Ask HN: Why are Tesla negative stories muted on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are Tesla negative stories muted on HN?

58 pointsTheAlchemist21 comments

There were quite a lot of stories, mostly negative, about Tesla recently and it seems that most are actively removed from first page - todays one about Tesla range estimation “issues” is an example.

While removing articles about Musk and Tesla stock price seems like a good idea, the other ones (todays one, the one about German leak a few weeks ago) seem much more interesting to discuss.

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It's a topic that was done to death even before Musk Mania went interstellar. There's little chance of an interesting, curious conversation around any of it right now. Since repetition and flamewar are the two things we're most eager to avoid, mods have been downweighting these.

This is standard HN practice when it comes to follow-up (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and/or flamewar submissions. We override that when there's significant new information (SNI - see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). For a topic like this, it would have to be big SNI - but it's possible we've missed something. If so, I'm open to hearing about it - I'd just need links.

Also, please send questions/info to hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I only saw this thread randomly.

The range estimate story you mention (below) spent ~13 hours on the front page, with 717 upvotes and 638 comments as I type this, and it's not flagged. This hardly seems like censorship?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36891642

This is HN, it's basically ground zero for both vocal Tesla owners and contrarians. So negative stories might get flagged?

But I don't think this is the case, negative Tesla stories frequently make it to the home page. The very story you're quoting has 632 comments, so I don't think it's being silenced...

It has 700 upvotes in 12h, and yet it’s only on 4th page - it’s definitely getting silenced

What are y'all talking about? I don't see a story with 700 upvotes. Can you link it?

It’s this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36891642

It's on page 4 or so, compared to the stories surrounding it based on votes / recency, it's definitely been muted

Perhaps there is a time component to the sort algorithm? As of now its 13 hours old.

It's because of the ratio of votes:comments. The higher the comments the lowest the score because the administration of a discussion site thinks users are not capable of having discussions.

Remember that hacker news auto buries controversial posts, where “controversial” is defined as some ratio of comments to upvotes (I don’t remember the specific amount). Basically stories that have about as many comments as upvotes fall off the front page much quicker than a story with the same upvotes but fewer comments.

HN has algorithms to detect flame-wars that will de-rank a thread. I don't know if that is the case here, only dang could answer that. People could email him to ask.

Oh ! I always assumed it’s only some kind of upvotes / comments per time ratio that determines the ranking.

Will ask dang, thanks.

>it’s definitely getting silenced

It has a high vote and comment ratio. Along with some downvote on comments. that is why it is on 4th page.

Isn't there a something built into the ranking where lots of comments gets ranked lower in the page? Something to make argumentive posts lower. Maybe I'm misrembering

In my observation from time spent on the new stream, HN is pro Apple and pro Tesla. Negative stories tend to get flagged and shut down quickly. Most of the answers here are focused on one specific example but I agree with your observation in general.

Sorry that your question has been flagged as well, what irony. This isn't the first time such an observation had been made and silenced.

Honestly, i think it's reactance. I understood Musk was full of it since 2016 and his "solarcity" exposition (at least it was better than his boring company CGI), but nowadays there is too much, and it's to fresh, too muddy.

Obviously i'll participate (or rather read) when its new news (like Twitter change its name), but if it's yet another article on Tesla/Musk, i'll ignore it. I dislike the man but i feel there is hatred for no good reason.

At this point, I just want a full year without hearing "Musk did that!", negatively or positively. He isn't helping me because of his outlandish attitude (and lies, that the reason i don't like him, i find him dishonest) but if places can HN could be a bit quieter, that'll be great.

I haven't noticed this, usually negative articles about Tesla or Musk are pushed to the front page.

HN needs a secondary meta discussion board to extract most of the non-news discussions so there's a venue for these kind of convos. Maybe StackExchange would kindly step up with an "HN overflow"? ;)

You can't post a negative story about anything Tesla related on HN without being flagged. Check out my submissions for examples.

Maybe out of boredom? There have been 11 Tesla stories in the last 24 hours. There is other stuff out there.

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