Hacker News where the billionaires hack together your news
Luigi Mangione also hasn’t been convicted of stealing the news cycle: he earned it. And without a trial, Big Tech took that away from him.
Last week I posted an article about how the professional site Stack Overflow renamed the account of Luigi Mangione while keeping all of Luigi’s content under a different name (seemingly in violation of the Creative Commons license). The company has not commented officially.
Aside from Stack Overflow, a separate and popular site programmers use is Hacker New (frequently HN). HN claims to be a social news aggregator. Anyone can submit links to it so long as they “gratify one's intellectual curiosity.” Small toot of my horn, but obviously my prior article fit that criteria, and someone apparently shared the article on HN:
Notice: 816 upvotes, and it’s only 9 hours old!
The front page Of Hacker News
Now this is currently the front page of the site. Take note to the following.
the post with my article is newer (nine hours old) than many of these articles
and, has massively more upvotes than every other article on the HN front page:
We know at one point my article made it to the front page listing because we have an archived copy. However, it mysteriously dropped off.
Shadow banning at Hacker News
The reason why is a pretty open secret in the industry. It’s a tool frequently employed called shadow banning. Moderators have the option of using this tool whereby the ban isn’t made apparent to the user most likely to complain, in this case the submitter.
What Hacker News did was scrub the article from the front page to deny new exposure, and allow those that have seen it to engage as if nothing happened. They have a history of these kinds of shenanigans.
The implementation of shadow banning is generally cheap and when implemented tends to reduce public drama for the company, and alleviate some of the demand on the community moderation team.
The technical implementation
In order to help understand this, one method you can use to implement shadow banning is to add another field in the data store that the user can’t interact with or see. Moderators can set this field to “true” when needed; and, when set, the article will be silently omitted on the front page. In even more draconian cases of shadow banning (like on Facebook), the post can not be seen by anyone except the person who submitted the post, it’s silently omitted for all others.
But, on Hacker News, some speculate the algorithm is much more complex. As argued in one response to my article.
The article likely dropped off quicker than you would have liked because it was penalized, mainly for being controversial:
This was an interesting argument. The post subsequently sourced this blog entry. I will do my best to explain: posts on HN prioritize submissions based on the ratio of comments to upvotes. The more comments to upvotes, the more contentious the submission is deemed, and the more likely it is to be penalized for being “controversial”.
Aside from the obvious question: why do you believe comments indicate controversy to begin with? My response to this needn’t be complex:
It’s not applicable to me:
When my article was on the front page it had 668 points, 486 comments for a ratio of 1.37.
When it fell off the front page it had 862 points, and 671 comments for a ratio of 1.28: the “controversy” metric went DOWN.
HN does NOT deserve the benefit of the doubt: if you want to show the article was treated fairly and my grievance is with the system, you need at least show that to be true. HN’s algorithm is closed and these indicators and metrics have not been shown to exist, they are only the subject of speculation.
It doesn’t matter: even if the algorithm was programmed by a human to deprioritize my article, for being controversial or otherwise, should I treat this any differently than if a human did it directly? The fact remains: the upvotes show _more_ people wanted to see them than other articles on the front page, and yet the article was removed from the front page.
interesting! i've definitely noticed media scrubbing, and in a lack of words: "kicking it under the carpet" when it comes to these article regarding Luigi, and unfortunately it had to resurface itself as a "shadow-ban" aimed towards you.
your articles are definitely affecting some (especially me, haha) and do not fret if the netizens of Hacker News aren't seeing superior articles (such as the ones you make)
keep posting to Reddit. you have a community there, and this article divulges the shady acts of these "news hosts" other than Reddit. awesome job!