(Also, the submitter did a fine job of rewriting the title to be less baity, as the site guidelines request: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Thanks GavCo!)
It's true that https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=telegraph.co.uk contains a lot of ideological battle articles that probably fall below the 'interesting' line. For that reason, that domain has a penalty on it—a medium-weight penalty that we put on every site in this category, regardless of which ideology they support.
However, it does look like there have been other good articles from this domain. For example:
So I'd say this domain is a good example of the kind that we'd penalize but not ban, and try to turn off the penalty when the occasionally genuinely interesting article does show up.
There's no single doc. We keep https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html at the level of principles, not practices, because trying to compile a complete doc would be nightmarishly long and then no one would read it (except maybe the litigious types looking for loopholes). It's for similar reasons that we don't publish a full moderation log.
There is tons of information about basically everything we do embedded in my moderation comments but one has to use HN Search to find it (that's why I link to HN search so often). One of these years I might try to wrangle a bunch of those into a bunch of essay-style commentaries, if only because they would be easier to link to and would lighten the load of always having to explain the same things.
We're transparent in the sense of always trying to answer questions, though.
Comments by users can get manually unflagged by mods but I don't think there's a software way to do that. Flagkilled posts, though, can get unkilled by user vouches (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.
Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
I don't know what HN's internal database is, but it seems like it could be a simple query or set of queries to determine if [flagged] is being used by a group of people as a way of censoring comments they don't agree with. After all, they're not required to justify their flag.
Some simple statistics would answer this question. For instance, in "sometimes turn flags off" what percentage of the time does that happen?
We do look at that sort of thing but I wouldn't say it's straightforward to determine because we don't have access to people's intent.
We turn flags off a small percentage of the time. I don't know how small because although we log the flagging history, we don't keep it in a form that's easy to compute.
Sometimes it does! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850886 is superb - in my book, that's above the "one has no right to expect a comment of this quality on an internet forum" line.
You're right about raging and soapboxes of course. Unfortunately, angry repetition is in far greater supply than excellent comments sharing rare information. But this is an internet problem and indeed a human problem in general. We try to moderate in favor of the good posts as best we can. It's not clear how to do it much better.
(Attacking the person): This fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone's argument or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument. The fallacious attack can also be direct to membership in a group or institution.
Sure, but the point is that the Guardian doesn't have the same sort of right-wing-outrage-machine reputation that the Telegraph has, so (1) the tone of the article might be less annoying to those of a leftier bent, and (2) someone inclined to expect that the Telegraph would be outright dishonest on this subject might trust the Guardian more (even if it's citing the Telegraph as a source, one might hope that they've done some fact-checking).
HN's guidelines specifically ask people to "Please submit the original source*. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's true that the provenance of an article sometimes leads to complaints, but I don't think we should let that be the high-order bit or train for it (in the way that repeated moderation decisions slowly train the community). This is one of those cases where knowing what you're optimizing for shows which side of a tradeoff to opt for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
(* when it's publicly available - that's an implicit bit)
For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn't at all suggesting that the original submission should have been to the Guardian article rather than the Telegraph one, and I don't think anyone else was either. I was just trying to explain why someone might have bothered to mention the Guardian article in response to a complaint about the Telegraph allegedly being a right-wing outrage machine.
Leftist censors seldom deny that the story is true--often the facts are indisputable. They are just outraged that someone made the facts available beyond the pale of the progressive Magisterium.
As presented it is just designed to generate outrage, which it seems to be doing a grand job of on here. There's a relevant quote from the Guardian article...
But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
So, Roald Dahl's family and the company they still control are perfectly happy with this. Why aren't we?
If you look at the actual changes, the careful consideration resulted in aesthetic atrocities, reverting the punchy use of language that makes Dahl's work so wonderful and entertaining.
People are outraged because the actions are outrageous. I reject the notion that I shouldn't be upset.
Did they remove all the bits about all the little kids being eaten and only their bones being left, which is a major element of The BFG?
Or the plot of Esio Trot which is a guy tricking his downstairs neighbor into falling in love with him by swapping out her pet every few weeks with a larger one?
Or the whole plot of George’s Marvelous Medicine which is a boy who mixes up a potion with everything he can find in his house, and feeds it to his nasty grandmother?
He’s got a whole lot of crazy stuff, and I can only speak of things I’ve read to my kids recently.
Quite a lot of them are using modern language instead of anachronisms:
> Unsurprisingly given The Witches’ subject matter, many of the edits are to do with depictions of women. “Chambermaid” becomes “cleaner”. “Great flock of ladies” becomes “great group of ladies”. “You must be mad, woman!” becomes “You must be out of your mind!” “The old hag” becomes “the old crow”
There is some removing of fat as insult. There is that too. But pretty much all changes in above paragraph sound better then old ones.
Not so much sterilized as replacing things that sound odd and archaic. No one, literally no one is using "old hag" as insult. It is not a thing, it sounds funny rather then insult.
>But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
This is the first time I heard of this kind of language 'update'. That's not normal.
Shakespeare is genuinely hard to read and understand but we don't just change random phrases and words to match modern sensibilities. Even modern English translation will keep the original for reference.
>As presented it is just designed to generate outrage,
> So, Roald Dahl's family and the company they still control are perfectly happy with this. Why aren't we?
Why should we care what some trust fund babies want?
If I'm reading a book by Dahl I want to read it as he intended. If you read the article you'll see how idiotic the changes are and how they literally change the meaning of the passages when considered "problematic".
The reasons vary but could all be addressed by releasing distinctive new editions. Remastered/unplugged/snowflake edition - whatever you want to call it. Just label them as distinct from the originals and everyone can be happy.
