Daniel, I know you mean well, but your suggestion of "flag sparingly" is
only useful some of the time, and there is code in place to handle those
who flag excessively. As always, there's more to it than meets the eye.
There is a great deal of "secret sauce" running on HN, and to prevent
adversaries from abusing HN for their own gain, PG deliberately does
not publicly divulge how a lot of things work. [1] You would need to
have either a deep fascination with discussion forums, or far too much
free time (probably both) to figure out some of the non-public details
of how HN really works. If one really does their homework well and
figures out some of the details, hopefully they have enough respect for
PG, YC and all of the folks using HN to not abuse or divulge what they
learn.
Though the precise details are not public information, pg has publicly
stated that he does have some form of (vote/flag) "ring detection"
running here on HN to thwart group and/or multi-account manipulation.
[2] Since the details are not public, there is really no way to know
how effective the ring detection is, but suffice to say, if it wasn't an
improvement, it wouldn't exist.
When it comes to flagging and up-voting of submissions, the publicly
described logic is both clever and fascinating. If you flag heavily
up-voted submissions, your flags count less. Similarly, if you flag too
many things (and most likely, too quickly), your flags count less. In other
words, there are thresholds employed. [3,4]
When it comes to flagging comments, I can't recall seeing any mention of
how the comment flags are handled, and worse, there's nothing in my
notes about it. Considering the potential for abuse, I doubt PG will
ever give vague details about it. Spam comments are an interesting
problem, and it's very difficult to solve. Allowing users to flag
comments is one way to handle it, but divulging the details would most
likely reduce the effectiveness of the counter-measures.
There is still one place on HN where doing a lot of flagging and
up-voting of submissions is both useful and beneficial to HN as a whole,
namely, on the "new" page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
I'm sure many people appreciate the high signal to noise ratio here on
HN, and would rather avoid the more noisy /newest page. None the less,
people putting in some time to both flag spam and give up-votes to new
submissions is what keeps the high signal to noise on the front page.
Yes, even if you're just flagging spam on the /newest page, you can
still trigger the "excessive flagger" threshold, and the result is
(was?) the "flag" links disappear. I had it happen to me once a long
time ago, but since then, I believe the system was changed to simply not
count the flags once a user has passed the threshold value. I would bet
a human being (pg or a moderator) looks at any account that flags too
much to determine if the account should be banned, hell banned, deleted,
or whatever. If they see that you're really just trying to flag the
endless spam submissions, they probably just quietly appreciate your
efforts. I've never received a gilded thank you note for flagging spam
submissions, and I don't expect to get one, but I'm sure everyone who
likes the high signal to noise ratio around here appreciates it.
NOTE: Though the references below are from PG himself, it's entirely
possible that he's changed his mind, and his code, since they were
originally posted.
This is my third account here. My last started posting [dead] last week. I'd very much like to know how one goes from positive karma to censored. Was it too many posts on the SOPA thread? That was the last set of posts before I went [dead]. I made like 10 posts, not a single one was downvoted, and a couple were upvoted 10 or more times. This was an issue I felt strongly about. Fair enough: my opinion may not merit such prolific posting - but how about blocking me from posting on that one article?
I'm attempting to view this positively: my goal is to learn how to communicate effectively here, and clearly I'm doing something wrong. It would genuinely help if I knew what that was.
I recently turned showdead on, most hellbanned users I find in the comments I can't understand why they were hellbanned looking at their post history. I can only imagine it was for flagging the wrong thing, or being part of a voting ring but at the moment hn moderation is a mistery to me.
Though I have studied HN a lot, I am not a moderator and I do not have
access to the actual code running on HN. The "basic" code behind HN
(NEWS.YC) is publicly available in the ARC language distribution, but PG
is running a modified version here. Without source code or moderator
access, along with my well publicized lack of mind reading skills, I
simply cannot tell you why your account was "hellbanned" (i.e. all posts
from the account are immediately marked "[dead]").
Even if you're a long time user with substantial karma and "show dead"
enabled in your profile, there are times when you're still unable to see
posts from some "hellbanned" users. With this said, even if I knew which
SOPA thread you're talking about, and what user-name you were using, I
might not be able to see said problematic posts. You are essentially
asking me for blind speculation.
The best I can tell you from blind speculation is you probably let your
emotions get the better of you in the discussion, others decided you
were acting like an ass, and they flagged your comments. Since you admit
to "feeling strongly" about the topic, you were most likely pushing your
opinion, and hence, your agenda... --And others pushed back. The other
thing to realize is, in highly political and divisive topics there are
most likely groups/rings at work trying to suppress the most vocal (or
acerbic) posters. As far as I know, there is no such thing as "perfect"
ring detection since differentiating it from group-think would be very
problematic. If you've read any of PG's code, or any of his coding books
(OnLisp, ANSI Common Lisp), you'll agree he's pretty darn good at
coding, but even for him, "perfect" ring detection is probably beyond
feasible.
So, with blind speculation, you've got three possibilities:
1.) You added a bit too much spice to your comments.
2.) You were on the wrong side of a voting/flagging ring.
3.) You were on the wrong side of consensus / group-think (i.e. you have
an uncommon and contentious opinion).
Just because you could see up-votes on your comments does not mean you
can see the 'flags' they have received, so you're basing your evaluation
on incomplete information.
Sure, SOPA intersects with tech and hacking, and even PG himself got in
on the action by taking a stand on it, but none the less, it's still
politics. You pushed heavily on comparisons to Nazi Germany (see
"Godwin's Law") and voiced strong advocacy of Ron Paul. You might want
to note that one rather prolific HN poster described Ron Paul as a
"Mendacious Kook," so your opinion is not universally accepted and
promoting your opinion is essentially pushing a political agenda. The
result, of course, is the same "Ron Paul Spam" problems seen on Reddit.
This is not Reddit. Here on HN, there is no way to compartmentalize
topics (i.e. "sub-reddits") to prevent political pressure over-load.
You may have been up-voted by those who share your political views, but
you were also most likely flagged for voicing those views here. If you
want to discuss general politics, HN is the wrong place to do it.
My hunch is that you've been banned twice for going political in a place
were it's clearly against the guidelines.
And no, just because you see PG occasionally breaking his own guidelines
does not give you, or anyone, license to turn this place into yet
another political forum. Hacker (nee Startup) News is his party, and the
rest of us are just guests here.
On the bright side, if you study both the NEWS.YC source code and posts
made by PG regarding his modifications to the HN version, you'll notice
he has a rather consistent habit of using time as a factor in a lot of
his calculations. If you got yourself banned for some reason, the ban
may or may not be permanent. I suggest that you give your old account
another try in a couple of weeks. Though I'm too tired to dig up a
reference for you, I do remember reading something about bans being time
limited in much the same way that there's a timer to prevent/slow-down
replies for the sake of preventing flame wars. I could be mistaken, but
none the less, I'm remembering something about this.
Looking at your posts under the 'ldar15' account shows none of them
currently marked as '[dead]' so it seems as if your ban timed-out.
I don't have total recall, so until someone posts a link to a post by PG
stating that not all bans are permanent, the only safe bet is to
consider your un-banning as just a coincidence. ;)
For notes, there has been one, and only one, time when I was actually
concerned about a down-vote I received. I was interacting directly with
PG, and quickly got down-voted. Since my reply to him would show up in
his "Threads" page, and the down-vote occurred so quickly, I was
unnecessarily concerned the down-vote came from PG --the guy nice enough
to provide this site to me any everyone else. In that case, I just sent
PG a polite email to make sure I hadn't stepped on any toes. It wasn't
him, and it wasn't a big deal to him, but contacting him privately was
the most polite way I could think of handling it.
Lastly, there is a known degree of randomness in voting, and there are
known problems with up/down link placement on some devices (particularly
mobile devices with touch screens). Though I have had moments where I
wondered, "Why (the expletive) am I being down-voted?" often, it's not
as big of a deal as it seems. Sometimes I communicate poorly. Sometimes
I fail to be perfectly clear. Sometimes I get things wrong. Sometimes
I'm a bit too spicy in my replies. But sometimes, people just click the
wrong button by mistake. It happens to everyone. Learning from mistakes
is good, but being overly concerned about it is a waste of time.
Thank you very much for such a thorough reply. The latest version I found of ARC is from 2009, but since I didn't know it existed at all, I am quite happy. The posts are still [dead] to me, unfortunately.
There is a great deal of "secret sauce" running on HN, and to prevent adversaries from abusing HN for their own gain, PG deliberately does not publicly divulge how a lot of things work. [1] You would need to have either a deep fascination with discussion forums, or far too much free time (probably both) to figure out some of the non-public details of how HN really works. If one really does their homework well and figures out some of the details, hopefully they have enough respect for PG, YC and all of the folks using HN to not abuse or divulge what they learn.
Though the precise details are not public information, pg has publicly stated that he does have some form of (vote/flag) "ring detection" running here on HN to thwart group and/or multi-account manipulation. [2] Since the details are not public, there is really no way to know how effective the ring detection is, but suffice to say, if it wasn't an improvement, it wouldn't exist.
When it comes to flagging and up-voting of submissions, the publicly described logic is both clever and fascinating. If you flag heavily up-voted submissions, your flags count less. Similarly, if you flag too many things (and most likely, too quickly), your flags count less. In other words, there are thresholds employed. [3,4]
When it comes to flagging comments, I can't recall seeing any mention of how the comment flags are handled, and worse, there's nothing in my notes about it. Considering the potential for abuse, I doubt PG will ever give vague details about it. Spam comments are an interesting problem, and it's very difficult to solve. Allowing users to flag comments is one way to handle it, but divulging the details would most likely reduce the effectiveness of the counter-measures.
There is still one place on HN where doing a lot of flagging and up-voting of submissions is both useful and beneficial to HN as a whole, namely, on the "new" page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newest
I'm sure many people appreciate the high signal to noise ratio here on HN, and would rather avoid the more noisy /newest page. None the less, people putting in some time to both flag spam and give up-votes to new submissions is what keeps the high signal to noise on the front page.
Yes, even if you're just flagging spam on the /newest page, you can still trigger the "excessive flagger" threshold, and the result is (was?) the "flag" links disappear. I had it happen to me once a long time ago, but since then, I believe the system was changed to simply not count the flags once a user has passed the threshold value. I would bet a human being (pg or a moderator) looks at any account that flags too much to determine if the account should be banned, hell banned, deleted, or whatever. If they see that you're really just trying to flag the endless spam submissions, they probably just quietly appreciate your efforts. I've never received a gilded thank you note for flagging spam submissions, and I don't expect to get one, but I'm sure everyone who likes the high signal to noise ratio around here appreciates it.
NOTE: Though the references below are from PG himself, it's entirely possible that he's changed his mind, and his code, since they were originally posted.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830838
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3354900
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830485
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830531