Because otherwise you end up with thousands of incomplete and incompatible implementations all fighting to be the best or running out of steam after a month or two. Node is a hellscape from a db perspective
I'd phrase it more like "ORMs are as popular as they always were, most DBs today are SQL DBs, same as always, and the only recent change in the last 10 years is people have stopped speculating that NoSQL is going to replace SQL DBs, and accepted they will be, at most, specialised tools for niche uses.".
"Most DBs" by what metric? If you count them as products, you're probably correct. But I seriously doubt that is true when adjusted for usage - say, number of requests per second, globally, across all deployed databases worldwide.
(in fact, I suspect that SQLite would win that contest handily.)
SQLite is in every android phone, it wins by a mile. I'd even go as far to wager that MSSQL instances alone outnumber Mongodb or Dynamo by a good margin.
I think that statement should be strongly disputed. Most businesses still have a SQL database at the core of their stack. NoSQL is still definitely the exception rather than the rule.
HN is also penalising threads that discuss this. This post has 74 upvotes in 27 minutes and 11 comments at time of writing. Ordinarily it would significantly outrank most of the other posts on the front page, but it doesn't seem to be able to break past #15. Either this is because HN users are flagging it, or because something else is going on. As Reddit is a YC company it'd be really nice to hear an explanation.
This exact same thing happened with the previous threads
Users are flagging them. The only thing moderators have done is decline to turn off the flags. We turn off flags sometimes when (a) the article contains significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) and (b) it can support a substantive HN discussion. Neither of those seems true here so I don't think it's a hard call.
There have been countless threads on the generic topic here (free speech online, let's call it) and the details of this particular story seem very specific to Reddit drama, indeed (not that I've looked closely) to some specific subreddit. If so, that's neither an interesting new phenomenon nor gratifying of intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so it's not on topic for HN and users have been right to flag these.
if there's an interesting conversation to be had it's about governance and transparency in how online spaces are moderated, given the depth of their influence, the broadness of their reach and the relative power wielded by those who control the platform (hello there!). Unfortunately that conversation is mostly absent from these threads.
That conversation in general has been and continues to be had over and over again on HN, so even if this is a good occasion for substantive discussion (which I doubt), it's not as if there won't be countless opportunities in the future.
The fact that this is being done to cover up the past of a specific person who's an employee of reddit strikes me as novel, weren't the previous examples about much more general topics like covid denial?
It may be novel but I don't see that it's interesting in HN's sense of the word (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). There's a difference between the intensely-interesting quality of sensational, exciting stories, and the intellectually-interesting quality of deeper, more substantive stories. The latter are what HN is supposed to be for.
When I looked in on the discussions that were going on about this last night, they were shockingly bad flamewars about all the expected generic issues, so precisely the kind of thing we don't want here. Everything I've seen so far confirms that this story is an intense drama involving specific individuals (not just the one who shall or shall not be named, but whoever made the decisions that stirred up the outrage) that doesn't have much to teach us in general. Its primary value to HN seems to me as a good example for calibrating where to draw the ontopicness line. A teachable moment, as they used to say.
I think many people don't care about Reddit at all and perceive these discussions as off topic and uninteresting. There are better spaces to discuss those, such as /r/SubredditDrama/.
If this were a new article on the subject, it might fit. But links to Reddit threads while the drama is happening live? To me, that's gossip.
Edit: Disclaimer because that's how it is on the internet, I am transgender. Yet I have never heard of this person before and only learned their gender identity in the comments here. I don't care about Reddit or UK Politics.
Perhaps, but I'm surprised given the level of influence Reddit has these days. Reddit reaches about 500 million people per month, probably more. It's not "just a silly message board" anymore.
They have a comparatively tiny number of employees and those people have a very real power to control narratives. We're seeing just the tiniest glimpse of that here because the employee in question has done so in an incredibly egregious manner. The question this whole incident should raise is "what else is going on, that we haven't yet seen?". The specifics of this particular example are uninteresting.
The Reddit admins have since then issued a statement saying that the auto-moderator was set too broadly. They have since corrected the issue are are investigating the bans.
Looking at the "other conversations" tab on the linked post displays 12 active conversations. The "rules" as presented on the /r/ukpolitics were speculation by its moderators.
As I said elsewhere, it was pretty much gossip at that point. This is Reddit drama and it should stay there (or at least, until another website reports about it). Linking to live threads is just asking for confusion.
Some threads, before I log out of Reddit until the next drama:
HN penalises threads that are "too active", as potential flame wars and downranks them automatically. There's also user flagging. I don't think it indicates that HN is specifically taking action against this thread because of who it's about, just the usual automated mechanisms.
Perhaps HN should look into the weight of flagging, judging by #votes, seems like their ranking is not working or perhaps it is and they are happy this is not the top post.
Quite ironical, regardless as Reddit is a YC startup, none the less Paul Graham is the ideator and the post is about paid Reddit staff silencing users.
If you're trying to create a discussion community where the least desirable outcome is controversial discussions/flame wars, high weight on flagging seems to be a good way to do it.
Of course, people flagging it might be thinking all kinds of things like "Why would a topic about what Reddit does be important here?"
Isn't this orthogonal to anything about that persons gender status? It should be possible to have a discuss and ban any comments that would normally be banned around gender status or more specific around this persons gender status?
Are we not capable of having a reasonable discussion around a person and their actions just because of this?
Yeah it's nothing to do with their gender status, but someone reading those threads now might draw the conclusion that the stories were flagged or penalised due to the transphobia, which is not the case - the penalty came before the hate.
HN appears to do some shady stuff too... sometimes it is users flagging post (like a mega-downvote) and sometimes it is the admins controlling the speech.
I'm not sure why HN needs flagging and down-votes... because flagging is being abused all the time (and I think that some users get super-heavy-flagging-powers, a bit like low level admins).
I’ve always wanted to see on HN a public audit trail of all moderator modified, or removed posts and comments. That would give greater transparency and might prevent moderators enforcing their own beliefs and norms. Then again the counter argument, or point, is that HN won’t do that because it could open mods to greater pressure, unless it’s actually corporate policy to control the narrative.
Any other reasons why HN wouldn’t publish a public audit trail?
Without all the information you're still left with a lot of mystery. I might ban an account, for seemingly nothing, because I can see they've created 15 accounts in the last two days to troll and stir shit up. Partial information seems to create as many, if not more, conspiracies than no information.
I think any action done can be noted to that effect, but a step towards transparency should be a goal, because over time and interaction that “mystery” cold be solved. Wikipedia records all changes for review, with such an erudite crowd behind HN, it would seem trivial to establish such a system.
It's automatic. If enough users flag a post, it gets "killed" and will only show up (with the tag "[flagged][dead]") if you have the "showdead" option enabled in your profile.
I don't think it's an awful system but I don't think it's exactly right for HN - in normal operations it works fairly well but when combined with some less desirable HN stereotypes it can just involve shutting down discussion one disagrees with (e.g. merely mentioning Donald Trump by name was an insta flag during the election, but you could always get away with worse if you talked about democrats because the average user is further right than most forums)
I think most of us automatically downvote or flag anything political regardless of personal politics. Especially US presidential politics, because that's what the uninteresting parts of the internet are for.
HN's moderation system is rather susceptible to brigading. Downvotes will flow like water to certain topics, regardless of the quality of the original post or the discussion therein.
I mean, just look at how emotionally charged the top comment threads have become after this got posted. It isn't exactly a topic that can be discussed when so many people can't hold themselves to the basic rules (be nice and polite, attack the idea not the person, etc.) and things devolve to "you're a bigot! / no, I'm not a bigot!".
One thing that people who compile these lists never seem to take into account is that the flagged discussions are only interesting to the extent that HN remains an interesting community, and that would not be the case if the site weren't moderated and users didn't flag off-topic submissions and flamewars.
The better HN does at fulfilling its mandate, the higher-quality the audience becomes, and the more people want to use it for other things (usually a marketing agenda or a political/ideological agenda). Often these people complain that the site isn't available to them for these purposes and demand that the filtration system be dismantled (censorship! suppression!). But if the filtration system didn't exist, HN wouldn't be a desirable target in the first place. It would in fact suck, because the best users—who come here to avoid getting barraged by marketing and political/ideological agendas—would have left. In other words, if you understand the dynamics correctly then these arguments refute themselves.
Firstly, thank you for keeping the site's standards high. The embarrassing amount of time I spent here is a testament to that.
I feel like posting this story was warranted as it appears to be about a possible conflict of interest and abuse of power by a Reddit employee. Reddit normally takes a hands-off approach to everyday goings of the community.
What we're being told by the volunteer community mods is rather worrying, and clearly an arbitrary and unwarranted use of the site's doxxing rule against a single mod - and by extension the entire community. This is rather unprecedented and warrants more scrutiny.
I am afraid people only see keywords like "politics", "transgender" and "moderation policy" and assume it's some sad Reddit flamewar leaking to HN. But it's not about that, not at all. It rather sounds similar to the case where Jimbo Wales abused his admin powers on Wikipedia to suppress information about his girlfriend's criminal activities.
Well, maybe. I mean you guys know all the details and I don't, but (a) I haven't seen a lot of (if any?) intellectually interesting conversation about this, and (b) that matches my gut feeling that the story, while intensely sensational, is of secondary significance.
Wait, I'm not making any argument here. I personally think that the wonderful moderation of HN generates, as a byproduct, very interesting (if controversial) threads, which deserve to be collected somewhere. These lists are not necessarily a critique to the moderation of this site, IMHO.
> Often these people complain that the site isn't available to them for these purposes and demand that the filtration system be dismantled (censorship! suppression!). But if the filtration system didn't exist, HN wouldn't be a desirable target in the first place.
This makes obvious sense when the things getting flagged are the abortion debate or similarly off-topic flamewars.
The problem comes when it's a story like tech censorship which is both on-topic and political. On-topic specifically in that it's a debate where the people here are directly affected and have a particular domain-specific knowledge and ability to affect change. The abortion debate you can go have anywhere.
Because a site like this will out-compete others for its population demographic. The alternative space where the same demographic might discuss political stories with direct relevance to them is defeated and disappears, leaving only this space to do it in. If it's then stamped out in this space too, there is nowhere left and the population demographic here is effectively disenfranchised.
And it goes double when the topic of conversation is censorship and manipulation of speech on major platforms, because having the discussion on the incumbent platforms would subject the anti-censorship efforts to the censorship.
Firstly, thank you for doing such a great job here.
A couple of questions, as I worry that "flagging" can be abused by small groups of motivated people who are not representative of the broader user base.
Do you have ways to prevent "flagging abuse"? e.g. Do you review why things were flagged, and reinstate them if for example the thread has a lot of upvotes and isn't a total flamewar, or if the flaggers weren't particularly good citizens?
Yes, we review flagged posts. I wouldn't say we review why things get flagged, exactly, because we can only guess at that. But we try to keep an eye on things and turn flags off when the article seems substantive and able to support a substantive discussion. We also rely on users giving us heads-ups at [email protected] when they think we should take a closer look at a thread.
Most stories and threads that get enough flags to win the tug-of-war against upvotes are just not very good or on topic for HN. Partisans of one side or the other on an issue tend to feel strongly about it, but the bulk of the audience is here for interesting things to read, and the site has a very clear mandate that way: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor..., https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. So most of the time, when people feel strongly that a story shouldn't be flagged, we end up disappointing them; fighting these battles is not really what HN is for. Still, there are fairly frequent exceptions.
I should add that when an account has a habit of flagging submissions that are on-topic and good submissions for HN, we eventually take away their flagging privileges.
Thanks very much for the detailed reply. That all sounds very sensible!
I'm sure most of us would agree that the quality of the moderation here is the reason this site has been so great for so long - thanks again for all your efforts.
Given the clear conflict of interest at play here (Reddit is a YC company and are seemingly preparing to IPO in the near future) this post would be a great candidate for additional transparency from dang
I'm still surprised that Reddit avoided a major scandal over the Ghislaine Maxwell situation. It's clear that they have serious ethical/integrity issues yet have avoided the kind of criticism that FB and Twitter get, despite arguably wielding more power. I wonder if this is partly because a lot of the community call themselves "redditors" and therefore interpret criticism of the platform as a criticism of the community. No one would call themselves a twitterer or a facebooker
I don't get why it'd be a major scandal for Reddit even if u/maxwellhill was Ghislaine. They were not a Reddit employee, just a community moderator. Would HN be responsible if famous person X was secretly posting on HN?
Do people expect Reddit to dox everyone posting or moderating on their platform and then publicize the results?
I'm not sure I want to list the reasons it is bad here because the subject has been painted as a conspiracy theory and YC is obviously interested in Reddit. But the gist is that they knew who she was,she used her substantial mod power to bury news related to herself and JE, and then when her identity was exposed Reddit used Reddit to bury that story to prevent a scandal.
I admit, I didn't believe /u/maxwellhill was Ghislaine but they still haven't posted since her arrest and it's been barely mentioned given how high-profile of a case it is.
Maxwellhill was super profilic and definitely got harrassed occasionally in all those years. Stopping exactly when she was arrested and making 0 comments and posts for 8 months since is extremely unusual especially as people forgot about it quick and given that if they were posting there'd be way less reason to suspect them or harass them.
People who create and curate content quite often want to be paid for their work, they create businesses to support themselves, often in the form of a website. If Google scrapes and repackages that content, so the searcher never even visits the creator's site, what incentive does the creator have to continue making content freely available?
I had a lot of help today from one of the brilliant programmers on YC's incredible software team. And there are other people who work on HN, just not full-time since Scott left.
