Ask HN: Are posts critical of Google getting flagged shortly after submission?

An anecdotal suspicion only (sample size = 3); I don't have any data as evidence except what's stored in my own memory.

The submission YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally [1] from half an hour ago rocketed to ~34 points within 30 minutes, then mysteriously stalled and got zero new upvotes from minutes 30 - 40. (I totally get that could happen to absolutely any post or purely by chance, but just seems sus).

Two other posts I noticed this happen to were YouTube deletes LTT video for teaching people how to live without Google [2] and Google removed 'number of results' default setting for some users [3].

Both got large numbers of upvotes in the first 30-90 minutes but either got slammed by downvotes or flags shortly afterward.

Perhaps something for @Dang to investigate.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41626035

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41466182

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41466138

The one post got 79 comments in under an hour.

Probably tripped the overheated discussion detector.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

candiddevmike · a year ago

IMO that detector keeps too much actually good content off the front page. Your post needs to be engaging enough for folks to upvote but not too engaging for folks to comment otherwise it leaves the front page.

calibas · a year ago

Yep, anything too controversial or exciting get buried. It's like to polar opposite of the Facebook ranking algorithm.

Seems ripe for manipulation, you could go start arguments in whatever threads you want to see downranked.

r721 · a year ago

That's why I usually check out both default front page and "Most active current discussions" (https://news.ycombinator.com/active).

Freedom2 · a year ago

YCombinator naturally doesn't want divisive content on the front page as it hurts their brand.

nomilk · a year ago

> overheated discussion detector

First time hearing of this - it might explain (at least part of) what had been observed.

yen223 · a year ago

I've seen so many posts critical of Google here on HN that it would be surprising if there was any such suppression going on.

goles · a year ago

pvg · a year ago

Perhaps something for @Dang to investigate

You can email such suspicions to hn@ycombinator.com.

FYI, this post was ranking fairly high on the front page, then it just vanished.

dang · a year ago

Users flagged it. Correctly of course.

Can you explain why it should be flagged? At least ostensibly, it seems earnest, introspective (at the site level), and of interest to the community.

(My best guess is perhaps HN doesn’t allow posts about HN. Or perhaps posts based on speculation.)

I believe there's a certain degree of "reputation management" happening with HN, and it seems unfair that we're not allowed to even talk about it.

That being said, I can understand why you don't want to see the comments degenerate into people accusing each other of being shills and bots.

specproc · a year ago

Easily testable hypothesis, at its simplest we could do:

  flagged ~ google_in_title + title_sentiment + upvotes + num_comments + some_time_var

libria · a year ago

> Perhaps something for @Dang to investigate.

Then email dang? Why bother asking us? We don't have any of this data.

codingdave · a year ago

One of those is flagged, the other two are not. (At least as of right now.) You cannot downvote posts, so that isn't a concern.

So sure, there may be some people flagging things... but if the post is not deserving of such treatment, other people typically vouch for it. And it is always possible that HN is doing something more behind the scenes, but odds are it is just the community doing their own self-moderation, with all the pros and cons that come with self-moderation.

AIUI vouching is harder to do/fewer people can do it vs flagging, which IMO enables some at times questionable censorship.

There should be a 1:1 vouch/flag capability or do away with it entirely and just use score like slashdot.

noirscape · a year ago

One of the remaining two posts also likely triggered the heated discussion detected, since the one known criteria is if a post has more comments than upvotes, it gets algorithmically pushed down.

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