> Probably in this case it's because metadrama threads like that are a dime-a-dozen and never lead anywhere new
I think that's unlikely. While it would be great to know why users flag the stories that they flag (feature request?) in this case I'd wager heavily that it was flagged by people who feel the underlying story is false and unworthy of public discussion, and not out of concern that the discussion would be boring.
Separately, I'll note that this story was submitted yesterday, quickly got to 38 votes and 7 comments, and then was flagged off as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881000. I vouched for it, which brought it back briefly, but then it was killed again.
Oddly, that version doesn't appear when one clicks on 'past', or with search terms for "taibbi" or "suppression". Any idea why this might be? Are flag killed stories always omitted from searches?
Edit: This post discussing the flagging of this story is flagged as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889835. Should it be? It seems like it raises reasonable issues. Vouching for it did nothing.
Thanks for vouching, that was the thread I linked in the GP post dang was replying to. Constructive ideation on fixing a community problem of censorship is now "metadrama", Orwellian. I'm open to it not being a problem, but we can't even have that discussion.
Taibbi frequently gets flagged, he's not liberal enough for the site. I don't have the motivation to now but if someone wrote a "HN has a flagging problem" and got lucky with timing, maybe they'd listen? I may have to just accept one of the last decent sites for discussing tech events is going down the same path as the rest of them, though tbh it's been on the path for a long time now (I've noticed at least 15 decent articles in the last year flagged for essentially being "not liberal" despite high quality content).
You're talking as if there's some new development here but HN has operated this way for many years. People are prone to interpret normal fluctuation as catastrophic decline. They were saying similar things about HN over a decade ago. It reminds me of what Voltaire said when told that he drank too much coffee and that it was a slow poison: "It must be very slow". [1]
Taibbi pieces have had more significant threads here than most political commentators. If HN did as you seem to be suggesting and disallowed flags on any articles like this—the ones that you like, plus the ones that everyone else likes, since why should one user be privileged over another?—then the site would consist of nothing but articles like this. That's obviously not its mandate. I don't see how this is "Orwellian", but it's not always easy to know WWOD (what would Orwell do).
So many strawmen! Dang maybe you’re just burnt out or something, because you’re not replying to anything I said.
I would never and didn’t at all ask for privilege. I set out suggestions to avoid majoritarianism, systemically. One - make flags “cost”, for less brigades. Two, make vouches cost more, but also have more weight, as vouching can protect a minority view.
I never said disallow flags on articles “like that”? I’m not even a big fan of Taibbi, I’m just a bit disgusted by people who would flag away things they just don’t like politically. It’s a problem, but my guess is it suits your politics and your bosses, so it’s not very pressing.
What’s Orwellian is that you can’t seem to grapple with anything I’m saying and instead or twisting it all to totally different arguments, while using quite creative yet generic words to hide behind authority. Read your initial reply: The reason you give for why it’s valid to dismiss an article on simple suggestions to fix flagging was... “it was flagged”, it was “Metadrama”, and it would (in your psychic wisdom) lead to a “generic hodgepodge” discussion. Could literally apply to any HN submission about the site itself, and in this reply you seem to had misread it as some beg for privilege for myself or something weird like that.
I’ve also been on HN for over a decade. I’ve seen a ton of controversies, I never waded in really. I’ve held my tongue for years on the suppression one, it’s been obvious for years. I’ve seen many claiming it went downhill. In fact at my first job a decade ago I remember multiple co-workers warning me how it’s gone downhill. I know it’s always been that way.
But the reasons it was going downhill before and now are categorically different. Before it was due to incessant flame wars, bad faith pedantry, lack of openness to new ideas (but within discussion).
Now - it’s literal flag brigading.
To be honest, this happened near the election last time. People lose sanity, and then they see abuse of power as “popular” and therefore justified, and then after the election the tide will naturally turn and you’ll forget the problem for a bit.
Censorship, majority rule, there aren’t the same as the critiques I’ve seen many many times over the years. Before it was about quality of discussion, now it’s about banning discussion entirely.
I didn't think or mean to imply that you were asking for special privilege. I just wanted to make the logic explicit that if we were to disable the flagging system, we'd have to do it across the board, and that would turn HN into a political site.
It's true that I'm using somewhat generic terms to describe these situations but there's a simple reason for that: there are hundreds of users asking (and sometimes outright demanding) answers and only one of me to answer them. If there's something specific that I said that you feel is unclear I can try to clarify it.
I don't find words like "suppression" super helpful because they mostly just add negative emotional valence to something that's not secret and is rather benign. If we have more political opinion pieces and/or inflammatory political stories on the front page, then we have less room for discussion of the topics that HN primarily exists for. You can call that suppression if you want. Is a florist suppressing chocolate by only offering a small selection of the latter in their flower shop?
Even more ironic is you missed the point of the post anyway, and your core reply here off: it wasn't meta-discussion, it was an entirely different discussion on the overuse of flagging on this site with examples of how it's happening + call for comments specifically on how to change flagging. In fact it was constructive, and the tone tempered.
Not being able to discuss changes to the flag system itself because it gets flagged is a big... red flag.
It's become used for "I personally don't agree with this" instead of "this is off topic, inflammatory, illogical, etc". Once you go down the path of allowing flagging for personal distaste, you've lost.
By meta I mean Hacker News threads about Hacker News. Meta is the crack of internet forums. Users tend to flag such threads and moderators tend to moderate them because they're mostly all the same, they breed like rabbits if allowed to, and they're not actually interesting—they're internet drama, which feels interesting but isn't. Such pseudo-content pleases/riles the self-obsessed minority (I mean the minority of HN users who are fascinated with HN, which certainly includes me) but leaves the majority of the audience cold. Self-referentiality is one way for a forum to lose its audience, and our #1 job is to prevent that happening to HN.
I realize that your intention was good and that what I'm saying here must sound cynical and heavyhanded, but you have to understand what it's like to see these things a hundred times and realize that they're never different and never lead anywhere. If they don't make you feel weary and slightly nauseated, that's because you haven't seen too many of them yet.
I think there's a difference between meta-drama and discussion of improving the algorithm itself to avoid meta-drama.
I'd actually honestly like to hear your reply on the proposals for flag rule changes. I think they would work, and would improve the discussion quality. We'd get more "out of the box" stuff - far left or right, but also just more out there ideas.
Finally - you spend a ton of time on the meta stuff. I read over a few pages there. You say often you don't have time for it. Perhaps it's time to try making some changes that would reduce the burden? And not ones that further lock it down, but instead add some transparency?
You guys already have vote brigading rules, flag brigading seems natural. Adding cost will improve the quality. Making vouches more precious would improve the quality.
Perhaps add a meta column to the topbar and direct/move all meta discussions there? I know your reply will be "this will only further it" but I doubt it, they could then avoid the home page altogether.
Only trying to help here, but I think you're now so meta-tired you've forgotten that meta discussion can be constructive and there's perhaps really simple changes that would reduce a good chunk of these complains.
Final note - seems like a lot of the complaints are all going the same direction. Maybe they're valid and not just drama.
Edit: let me reframe it in a way that may be helpful: if you could reply to every meta thread with a single link to a static page on HN, a small write up that included a changelog of the latest rule changes you've implemented, a clear policy enumerated, and a link to a "meta" area where you'd automatically move comments/threads, you'd save yourself a ton of time going forward, and I think you'd gain a ton of positive goodwill on the site. You'd conquer the meme thats been building for years as well.
Of course the rules prohibit flag brigading. If you're saying that political stories are getting flagkilled because politicized users are organizing to kill the ones their cause opposes, then either you have evidence I haven't seen (and I need to see it) or you are vastly overinterpreting the data. Certainly such behavior would be abusive, and we would either penalize such accounts or ban them outright. Just keep in mind that evidence means something objective, such as a post on some external site organizing people to flag something on HN. Posts getting flagged when you think they shouldnt've is not evidence of brigading. It's just evidence that other users disagree with you.
A separate meta section would be a disaster—it would create a dedicated place for the problem to metastasize, and the demands on moderation would go up not down. I once had a conversation with the founder of a forum much larger than HN, who told me that creating a meta section in the hope that it would help contain such complaints was the biggest mistake they ever made.
The meme that HN is declining is more or less as old as HN itself. Maybe HN is declining and we're doomed unless we make major changes (though the prescriptions for such changes are perennially contradictory). I think you're missing a more likely explanation though: internet users just like to complain a lot. Moreover there's a nostalgia bias that always makes it feel like the site was better when you first joined it. (I don't mean you personally, I mean any of us.) Like tree rings, each cohort dates the decline from approximately when they joined the site. It's always the later users, the hoi polloi, who are the invasive species ruining everything—in conjunction with the feckless and ignorant mods.
How about we make this into a positive this way: if there's a specific article that you feel was intellectually interesting, and capable of supporting a substantive discussion on HN, and which was flagkilled unfairly, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. So far you've mentioned two. In one case we'd already turned off the flags before we saw your complaint (and I think that was because someone emailed us—which is what the site guidelines ask you to instead of making meta posts). In the other case we simply didn't agree that it was an intellectually interesting article that was capable of supporting a substantive discussion on HN.
Moderators have to make these calls in the end because if we don't, the site will be consumed by flamewars. That's a different issue from getting any particular call wrong. If we get one wrong, I'm happy to be persuaded, to admit it, and to correct the error in that case. But I don't agree that the system is malfunctioning and needs an overhaul. I think it's basically functioning the way an immune system has to, which includes being overzealous at times.
I spend a ton of time on the meta stuff and I spend a ton of time on all the other stuffs too. As you'll gather from my several lengthy replies to you, I don't have any problem engaging with specific users' concerns about the site. But I prefer to do it either in situ, or by email. Making meta submissions to complain about downvoting or flagging doesn't have good effects. It just stirs up mobs, in which everyone with a complaint shows up to make it, the discussions turn into the same thing they always do, and it's simply impossible to respond. Don't forget that there's currently only one mod (me) who's in a position to respond publicly.
I appreciate the replies. I've noticed at least a couple handful over the last year, some more unfortunate than others, but I'm not keeping close score so I don't have them on hand. I don't actually even follow flaggings really, I assume there are many I miss.
Is there a place to see flagged-but-highly-upvoted articles? That would be another helpful area to let users check and report false negatives.
When I notice more, I'll just shoot you an email.
I am agreeing on the complaint meme, by the way. As I see it, the meme used to be that it's a bunch of assholes and closed-minded-pedants/contrarianistas (and to be honest, it kind of was for a while, and I think mods have fixed it a bit), and now the meme is that it's getting a bit groupthinky and quick on the flag button (and I suspect that meme is true as well, and can be fixed).
I think the post definitely has some merit on the discussion of free speech on the modern platforms that have become the new town square.