Dupe; discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11542664
> (2015-10-16) The people behind the scenes at Hacker News now hand pick stories they want on the front page. It's not a user-generated voting-controlled news site. But it pretends to be one and tries to look like one. It's deeply dishonest. http://www.curi.us/1612-anti-israel-bias-at-hacker-news / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10402465
This is outrageous, and I will find a way to create a front-page list that is "unadulterated".
Here's the moderator commenting about the many factors:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20rank&sort=byPopulari...
(not all the results are applicable, enough are)
True, however the HN front page has always given me the impression that votes matter the most, and that the front-page is largely reflective of the interests of the HN demographics. The question I'd ask is: why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators?
A subtle form of pretense is not speaking of the truth.
Also, HN is pretty open about being more heavily moderated than other parts of the net, it's far from secret. And while I don't necessarily share the view that moderation of discussion is a GoodThing™, I find it acceptable since no one is trying to pretend that it's not happening.
> HN is pretty open about being more heavily moderated than other parts of the net [...] I find it acceptable since no one is trying to pretend that it's not happening.
A subtle form of pretence is to not explicitly state the fact. Why is there no explicit indication (written in the footer, perhaps) of the front-page being vetted by a handful of moderators? Why is the 'active' page kept hidden (it is not in the navbar)? Why all this secrecy?
I don't really see any of it as secrecy, as that implies actively and intentionally hiding, to me it seems more like not going out of the way to show/tell people. The Guidelines and FAQs go into it a bit IIRC, and dang has written comments on it as well. I'd describe it more as unintuitive than secretive. It seems like the same reasoning behind keeping HN minimalistic and not webapp 2.0 bloatware. It might chase some people away but it also keeps an eternal september at bay.
Also the front page is not vetted by moderators (if it was they'd be doing a terrible job as dupes and blatant linkbait are common), but there's code in place to mitigate flamewars and such. If you want to see what stories and comments are actually getting killed (by users, not the mods) you can enable showdead in your profile, which imo should be enabled by default but I can understand why it's not.
Generally if you see a story drop off the front page quickly, it's getting comments a lot quicker than it's getting votes. I do think mods will occasionally remove the penalty for this on stories that triggered the flamewar protection without there being a flamewar. Additionally some domains and topics are penalized, and there seem to be filtered words that will auto kill your comment. Try leaving a comment with (Im sorry, gotta avoid it somehow) m@$tur b@t3 in it. But again that's all automated, just unintuitive.