back
183 comments
Thank you Dang and team for your moderation efforts.

You’ve done a remarkably good job maintaining the quality of the community - we appreciate you.

Somehow it got better over the years as typically moderation gets worse.

Maybe Dang got sick of Apple too, because there was a heavy hand on anything anti-Apple at one point.

+1 This. Consigned.
+1, I would pay for HN because of Dan, Tom, et al.
Hacker News has a silent majority that works tirelessly to keep this site relatively free of ads disguised as articles and political news. I hope it stays that way. I'm just completely tired of those political echo chamber articles, even when I happen to agree with them.
What if there was a way for the “silent majority” (or something like it) to discuss political issues free of the impetus to polarization? Surely that would be a lot better than echo chambers.

Hackernews style apoliticism strikes me as wanting to chameleon to whatever side is perceived as winning the political game. I think it’s a nihilistic stance.

We need to be able to be political without the zealotry. Politics, of all things, is not a zero sum game.

HN also has a hide feature. If you don't want to see something & have it replaced by the next story, you have agency here as well.
There's almost always some political post on the front page about China/EU/Russia bad. They only get removed if it's about America.
>silent majority that works tirelessly to keep this site relatively free of ads disguised as articles and political news.

And just like the other "Silent majority", this is utter tripe.

Every other submission is an ad FFS. Nobody is doing anything to remove ads. HN Itself is an ad.

It's not "Silent", as these people love nothing more than reminding you that topics they don't like are objectively "politics" and "Don't belong on HN" even though HN tried that once and it was terrible

And they aren't "Majority", because the flagging mechanism requires shockingly few flags before a post is knocked off the front page, and if anyone tries to plead any case in the comments, that also knocks it off the page, as a "flamewar", because apparently on a place that insists it is curating thoughtful discussion, high velocity discussion is impossible?

It's a heckler's veto is what it is.

> it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.

Not hard to believe at all. While I don't flag any posts. I have no interest in LLM related content.

I also actively use AI tools btw. It's just tiring seeing everything with AI suffix including monitors.

I like significant LLM news and even well-justified opinions.

I don’t like seeing essentially the same LLM opinion and justification again and again. This happens with both pro-AI and anti-AI opinions. And some of the justifications (on both sides) are poor. For example, I don’t want to read “LLMs have improved my productivity so much!” without evidence; show me a mostly AI-generated program and code, and explain the (AI-augmented) development process. On the other side, I’ve seen the “LLM inevitablism” argument multiple times, and…I don’t agree with really any of it. It ignores that LLMs are useful (to some extent), so they’ll probably be part of the future no matter what an average reader does; and if LLMs aren’t useful enough to replace everyone and everything (currently they aren’t), they won’t be all of the future, which even the people claiming inevitability are saying (and those who do claim that future LLMs will do everything, you can point to current LLMs and the CEOs of AI companies who, even in their position, are lowering expectations).

I wish hacker news had filters, ... if LLM, AI, or other hyped tech... make it hidden
tiring seeing everything with AI suffix

Reminds me of when everything was e-something. Then i-something. Then net-something. Then my-something. Then cyber-something.

You can tell the age of a tech product by which naming trend it attached to itself.

Whoever finds the next interesting trend to talk about after AI is gonna get a lot of upvotes.
> AI suffix including monitors

What now ?

My quick google-fu brought me this : https://www.samsung.com/ca/monitors/smart-monitor/

I guess that if I could I adapt to cleartype when I ditched my 16" VGA Philips CRT, I'll be ready for "AI-powered Immersive Experiences", whatever that means in Visual Studio Code.

Looks like a majority of it’s all politics and LLMs. I think we’re all as a collective tired of both and want something ‘interesting’ for once to post.
I'm tired of the hype too. Yes, coding agents are useful but the bubble seems primed to pop. Agents are not profitable enough to justify the billions of investments in data centers and chips.
AI, politics, and discussing how HN isn't what it used to be. That's all that's here now. HN isn't what it used to be.
It’s tiring for me because it seems like everyone is just spitting mad about AI, and at every opportunity they breathlessly make sure to let us all know how useless AI is, and how they are indeed the one true programmer who has no need for such base and depraved additions to their workflow. There they are, standing (or maybe hunching over?) bold and proud, on the shores of Algorithmia where no LLM could despoil that one true paragon of software engineering, as if the Platonic forms themselves deigned to come out of the realm of legend merely to demonstrate to us mortals how software ought truly be written.

Anyway, I think AI is pretty neat and use it every day.

I browse HN too much, I recognised most the removals as simply recent duplicates.
(2024)

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39230513

Reading that, I feel bad for dang.

It sounds like HN relies on automated flamewar detection and not-immediately-moderated flagging and voting that doesn’t work that well for hot threads or poor user behavior.

I’ve been visiting since the late 2000s and have felt for some time that HN was really ADHD in its topics in the frontpage and that things frequently are unfairly flagged or voted down.

PG used to say something to the effect of “use humans to scale until you automate properly”; obviously the moderation needs human help.

Ok, so let's think about this. If we were to make a "hacker news for politics", how would we do that? It would have to be moderated, what would be the rules? Who wants to do it?
Look no further than to your parliament / congress / senate debate. They probably have a +5 hour session from today for you to listen to. Enjoy!
In the january archive [0] I can't find this flagged story [1]. Was it already fallen off when flag-killed? Or doesn't it catch these?

So many important tech related debates lately being silenced by mass flagging. Luckily they remain in https://news.ycombinator.com/active

(I feel like "everything" is now "political" and thus not wanted here. Since Musk for instance now is a political figure, one cannot discuss X even when not a partisan topic about X. Or when some guy does big swoops that affect tech world wide, it's also not possible to discuss here. And I miss it, because I think HN is full of great people and I would like your take on these events.)

[0]: https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals/blob/ma... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46503199

In a sense, "everything" is "political", and always has been. It's practically a given, since politics is literally about governing our lives, technical standards, industry regulations, etc. A ton of news, especially that worth discussing, happens within this lens. Now, if, for example, HN allows stories about twitter to be killed opaquely and selectively, this is a political act in and of itself & the selection is telling.
basically anything DOGE gets automatically flagged by someone, even though it's very much in the realm of technology. yes it intersects with politics, but most tech discussions do these days
>everything" is now "political"

Old tech nerds area surprised that technology took over the world and drives politics and want to hide their head in the sand.

Now, every article being political does suck, and we should probably drip feed it on the site, so the technology itself it what is primarily talked about, but ignoring it all together is dangerous.

Publishing to GitHub using git is a very interesting mechanism, crafty and hacky, love it!
I wish HN would add something in the page that indicates that flags were turned off for a post.
Yes, the moderators are in effect editors of a news media site with heavy social elements. Editorial decisions about articles should be handled differently from content moderation of user comments. There is a lot of editorial involvement (tweaking titles, hand placing articles on the front page, flag removal) but almost no transparency or communication. Sometimes a pinned comment from dang but that's it.

These actions aren't nefarious or anything but like, is there a policy? Or is it just if a mod happens to see something and they happen to feel like tweaking it, they do. There are actual (varying, but something) standards professionals follow on this stuff, or at least convincingly pretended they did until pretty recently. HN's editors don't take the site as seriously at it deserves or needs for its stature, influence, and subject matter.

Somewhat related, I use this script to see which posts are new on frontpage. Also shows rank change but I don't look at that anymore. https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/e7c9ed3936ba69e522f8cb38...
"An Unfolding Scientific Revolution in Cosmology" seems to be uncontentious in itself but that it is on economicsfromthetopdown.com raises a question about why it is there at all. Also there seems to be little that is newsworthy in it.
> there seems to be little that is newsworthy in it.

Newsworthiness is not a criteria, officially; it's intellectual curiosity. A FPP could talk about Newton's Laws, which would not be newsworthy.

And yet it’s an excellent article and shatters scientific dogmatism some what like Nietzsche took a big dump on c10y.
Tech and politics are now entangled. Techies make choices, often not smart ones.

Most would jump at the chance to make "a few dollars more" on people-exploiting projects than beneficial enabling ones.

I tried, and never crossed that line. I advocated open source but never contributed. That was probably good for open source.

I'm trying to be objective here, while the thread does go fiesta politico at times.

I participate at two sites, both heavily moderated, in order to learn and to do good when possible. It's additive. Bullshit and rage are subtractive.

I never understood the "flag" option on HN. Usually "flag" means to flag as inappropriate - porn, obvious spam, etc.

But, is it meant to be used as "downvote"? i.e. "I don't want to see this topic" or "I disagree with this opinion?". I guess the equivalent here is just lack of an upvote?

There seems to be a variety feedback that mean different things... e.g. sometimes I would like to say "I strongly disagree with this opinion", but I don't want to say "This shouldn't be on HN".

That's the biggest problem here: People using "flag" as a mega-downvote to eliminate things they don't want other people to read from the front page.

HN has a little "| hide |" button under each article that you can click if you don't want to see the article. I wish people just used that and moved on. The only reason you'd flag is if you don't want other people to see the article.

Flag is to disappear stories that are inconvenient.

Ie democracy is burning to the ground in the US but we need to hear more about LLMs and raising a funding round.

I’m glad the flagging system exists on HN but I think it could do with improvements. I think it would be interesting to be able to see how many flags an item has gotten and who has flagged it.

There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc) despite those topics generating a lot of discussion. It would be interesting to have clearer visibility into whether this kind of thing is spontaneous or whether there is a core group of power users censoring topics they dislike.

Agreed. While I really value HN's commitment to not becoming Reddit, the intersection of politics and tech (and their effects on our lives) is indisputable. If we can't talk about the government's use of technology as a tool of the state without it being considered a 'hot button' topic - especially considering the relevance that politics have always had to 'hackers' - then this is really just a site for discussions about technology fluff.
> There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc)

Have you considered that it could be that left wingers are more likely to submit political posts on a technology forum rather than right wingers only flagging left wing posts?

uh, found several mines :)

sometime I have the feeling having a username that ends with "xx" does not help much :)

I feel like if you are not making this page at least once or twice a year you are not trying hard enough to think outside "da box".