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> In the wake of all this drama, a blog post titled "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth" went viral and hit the top of Hacker News. Which you might have mi
by havan_agrawal 2y ago
> In the wake of all this drama, a blog post titled "Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth" went viral and hit the top of Hacker News. Which you might have missed, because Hacker News — which is owned by Y Combinator — seems to have manually dropped the post lower in the rankings to suppress its visibility.
Is this true? I never thought HN moderated content critical of itself
- atxbcp 2y agoYes, that's true. The thread reached the top of Hacker News, then disappeared. I had to use HN Algolia to find it again.
- dang 2y agoThe thread reached the top of Hacker News, then went to #15. It spent 5 hours on the front page, which is a lot longer than it would have if the topic hadn't been YC-related. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 for more.
- atxbcp 2y agoThe article only states that the post was deliberately lowered in the rankings to reduce its visibility. "Is this true" ? What your explanation is hinting at, although you're not saying it outright, is that "Yes, that's true." The graph posted below speaks for itself.
- dang 2y agoIf you (or anyone) wants an accurate view, you can't just look at one graph. You need to take into account that moderators are downranking stories on HN all the time. HN is a curated site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20curated&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If we weren't downranking stories all the time, the frontpage would be completely different—like a garden when there are no gardeners weeding it. The site would basically be all drama, all the time. That article was of the type that we'd normally downweight off the front page, since it wasn't substantive or intellectually interesting in the way that the site mandate calls for. Since it was about YC, though, we cut the amount of downweight. The post went from #1 to #15 instead of (say) #55 or whatever. #15 on HN's front page is far from "disappeared". It's still a prominent position, and the post continued to receive a lot of attention and traffic that it otherwise would not have. > What your explanation is hinting at, although you're not saying it outright, is that "Yes, that's true." I wouldn't say so. The reason for downweighting the post was that it wasn't a good article for HN. The reason for downweighting the post less was that it was about YC. You can call that "deliberately lowered in the rankings" but it's equally true to say "deliberately heightened in the rankings". It depends on which baseline you're comparing to. Relative to the baseline of standard practice on HN, the post was heightened, not lowered. Is that clearer? I'm not asking you (or anyone) to agree with, like, or approve of how we moderate HN but I would like the details to be understood.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoI'm sure nobody has hard proof either way, but there's certainly an ongoing pattern of the symptom. This place only exists to promote YC, so you can decide for yourself which is the simplest explanation.
- trowalay 2y agoThey could just make all mod actions transparent. They won’t, of course, because that would mean accountability.
- sanswork 2y agodang has said on multiple occasions they don't and he has never given me any reason to doubt his integrity. Quite the opposite.
- NicoJuicy 2y agoThere are a lot of HN folks here ( startups, ... ) Dang said they didn't do it and it's being flagged by users. Which obviously makes sense of you think about it.
- freedomben 2y agoThe flags on hn are extremely powerful, so I don't doubt this. Just a few flags obliterate a post with tons of upvotes. It wouldn't take many people to kill it, and it doesn't require a conspiracy
- sanswork 2y agoI will frequently flag posts that are rage bait or where the comments are just the same few people arguing. I haven't flagged this one because I commented in it but it's a very low value post.
- 11101010001100 2y agoWhat makes it low value in your opinion? The story combines AI, YC, software licenses etc., which are generally of interest to the HN community.
- sanswork 2y agoIt's gossip rage bait to feel the feelings of superiority in the writers community vs VC land. It doesn't dive into any of those things, if it did that could be valuable, it's just reporting events to drive feelings.
- dansiemens 2y ago
- blibble 2y agodecide for yourself https://hnrankings.info/41697032/ https://hnrankings.info/41697032/ this happens very, very frequently
- aguaviva 2y agoCan you provide more examples?
- youreth4tguy 2y ago[dead]
- Isamu 2y agoSo this shows a rapid climb and rapid fall. I understand that articles don’t just climb due to the magnitude of upvotes, but also the velocity or upvote rate. All kinds of articles don’t stick to the top, to me the more likely explanation is that the rate of upvotes was not sustained.
- snakeyjake 2y agoThe current top post has been in that position for >8 hours. With both fewer upvotes and comments. https://hnrankings.info/41721668/ https://hnrankings.info/41721668/ 8 of the current top 10 stories have been on the front page for longer than the submission that is critical of ycombinator and every single one of them has vastly fewer upvotes and comments. It's not even close, the story that is currently in position 6 has 1/4th the upvotes and 1/10th the comments. It has been on the front page since its submission. https://hnrankings.info/41721318/ https://hnrankings.info/41721318/ It's been on the front page for 11 hours. It is impossible for the velocity, given any reasonable common sense examination, for the upvotes on that post to be greater than the story that was nuked after 2 hours. There is no submission on the front page, some of which have been on the front page for over 24 hours, that has more upvotes, comments, or any conceivable rate of upvoting or commenting that even approaches 1/10th of the nuked story. There is one submission that has an average of four upvotes per hour. Assuming that upvotes fall off precipitously after leaving the front page, which I would say is a safe assumption, the nuked story had an upvote rate of several hundred per hour. There's something fishy going on and that smell isn't the strong odor given off by Salt Water Dimmers, a submission to a barren wikipedia page about an obsolete technology with 13 upvotes and 5 comments that debuted on the front page, and has been there for several hours. I'm not joking. On the front page of HN for several hours is a link to a 200-word wikipedia article about dimmers used in stage productions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687950 For what it's worth, stories about Boom (a ycombinator joint) SEEM to get nuked extremely rapidly when non-VC non-techbro domain experts start chiming in about what their chances for success actually are and how there's a 50% chance they're the next OceanGate and a 50% chance they're just a scam that got way too big for its britches.
- jerrygoyal 2y ago@dang is that true?
- rdlecler1 2y agoPower eventually turns a high trust society into a low trust society when that power is used to one’s own advantage.
- dang 2y agoI agree, which is why we're so careful about this - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 elsewhere in this thread for what I mean by that. Community goodwill is the only value HN has, so we take our lumps when we have to, rather than jeopardize that.
- dang 2y agoWe moderate less, not more, when a story involves YC or a YC startup. This is pretty much the #1 rule of HN moderation. I've posted about it many times over 10 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... "Less" doesn't mean "we don't moderate at all"—that would be too big a loophole. "Less" means "do what we normally would, but not as much". That way we can keep the front page reasonably close to the site mandate while still having a consistent approach to conflicts of interest. For example, if a story is the kind of thing we'd normally downweight off the front page (e.g. because it's a typical opinion piece or drama that isn't intellectually interesting), then "do what we normally would, only less" might mean that the article ends up halfway down the frontpage, whereas normally we'd downrank it off the frontpage altogether. This approach goes back to the first morning that pg was showing me how he moderated HN and it was literally the first thing he said to me, before I had a chance to grab a chair. He kind of barked it actually - 'whatever you do, don't do that!' 10 years later, it has held up well: it's a simple rule, easy to be both transparent and consistent about, that addresses one of the hardest aspects of running a site like HN. It doesn't work perfectly (nothing on HN can work perfectly, for the simple reason that different segments of the community want different things) but I find it hard to imagine a better tradeoff. This doesn't stop people from jumping to inaccurate conclusions (such as "HN mods suppress bad stories about YC" when in fact we do the opposite), but it does mean we can answer questions in good conscience, which is vital not only to community goodwill but also our own morale.
- P_I_Staker 2y agoThe bias on the site is really terrible. It's not always YComb itself so much, but all the valley stuff. As with anything you have "the powerful people" who have opinions on what critiques are "fair", and will demand them communicated with perfect decorum. Additionally, people are aware of how it will "look". In a way they don't care, but in reality there's always an appearance people prefer to keep. Anyway actually break out some pointy critiques, and they'll get mad.