> This is a stub comment to collect replies in one place.
Collapsing comments only works if javascript is enabled. It would be nice if a mechanism existed to collapse comments without javascript, perhaps with a list of collapsed identifiers in the URL
Ah, that's a good point. I'm sorry not to have a better solution at the moment.
One thing I think we'll do is add links to comments to jump to next subthread (and jump to parent), which would at least enable you to skip the noise easily.
html5's summary/detail works without javascript, can be controlled via attributes and remains interactive with JS disabled. Maybe with some creative CSS it could be somehow wrangled into the [-]?
Summary/details are very difficult to style. You can approximate it using some hackery with a checkbox and sibling selectors. Here's an example that I was working on recently: https://smichel17.gitlab.io/donate
Note: accessibility is still WIP, because the toggle is not selectable with the keyboard. Should be solve-able though by hiding the checkbox via different means than `display: hidden` (ie, so the checkbox is visually hidden but still keyboard-selectable).
I know that it’s difficult for you to discuss anti-astroturfing methods without disclosing information that could make circumvention easier, but can you give us an idea of how much effort is put in to detecting this kind of activity on HN? You seem very confident that this doesn’t happen here; is that because you’re doing something to prevent it? We are, after all, talking about an entity that is known to use these tactics on pseudonymous forums at extraordinary scale.[1] With that in mind, writing off these concerns as merely “nationalistic” comes across as dismissive.
I guess the real question is: could you really detect well-executed astroturfing here, even if you tried very hard? I worry that authentic discourse on high-traffic pseudonymous forums is basically impossible if someone is determined to sew an opinion and has significant resources at their disposal.
Thanks for asking the question and putting so much care into stating it.
I have no idea what kind of methods HN employs. I personally always check the posting history when I'm in doubt about the intentions of a poster. Most of the time, I find an extensive amount of fairly well considered comments on a variety of topics. That leads me to the conclusion that the account is 'genuine'.
To state it a bit more naively: if a Sybil attack would require the attacker to craft so many constructive comments in order to evade detection, it could actually have a net positive effect on the community as a whole.
> I personally always check the posting history when I'm in doubt about the intentions of a poster.
I do the same, and in the cases where it's somewhat obviously a new or 'bad intentioned' it still surprises me how fast the comments are grayed out and/or dead (often within minutes).
I've always been curious how much of that was human curation and how much of it some algorithm. I've never gotten to see or play around with HN-style site data, but personally I'd probably write some code that takes into account valuable 'curator' users (with some checks and safeguards of course, and manually tagged by the moderators).
> You seem very confident that this doesn’t happen here
That's a misunderstanding. I know my posts on this are super repetitive, but I'm careful never to claim such a thing. How could we know? I'm merely saying that the overwhelming majority of the insinuations and accusations that people come up with about it lead to precisely nothing when we investigate. It's like flipping a coin and having it come up tails a thousand times in a row: you start to look for simpler explanations, and there are clear, simple explanations for why this might be.
I've pored over this kind of data on HN so many times that the patterns are blazed into my skull. I'm happy to change my mind as soon as I see a new pattern—if nothing else, it would be a refreshing change of pace.
So far, that has almost never happened on political topics [1]. It's more common on business topics, but most of those cases are at the boring end (people trying to promote their startup or whatever). I have to call this as I see it and tell you guys what reality is as far as we can tell. It would be a breach of trust with the community to do anything other than tell the truth, and in this case the truth about what we see is as boring and one-sided as my comments on the issue have been for the last five years.
Is it possible that sophisticated state actors are implanting biased comments into HN threads in ways that are so clever and subtle that they fool us completely, leaving zero traces in the data of the kind we know how to check? Of course. It's possible; how could we say otherwise? But this kind of thinking leads to the wilderness of mirrors, in which people see whatever they think they see. That way lies madness. We need some sanity-preserving heuristics. Fortunately we have at least two.
First: before concluding that there is manipulation, we need something objective to go on. We need some evidence—I'm tempted to say any evidence—that we can point to. And if you apply this rule consistently, which we do, the insinuations all evaporate under it. (Again, I mean on political topics. It's more complex on business topics.) Basically, every time we look, we find nothing. I'm happy to keep looking; the deal with HN users is that if someone is worried about abuse, they're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look. There are a couple such emails in the inbox at the moment that I'm hoping to get to tonight. But I don't know how to communicate to you guys how universal this pattern has been so far. The pattern is: HN users are all over the spectrum on divisive topics, they disagree with each other, often vehemently, and many people have trouble recognizing disagreement as genuine.
Second: any sufficiently well-executed astroturfing is undetectable by definition, so we can't rely just on detection. If sophisticated manipulators are among us, smart enough to evade all detection and fool all the moderators, the only defense the community has to fall back on is good-faith discussion: responding to false information with correct information, and refuting bad arguments with better arguments. That's good news, because that's how what we want HN to function anyway. Going into flamewar serves manipulators just fine, so in the long run our best hope is for HN to get better at what it ought to be doing in the first place. That's the best immune system, and the only one which stands a chance of maintaining a community against sufficiently subtle invasion.
[1] I say "almost" for strict accuracy, but the exceptions I'm talking about are boring and I'm leaving them out for brevity's sake, not because there's anything scintillating there.
I want to add that the flamewar type of discussion will attract a certain kind of visitors to the site, who will then steer the entire site in the flamewar direction attracting more of their own kind. For that reason I support nuking any thread that devolved into a flamewar and taking other measures to discourage them.
Can you present evidence of moderation not having a one sided bias? Every time I see anything critical of the US / Europe / Canada and other liberal democracies it's sitting at the top, no matter how unsubstantiated. While every time there's anything that puts CCP in a bad light there's strong moderation because it's "not interesting" (even though this particular event is objectively very noteworthy in tech world and beyond).
> Every time I see anything critical of the US / Europe / Canada and other liberal democracies it's sitting at the top, no matter how unsubstantiated
The key word here is "see". The problem is that we mostly see what we're primed to notice—which is basically whatever we most dislike—and we simply don't see (or don't weight as heavily) all the cases that don't feel that way. This creates a feeling of "every" or "always" (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835843 in this thread), which is a true statement of what you've seen, but only because your seeing is extremely conditioned by your passions on the topic. (I don't mean you personally—we all seem to have this bias.) People with opposite passions see literally the opposite picture. Moreover, the degree to which the picture you see feels unfair and unbalanced is a function, not of the raw data stream, but of the intensity of your passion, regardless of which direction it points.
For evidence, if you search my comments you'll find examples where I've admonished users for flamewar in the opposite direction, as well as for flamewar on other topics, including nationalistic flamewar about other countries (India is probably the second most common case; Russia was up there for a few years and still flares up at times).
Thanks for the response. If you claim there's no bias, would you be willing to release the full list of posts that have been nudged / downranked from the front page by moderator or trusted users as part of a "HN transparency report"?
The idea of a total moderation log comes up from time to time: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I think it would be a mistake—it would drain our resources while convincing no one. People who see "every" comment they disagree with "always" at the top, and "every" comment they disagree with "always" flagged and removed, are not looking objectively.
I don't mean to pick on you personally!—these are common feelings, rooted in cognitive biases we all share. But the patterns they claim are not even close to true, so anyone who wants to be convinced by evidence can just look at HN in the first place.
Beyond that, there's plenty of transparency available through HN Search and the moderation record of https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang. Anyone who looks through the record can find numerous examples of us moderating opposite views in exactly the same way, if they want to. The litigious type of user tends not to want to, and although that group is small in numbers, their capacity to consume moderator time and energy is prodigious. It steals a lot of resources away from other users and from the things we need to be doing to improve the site in general.
By the way, I don't claim there's no moderation bias. How can we know what unconscious biases we may have? I'm just saying that certain stock allegations about it are incorrect and have clear explanations.
Does it mean every thread that is downranked by moderator or superuser will have your comment in it that will show up in search results visible to everyone in the community? Or are there threads that are promoted or demoted silently?
Can you do extra work for free, that will be full of uninteresting spam, that no one will ever read, so that I can I win some sort of imaginary war against the CCP/HN boogeyman?
How does UK banning Huawei puts CCP in a bad light?
If you see things critical of US/Europe/Canada sitting and not strongly moderated - that's because people can usually hold rational and informed discussion on those subject. (btw this one is sitting as well? is it not?)
I don't see the same when it come to China, it just gets flooded by propaganda from both sides, and it devolves into a flamewar. People start accusing each other for being spies and shills, and wishing ill on an entire people because of where they're born and how they happened to be governed. And that doesn't belong to HN and should be moderated, if you like information or discussion that conform to your existing bias you can definitely participate at /r/worldnews.
Happy to steer the conversation away from inflamatory topics. It is the right thing to do for a healthy forum.
But I think it could be handled with a little bit more transparency @dang. When you "nudge" or "handicap" posts from reaching the homepage, we would like to know maybe.
> any comment that isn’t 100% backing the CCP falls to a negative score in a matter of minutes
This is so bizarrely remote from accurate that I don't know what else to tell you. As far as I can tell, the only explanation for this sort of wild misassessment is that people's perceptions are extremely affected by their passions. The more passionate our beliefs, the more we simply can't see the datapoints that don't fit the filter.
That also explains why these claims are getting more common these days: passions are rising.
When your comments are breaking the site guidelines, you need look no further for why they might be downvoted. I seem to recall that you've done that a lot.
Ah yes dang. Users who are otherwise constructive members of the site break the rules only on CCP related threads. Not only that, but their rule breaking is only penalized in the minutes after which they post, only to slowly return to the mean over time.
If I look at your other posts, you're indeed pretty constructive elsewhere.
Then, don't you see that the claim you make, that "any comment that isn’t 100% backing the CCP falls to a negative score in a matter of minutes" is clearly false and an exaggeration? That lack of self-awareness is the reason your post is dead in a matter of minutes.
It's incredible how when its not China, you are always "its up to the community to decide". But when it comes to China, you go out of your way to freeze discussion. People like you are weak ass hypocrite pussies when it comes to China, you should be ashamed of yourself. Dan G you pussy ass communist appeaser, shame on you.
"Always" is a strong word. Usually it just means you noticed some things that you dislike [1]. The problem is that we're all far more likely to notice such cases and to weight them more strongly, so before long we've sample-biased ourselves to "always". The other side feels the opposite "always" [2]. Same mechanism in both cases. It always feels like the mods are against you, just as the refs are always against your team and you're always the one who gets the speeding ticket.
I feel like he nukes all my class war against the rich posts, but you have to realize I have personally accused of him fostering a white nationalist site for promoting assholes like you and also for hiding all my pro-communist comments.
So only one of us can be right, is dang a commie or nationalist?....or maybe everyone is complex and not entirely composed of a single ideology and also he was chosen to curate this website and that will ultimately anger both of us?
I said he was a communist appeaser. Curation is one thing. Let's not pretend like this motherfucker doesn't bend over backward and start singing about rules and civility when china is involved. That's fine, Its his website whatever, but let's not pretend he's not some sophist pussy like so much of the rest of america. He's like the dominant force of super sino simp on this site.
