I'll be honest, I feel whoever decided to reject this made a pretty poor decision. This is a discussion that absolutely needs to be had, and frankly it looks like collusion between Reddit and HN (while I doubt that's why).
Regardless, this community and reddit share a ton of users, if Reddit is going to ban discussion of what is at best a questionable hire, this should be a place to freely discuss it. It's both relevant and topical to the community here. As best I can tell it doesn't violate any rules, and if it does an exception should be made IMO.
No, there's a middle ground where a post is simply de-ranked. Which, absolutely, makes it hard to tell what happened as an outsider. IIRC, basically a "flag" also counts as a bunch of downvotes, in addition to adding up to a threshold where it actually marks a post as "flagged".
Given the clear conflict of interest at play here (Reddit is a YC company and are seemingly preparing to IPO in the near future) this post would be a great candidate for additional transparency from dang
Seems like this post has likely been quietly downweighed and pushed off the front-page. I do wish there'd be a bit more transparency over those decisions though I understand they are common and do usually have reasons behind them.
This thread has been captured in https://rejected.substack.com/, the newsletter of posts that reached the HN frontpage but were silently pushed off, and will be visible in the next release of the newsletter.
I've gotten a reply or read a reply in some cases though it's usually done silently.
Some cases are due to a topic being overly-popular and having too many front-page submissions and the most obvious ones. Some are from flagging. A lot of the other ones seem to be purely based on what dang (and other mods?) like and don't like. Possibly there's also pressure from YC or VCs, maybe not - I have no idea there.
There's also much more up/down weighing than is captured here, some of it more minor. Overall, it's something of a myth that the front-page is mainly based on what the community is interested in - that's at most a secondary factor given the heavy curation and its effect over time.
Frankly, I would flag basically anything by Glenn Greenwald. Even putting aside my personal feelings about him, it's basically guaranteed to result in a carbon copy of the same political flame wars we've all seen 1000 times. Sometimes the issue is just that people are bored of the same discussion over and over again.
The issue is that different community members have differing views about what's on topic here and/or what breaks the site guidelines. That's inevitable and natural.
Many reasons: users flagging, moderators manually removing from front page are the most common. I guess it's pretty normal given how HN works (anyone with a certain number of points can flag + active moderation), but I just find those "rejected" threads quite interesting, especially their comments section.
Oh, I never saw this but like it! I occasionally note submissions that have been weighed up/down based on the karma/time of the posts surrounding them for fun.
The entire frontpage looks like it is curated by some propaganda department & megacorps acting like their posts with 1000k upvotes aren't advertisements
Mine doesn't look anything like that.
Everyone has their own frontpage based on their subreddit subscriptions so I have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe post a screenshot?
There is the personal "front page"(stuff you subscribe to). Then there is the public "front page" which is just the most popular posts on reddit sans some controversial or NSFW subreddits.
Anyway, here's the frontpage of r/popular for me, is the "entire frontpage" full of advertisements by megacorps? Looks like I might be missing something, can someone tell me why each of the, say first five posts, are actually ads?
Not saying this is the case in your example, but take the Mariah Carey post: it wouldn't be hard for someone to buy up legit-looking accounts and make a bunch of posts about Mariah Carey (or whatever person/thing) to refresh everyone's memory about the topic in advance of some new concert or movie in a few months.
Again, it's not necessarily the case in your screenshot, but at the same time, how do we tell for sure?
Yeah. Reddit are gearing up for an IPO about to launch soon. They need to convince investors of their ability to push ads. Reddit ads most of the time just look like posts. Sometimes (top) posts themselves are cleverly disguised ads. In short, they are just about to go full corporate.
It has a lot of unnecessary conflict, trolling, SJW, crazy people, censorship, idiocy, and no defense allowed insta-ban fascism.
What's missing is a nicer general purpose platform that doesn't have so much thin-skinned, circular firing squads or anonymity for SFW topics. Let everyone participate so long as they're not advocating the basic limits of free speech: conspiracy theories, violence, obvious hate, or criminality. Politics is probably best contained to a separate section, as well as NSFW.
Thats all due to their "karma" bullshit. It is a truly orwellian concept. People have fear of being silenced so nobody wants to argue with yes-men. Redditors always take one side of any hot issue and usually the top comment sets the tone. So it quickly receives 100000 likes and nobody would dare to disagree and instantly lose all of their precious karma points. So those who disagree will simply stay out of the discussion or would "agree" for the sake of driving their karma up. And every contrarian post will be reported and deleted. It is stupid and disgusting.
I agree with the other requests for examples. I just went to reddit.com from a browser that has never been there before. Here's what it is showing me. This doesn't seem very propaganda or megacorpish to me.
/r/GME post about a billboard telling people to keep holding GME.
/r/wallstreetbets GME Megathread.
/r/worldnews post about a Saudi official issuing a death threat to a UN investigator apparently over the investigator's investigation into the Khashoggi killing.
/r/Cricket match thread about "1st ODO - India vs England".
An ad.
/r/AskReddit asking what is something you loved as a kid but hate as an adult.
/r/technology thread on Microsoft's possible buying of Discord.
/r/awefuleverything thread making fun of Americans.
/r/worldnews post on a US intelligence agency saying the US should join South America in fight against illegal Chinese fishing.
/r/aww post about a puppy.
/r/Wellthatsucks post about a home baked pizza failure.
/r/IdiotsInCars post about an idiot in a car.
/r/politics post about Biden's infrastructure package.
I'm still surprised that Reddit avoided a major scandal over the Ghislaine Maxwell situation. It's clear that they have serious ethical/integrity issues yet have avoided the kind of criticism that FB and Twitter get, despite arguably wielding more power. I wonder if this is partly because a lot of the community call themselves "redditors" and therefore interpret criticism of the platform as a criticism of the community. No one would call themselves a twitterer or a facebooker
I don't get why it'd be a major scandal for Reddit even if u/maxwellhill was Ghislaine. They were not a Reddit employee, just a community moderator. Would HN be responsible if famous person X was secretly posting on HN?
Do people expect Reddit to dox everyone posting or moderating on their platform and then publicize the results?
I'm not sure I want to list the reasons it is bad here because the subject has been painted as a conspiracy theory and YC is obviously interested in Reddit. But the gist is that they knew who she was,she used her substantial mod power to bury news related to herself and JE, and then when her identity was exposed Reddit used Reddit to bury that story to prevent a scandal.
I admit, I didn't believe /u/maxwellhill was Ghislaine but they still haven't posted since her arrest and it's been barely mentioned given how high-profile of a case it is.
Maxwellhill was super profilic and definitely got harrassed occasionally in all those years. Stopping exactly when she was arrested and making 0 comments and posts for 8 months since is extremely unusual especially as people forgot about it quick and given that if they were posting there'd be way less reason to suspect them or harass them.
Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history? I'd like to be able to dump all my comments, saved posts, etc to a folder. Even better if I can download whole treads, linked media, etc. Not worried about getting nuked for OP's linked example but I've gotten very interested in building personal archives of any of my online history.
As a personal anecdote, earlier this year I went through and (tediously) saved my bungie.net account which contained all my Halo 2, 3, etc online activity history. Funny enough, just a couple of months later Bungie announced that they were shutting down the site, and longtime fans scrambled to save what records they could. Unfortunately the forums were gone by that point, so I lost a lot of my memories there, but today I don't remember how much time I actually spent archiving that data, I remember the memories that come flooding back whenever I look through that data again.
> Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history? I'd like to be able to dump all my comments, saved posts, etc to a folder. Even better if I can download whole treads, linked media, etc. Not worried about getting nuked for OP's linked example but I've gotten very interested in building personal archives of any of my online history.
> As a personal anecdote, earlier this year I went through and (tediously) saved my bungie.net account which contained all my Halo 2, 3, etc online activity history. Funny enough, just a couple of months later Bungie announced that they were shutting down the site, and longtime fans scrambled to save what records they could. Unfortunately the forums were gone by that point, so I lost a lot of my memories there, but today I don't remember how much time I actually spent archiving that data, I remember the memories that come flooding back whenever I look through that data again.
IMHO the problem with user account activity archives is that social media is social. I've got archives of my old Facebook activity, and it feels even more incomplete than only hearing one side of a telephone call. What I'd really want is an archive of every thread I've posted in, or even every forum for the dates I was active.
>Somewhat related, does anyone know of a good tool to archive one's entire reddit history?
I've tried this for nlp training and all the old tools I tried no longer work, and you can't do it via the API either. Your best bet is to scrape it the old fashion way e.g. with Selenium but I am also interested if there's a working tool.
Bummer; so there is a reddit API, but you really can't use it to just get your saves/comments/etc? I had assumed you could. I guess this'll take more effort than I thought. thanks!
I definitely agree about Graham Linehan based on what I saw in that article but not at all about Jesse Singal and he isn't even mentioning they are trans.
Singal isn't anti-trans but due to researching and writing about topics like de-transitioning, a lot of people tried to paint him as one, perhaps because actual anti-trans people talk about de-transitioning, too.
I won't put Singal in the same camp as Linehan, who is virulently transphobic. But in the Twitter thread you posted there are people misgendering Aimee, bemoaning Reddit's takedown of r/gendercritical and posting multiple Graham Linehan articles. So clearly, anti-trans folks see some common ground as well.
The statement "Singal isn't anti-trans but… a lot of people tried to paint him as one" implies that the people who believe Singal is transphobic tend to be "pro-trans", or at least have some sort of agenda. I'm simply noting that a lot of anti-trans people seem to share that belief about his motivations.
That in and of itself doesn't mean he's transphobic, of course. But it does undercut the idea that one side is smearing him.
Right, but you seem to be implying that because two disparate groups believe the same thing it lends credence to the idea, but have you considered that maybe Group A believes what they believe due to the existence/behavior of Group B, not because of some external facts they've both found?
In other words, maybe pro-trans people assume Singal is anti-trans because there are a bunch of anti-trans reply-guys in his tweets, without actually determining if Singal himself is or not.
Or... maybe the anti-trans people are only gravitating towards Singal in the first place because the pro-trans people are calling him anti-trans (without it being true), so the anti-trans people assume he is/will be a good banner-man.
In both scenarios, there is only one prime motivator, and it is not that Singal is actually anti-trans. Might Jesse Singal be anti-trans/transphobic? Of course. Does the likelihood increase just because two disparate groups see him that way? Not really. The only thing that matters is what the man in question has actually said/done, not how people think of him.
Sure, pattern matching like that is a shortcut that inevitably yields some false positives. I think the amount of credence it lends is basically an inverse of how much time you want to spend on the issue. If you want to engage deeply, you do your own research; otherwise, you end up taking the word of people whom you already trust.
I don't mean to imply that it lends credence beyond that. I just think it's unfair to characterize this as if only one side were doing the painting, when multiple groups of people seem to have reached similar conclusions.
Singal repeatedly denies he is transphobic while also constantly writing articles that align with the anti-trans and gender critical communities, and also ignoring all criticism from actual trans people, even those he specifically sought information from. Weird coincidence if he's not transphobic!
Can you point to some proof about what you said re: Jesse Singal? I feel like you've read some tweets and made up your mind instead of actually researching someone you've just lied about on a public forum.
> I feel like you've read some tweets and made up your mind instead of actually researching someone you've just lied about on a public forum
This is par for the course in trans circles in my experience (as someone who's queer).
There's a tendency in a least some segment of the community to be extremely bigoted, casting anyone that says something that doesn't conform to their ideology as "harmful" without ever carrying the burden of producing evidence or explanation (of course even broaching this is met with "it's not my job to explain why what you said is wrong" or "I'm so tired", etc.).
It's weirdly religious in terms of dynamics of the community.
This article both deadnames and misgenders the subject in the headline and throughout the article, and slurs her as a “trans-identified male”. This is an extremely hateful piece, not in any way a neutral or trustworthy backstory.
Yeah, I also didn't like other things like the shaming of kinks even if mentioning them could be relevant. Would have definitely preferred something more neutral.
Regardless, this community and reddit share a ton of users, if Reddit is going to ban discussion of what is at best a questionable hire, this should be a place to freely discuss it. It's both relevant and topical to the community here. As best I can tell it doesn't violate any rules, and if it does an exception should be made IMO.