You’ll Never Guess Which Recent DF Article Was ‘Flagged’ at Hacker News

“Flagging” isn’t what I was writing about yesterday, with regard to Daring Fireball’s unexplained ghosting at Hacker News in recent years. If you look at the list of recent DF articles at HN, only one is explicitly “flagged”. Whoops, now it’s two, but they’re both the same article.

Tim Bray:

I’m really glad @gruber posted this, because me too. Same timeframe, same behavior.

Oliver Reichenstein (from iA):

Same for content from iA. Again and again our posts get to the top page and then someone ghosts them. Ghosting started around the same time as DF ghosting, I think. My take: It looks like someone that has enough access just doesn’t like us. ¯\(ツ)/¯

I’ve heard privately from a few other bloggers that they’ve seen similar ghosting at HN in recent years.

Near the top of Hackers News’s FAQ:

How are stories ranked?

The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.

Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.

Hacker News presents itself as a forum that is primarily driven by the community, where ranking and moderation are mostly, perhaps even overwhelmingly, transparent. And that “moderator action” is only a secondary or even tertiary factor. The core HN audience buys into this — the HN audience is comprised of people who view themselves as independent thinkers. Part of why they like and trust HN as an aggregator is that they believe they’re driving it, and that they know how the whole thing works.

My thesis is that the above might once have been an accurate summary of how Hacker News functioned, but hasn’t been for years, and that there now exists a cabal of moderator/admins with their thumbs on the scale, and their personal predilections are the primary steering force behind what’s permitted to surface and what gets ghosted. This moderation cabal operates more or less in secret. Their actions, and thus even their usernames, are invisible — lest the HN community discover that it’s steering things about as much as Maggie Simpson is.

Read between the lines of the “Hey, why is this post flagged?” wonderment from genuinely openminded HN users in the comments on my now-flagged submission, and you’ll catch a strong whiff of “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

★ Thursday, 27 March 2025