Why Does Hacker News Flag Many Scientific Articles Regarding Discrimination

7 points by externalreality 7 years ago | 15 comments

I've seen articles breaking down the science of white supremacist shooting. I've seen articles on the lack of diversity in tech. They seem to get flagged pretty frequently by hacker news. Why? Do they get flagged because the comments start to get out of control? Or is it something else?

dang 7 years ago |

I'd need links to be specific, but the general answer is that HN has had many threads on these topics. Some don't get flagged and some do. We sometimes turn off the flags when an article is particularly substantive. But there are also many articles on these topics that aren't so substantive, and those are especially prone to flamewars. The quality of the article has a lot to do with the quality of the resulting discussion, so we tend not to override user flags on the less substantive sort of submission.

From our point of view as moderators, these subjects are not necessarily off topic on HN, but it depends on the specific article. Is it conducive to intellectual curiosity, the main value of this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? Or is it more focused on stirring up anger and rallying support to a cause? What's its information-to-indignation ratio? There isn't necessarily anything wrong with indignation—on the contrary, it can be very important in the larger social context, more important than most things on HN—but because its effect is to promote flamewar rather than intellectually curious discussion, we are more likely to moderate it here. We have to, or the site would soon go up in flames (i.e. become dominated by political battle), which would destroy the things it exists for.

The community is often in disagreement about which topics belong on HN. People who feel strongly about topic X tend to think that HN hasn't enough X and even that X is being suppressed. But frontpage space is the scarcest resource on the site. There isn't enough to go around, so every X ends up getting shortchanged. Beyond that, when a topic is repeated often enough, it becomes predictable, and predictability is the enemy of curiosity. We try to moderate HN for variety because the community strongly prefers that. My sense is that most of the time when X gets marked as [flagged], the flags are a sort of coalition between users who don't want to see X because they disagree with it, and users who actually agree with X but are tired of its predictability. If it were only the first group, there usually wouldn't be enough flags to win the tug-of-war against upvotes.

If you think an article is particularly substantive and shouldn't be marked as flagged on HN, you (i.e. anyone) are welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look.

rpiguy 7 years ago |

The mods do a decent job, I commend them. Articles get flagged by users. Users have a wide spectrum and differing opinions on what is relevant to be discussed here.

In my experience, articles directly related to tech, like diversity in tech will stay open to comments for a long time before mods respond to flags and lock it, allowing a decent amount of discourse.

Articles that are science, but not directly related to tech (white supremicist shooting research) tend to be shut down faster if they are flagged. Why do users flag them? Probably because the arguments, potentially from either side make them uncomfortable and they’d rather it not be discussed here. The mods are just responding to user flags.

I have seen threads get uncivil, at which time the mods will lock them down, which I think is also fine.

greenyoda 7 years ago | |

> In my experience, articles directly related to tech, like diversity in tech will stay open to comments for a long time before mods respond to flags and lock it...

Actually, the mods generally don't get involved in this at all. If an article is flagged by enough users it automatically gets killed (marked "[dead]"), at which point you can't add any more comments.

Sometimes the mods will revive a killed article if it's not off-topic and people ask for it to be reopened.

You can reach the moderators at hn@ycombinator.com if you have concerns about moderation issues.

rpiguy 7 years ago | | |

Cool!

externalreality 7 years ago | |

Why not just flag the comments. Why shut down the whole discussion? Seems like a heavy handed approach. I mean of course talking about the rampant racism in tech will make many white males uncomfortable, that the reason we post and talk about it. So that people become more comfortable talking about it. The mods aren't helping the problem they are exacerbating it by coddling.

rpiguy 7 years ago | | |

If it is just a case of one or two people being uncivil, they will just delete the comments. If an article/post gets a bunch of flags they are responding to the community, which is signallng that the post should not be part of the community and the whole thread will be locked.

See comment above, it appears to be automated.

sadris 7 years ago |

The use policy explicitly states that they don't want this site to become a political message board.

externalreality 7 years ago | |

I guess political nature of the article take precedence over any form of science or tech found in the article. Moving on from hacker news waste of time.

HNKingpin 7 years ago |

Maybe because a "racism" thread will inevitably turn into a political shitstorm. There's thousands of other places to discuss politics.

rolph 7 years ago |

everyone has different reasons for flagging, some people flag because they disagree in some way with the topic others flag because theyve seen the subject before ad nauseum, and it always leads to a degenerate commentary.

I have a hunch some flaggers may not yet have enough karma to downvote, but enough to flag so they flag in lieu of downvoting but thats just a guess.

another thing to consider, is that HN comments do show up in google searches at times, so cleaning things up quick is a positive thing regarding, profanities, or potential liabilities.

greenyoda 7 years ago | |

> I have a hunch some flaggers may not yet have enough karma to downvote, but enough to flag so they flag in lieu of downvoting but thats just a guess.

Flagging is only supposed to be used for violations of site guidelines (off-topic, spam, uncivil or unsubstantive comment, duplicate submission, etc.), not for disagreement. People who flag on-topic articles or comments may get their flagging privileges revoked by the moderators.

rolph 7 years ago | | |

yup, i can forsee some mistakes as well. ive had a couple times i was sure i hit fav but hit the flag, as was evidenced by the unflag option in its place. so commentors do have the option of unflagging for a period of time. The algo flags are an other matter

externalreality 7 years ago |

Well, its time to move on from Hacker news. This will be my last post, I will try to get them to remove my account. Suppressing conversation about topics very relevant to technology is where I draw the line. There is nothing political about facts. If the moderators of hacker news can't handle that (because they too are a white male dominated company) then that is just something they are going to have to deal with - even if reality is something they can't deal with.

bayareanative 7 years ago |

There's hard science, and then there's pretend social science being used to justify politics. HN doesn't do politics and hopefully not SJW/hierarchy-of-victimhood drivel either. Keep civil debates raging but I don't want to see items about (insert identity politics label) + engineering... a person's melanin content, sex chromosomes or any other random identity label is irrelevant and obnoxious when discussing probabilistic data structures and algorithms. And furthermore, the people pushing forced "equality" of outcome without equity of opportunity are implicitly advocating advantaging some while disadvantaging more qualified people by collective punishment.. you know, like canceling men's sports programs because Title IX says everything has to be exactly the same and women don't want to play the same sports. Also, the outrage and offense culture, cyberdisinhibitionism, and modern social fascism of deplatforming and silencing debate tends to prevent any meaningful discussion.