, so countervailing mechanisms are needed [2] if we're to have a space for the more intellectually curious stories that the site is meant for.
I would be very happy to hear Cloudflare's actual side of this. (Or - it would have been great if they had given their side to us before getting into this mess). The only critical information from our side that I'm aware of is that we're a casino with multiple domains - which is why I put that right at the top. But most of the info should be relevant to any business interacting with CF.
I do admit that I originally drafted this article as a "customer support of last resort", since that seems to work well for CF specifically. But it's too late for that anyways by now - the problem is "resolved" by fire and we don't plan to move back.
I purely posted it now as a precautionary tale for other people because of all the pain it has caused us. So the audience is tech people in most companies of small size that will hit more traffic at some point in the future.
My experience with Cloudflare is that anytime “Trust and Safety” are involved, no one will ever be told anything. Even if it’s a totally benign or even good situation. Even if they find a case in your favor or resolve an issue for you.
Whoever runs that team really, really gets off on being withholding, as Buster Bluth would say.
This seems to be the rule in general with large companies.
They say it's because if such teams don't operate under secret protocols, the "bad guys" will discover the loopholes in them. But I rather suspect that this has more to do with evading legal liability.
I tend to agree with you. Trust and Safety teams make a lot of judgement calls that they don’t want being disclosed because many of those calls are subjective.
Those are variations of the same thing from an HN systems point of view. The problem is that there are way too many of these stories to be interesting and/or to all be on HN's front page, but they tend to attract upvotes anyway.
As I said above, we're happy to make exceptions for the occasional thread that is genuinely of interest, but sometimes the process for idenitfying those is "apply standard penalties -> generate howls of protest -> eventually find out about community pushback (e.g. in this case someone emailed hn@ycombinator.com) -> restore post".
While I understand where you're coming from. Appreciate the immense amount of work you do. HN is pretty much the only way I'll see a post like this, and I like to keep track of behaviours like this. I use cloudflare for a lot of things, but it's a deal breaker not giving time to migrate off and causing downtime.
I understand all the complexities here. Have worked closely with a Trust and Safety team before (real estate portal). But if that business was good enough to exist on the CF network for X years, it should be given time to move if it's no longer an agreeable business partner, that makes it a worthy story.
if you check sites that track HN's rankings, it was ranked #1 for a while, then it suddenly dropped to #27 and continued declining
https://hnrankings.info/40481808/
thanks for sharing. I didn't even know this was a thing! Comparing to 4 or 5 others, this definitely looks more like a step function into obscurity unlike the other lol
You can always email the mods if you believe you’re witnessing an attack on either a single article and/or the site; they have many more tools to reveal concerted group assaults than we do.
A more charitable interpretation is that lots of techy HN'ers would rather defend CF against an unknown company, as some sort of tribal allegiance - the same way Apple has a huge cult following. Nonetheless the end result (flagging/downranking) is wrong - hell, I had to find this thread by going to my previous comments as I couldn't find it on the front 2 pages. If that isn't considered an abuse of systems (again, charitably speaking, unintentionally), I don't know what is.
I don’t think we need any conspiracy theories. I can easily see people getting tired of these kind of articles and the predictable torrent of outraged comments.
They are valuable in keeping people aware of what’s going on. But only to a point and people will endlessly argue over where that point is and scream censorship and over ups by corporate interests.
It gets rather grating after a while. Even more so when I suspect an article is omitting key facts to generate the attention they want.
I haven’t flagged this article but I can easily see why people would.
Yeah I commented, refreshed and was shocked to see it disappear. It's ironic that we're (reasonably) asking for transparency about a post which is kind of about non-transparency.
