HN Moderation and Censorship – Community Discussion

6 points by travelhead 4 years ago | 15 comments

HN is a highly moderated platform that uses several “tools” to silence dissident views including shadow banning posts, removing posts, applying penalties to accounts, account bans, downvoting posts, etc.

I completely understand these actions as it relates to spam or bot activity as all platforms must use moderation to provide a good user experience, but these moderation weapons are primarily used to silence alternative viewpoints and subject matter that does not agree with HN moderators.

Although moderators believe they are acting with good intentions, there are many consequences to portraying the HN platform as an “open” social news community, but secretly silencing opposing views.

The primary issue is creating a narrow filter bubble. Secondly, reinforcing narrow social, technological and political ideologies.

As a community we should keep open the discussion of how these moderation tools are silencing posts and the wider effect they have on HN readers who believe they are reading unfiltered user submitted and generated content.

zamadatix 4 years ago |

From what I've seen users themselves seem to be the most policing with flags. Even some technically focused comments by newer accounts I deemed in reasonably good faith and wanted to give a decent answer to have been flagged so badly as to be unreliable even if I vouch. For particular example there was one on an IPv4 thread proposing a form of v4 in v6 embedding and I wanted to point out how the standards have already done a more complete version of the idea but couldn't. The HN moderation team seems to come out more towards tone unless the topic is completely over the top on breaking the rules.

Without a specific topic of what is being censored in your view or why it seems to be the moderators themselves it's hard to say much more. I will say HN isnt supposed to be a general open social platform, perhaps one of the problems here is the off-topic guidelines aren't enforced enough rather than the other way around.

dang 4 years ago |

I unkilled this, for anti-ironic reasons. But as other users have correctly pointed out, these points are meaningless if they don't come with specific links. The minute you give people specific examples to look at, you'll see that they generate an entire spectrum of responses, from strong-agree (from the ones who like the examples) to strong-disagree (from the ones who dislike them). This reveals how hard, indeed impossible, it is to come up with a satisfying answer to this.

Speaking of irony, if you want some, consider this: the most even-handed policy, the most consistently applied, would actually produce an optimum of dissatisfaction—because by applying even-handed principles to all content, it would produce plenty of examples for everyone to dislike, and those are the data points that determine people's views about bias, skew, and censorship (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

More ironically still, the most even-handed and consistent policy would actually be perceived by nearly everyone with strong feelings as hopelessly biased and in favor of the other side (whichever that is, relative to the perceiver).

I'm not saying that we do moderation in the most even-handed way, nor that we do so with consistency—especially not the latter, because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). But some sort of evenhandedness does follow, as a value, from HN's core principle of intellectual curiosity—since if you exclude things for ideological reasons, you're automatically not optimizing for intellectual interest. So we have to at least try to be evenhanded, and we do at least try.

travelhead 4 years ago | |

Example 1:

Dang you admitted yourself to shadow banning me for this post:

https://travelhead.medium.com/amazon-delists-us-again-3c8874...

You claimed this was self-promotional. The article had nothing to do with self promotion and was written as a critique of big tech, which ironically as an SF “big tech” website you appear to be defending by censoring my submission from HN readers.

All I requested was a “fair chance” to submit my content and get upvoted or downvoted by my peers, which you explicitly forbid by killing the post within 2 minutes and shadow banning me.

In fact, my previous submission on a related topic received 511 upvotes and 267 comments, which was fairly promoted to the first page of HN:

https://travelhead.medium.com/competitor-reported-our-no-buc...

You claimed my new submission was too similar to my previous submission even though it was on a completely different topic.

At what point does Dang (ONE GUY) have too much power and control over what gets seen and distributed to potentially millions of people?

I’ve read over the HN terms, guidelines, rules, and your moderation techniques seem to be completely unjustified. I neither spammed HN, submitted promotional material, used bots, or submitted irrelevant content. Yet my account is treated just as a spammer even though my previous submission had 267 comments and I was interviewed by national media on TV, etc about this exact topic.

Example 2:

Within 5 minutes of submitting this post it gets “FLAGGED” status. Granted, this was probably from the community and not Dang (although I’m not certain). As a community, why is this topic so heavily downvoted and flagged? Why is it controversial to discuss in the open HN’s policies towards content moderation and specifically shadow banning when it’s not clearly disclosed in any terms of service or website policies that are available for the community to read?

Example 3:

After submitting this thread and noticing it was flagged, I attempted to ironically post another submission pointing out this post about moderation was flagged and censored, but my submission was immediately shadow banned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30240159

Essentially what is happening is there is no discussion on the topic of HN censorship and shadow banning policies, any attempt to discuss it results in immediate downvoting and shadow banning, and this all happens under one guys watch, Dang, who everyone trusts to moderate content without any bias across a wide variety of topics that he may or may not agree or disagree with.

However, Dang, I do appreciate you responding to this thread and “unkilling” this thread. This shows me you are attempting to act fairly, although I disagree with your moderation policies and ability to kill topics so quickly which you solely deem irrelevant (To YOU).

dang 4 years ago | | |

> Dang you admitted yourself to shadow banning me for this post: https://travelhead.medium.com/amazon-delists-us-again-3c8874...

Ok, thanks for the link. It turns out that we had a very long email conversation about this last year. One of the things I said in it was "You're not and have never been shadowbanned".

As I explained back then, your submissions were getting filtered by software based on the following site guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." When an account is using HN solely to submit its own stuff, our software interprets that as promotional. I gather that you disagree with this use of the word "promotional"—which is fair enough, but you seem to have forgotten all the lengthy explanations I sent you about exactly how our software works, why it works that way, and what you could do to stop being affected by it.

The bulk of this community, I'm pretty sure, agrees with us about moderating the site in this way. Why do I say that? Because that's why we wrote that software in the first place: community members kept telling us that they don't like it when accounts use HN solely to post their own material instead of participating in a more varied and curious way in the community. I don't believe most people here would agree with you that this is "silencing alternative viewpoints and subject matter that does not agree with HN moderators".

As for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30240159 (which is the current OP), it was killed because users flagged it. The reason users flagged it is no doubt the same as what I tried repeatedly to explain to you in the past: it's not using HN as intended.

By the way, the vast majority of users who email for help in such situations react very differently than you have: they are grateful for the clarification, understand how that software filter relates to the goals of the community (as expressed in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and agree to use the site as intended. They don't create prolonged antagonistic exchanges by disputing every point and complaining that they are singled out for unfair treatment. They don't try to stir up drama on HN itself with dramatic posts about censorship and moderator abuse. They simply go on to use HN in the intended spirit, and the problem disappears.

NicoJuicy 4 years ago |

Before you claim silencing opposing views, you should at least have some examples and show some proof that it's not the users flagging or down voting.

Ps. Flagged this because the title is too suggestive and shows/suggests bad faith.

WaxedChewbacca 4 years ago | |

> show some proof that it's not the users flagging or down voting

Not possible to do using any normal means, of course. So, not a very useful hoop to ask somebody to jump through.

But I can testify that although I've never been abusive, I seem to be in an indefinite extreme rate-limiting and shadowban status. I'd link to my innocuous posts for proof, but... they are hidden from you by the shadowbanning system. ...And I'd like to respond to you right now, but I'm being rate-limited.

Is this your daily experience with HN, having your posts hidden from others and having to try to post your comments ten times over a period of several hours? If not, I suggest you are not fully aware of the level of suppression on HN.

NicoJuicy 4 years ago | | |

I have showdead on so i can see those posts :)

If you want to be not rate limited, you'll have to contact HN. They will fix it for you, but not if you continue past behavior.

Since that's probably what got you rate limited in the first place.

Obviously complaining about moderation while doing unwanted behavior ( and eg. using other accounts to circumvent) and trying to post here and blame it as a community concern will not help you.

ComradePhil 4 years ago |

Well, yes, they do reportedly use several tools but from what I understand the flagging is done by members of the community... and certain number of flags "shadow-bans" your comment.

Silicon valley has certain political leanings which is reflected by the majority members here, as expected.

zozbot234 4 years ago | |

My experience here is that downvotes merely for going against "SV political leanings" never happen. Of course, plenty of outsiders like to complain about the "weird" HN politics. It's too liberal, or too conservative, or both. Ultimately, I find that there's at least some potential for tolerably good discussion that preserves intellectual curiosity, and that's what really matters. The techbros vs. anti-techbros tribal fight is just too boring, and that's where I see downvotes and flags all the time.