Buzzfeed seem to be partly rebranding themselves with high-quality long articles. I thought this was excellent: http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/tom-lehrer (and posted it to HN to no avail). So yes, we've upgraded Buzzfeed from banned (stories get auto-killed) to lightweight (stories get a penalty, which moderators can override). A moderator saw the OP and marked it as solid.
Lightweight sites are an uncanny valley for HN. We can't un-penalize them without the site being overrun with fluff. But we don't want to miss any solid articles, either. It requires human intervention to tell the two apart, and we neither see everything nor necessarily see things in time.
I have some ideas for writing software to help with this conundrum, but won't be able to get to that (or the dozens of other things on our list) until my ongoing moderation-comment blitz subsides.
Serious question: Does the HN moderating staff have any ethical concerns about supporting Buzzfeed, regardless of article quality? Not even delving into their business model (which can be politely defined as "parasitic"), I'd guess at least half of all their content is blatantly plagiarized... at best "lightly" ripped from others. Last time I checked they also continued to use copyrighted and restricted licensed content without permission or payment.
That, unfortunately, is true of many of the most commonly posted sites to HN. Our policy is to keep the rip-offs off the front page, and whenever possible replace them with links to original sources. That's harder than it sounds. Banning all of these sites, though, wouldn't be good for HN, assuming they also produce substantive work.
Buzzfeed have done themselves very considerable harm with their earlier tactics. Enough that I look on the URL with extreme prejudice.
I've got a custom CSS I apply to the site (I refer to it as "unbuzzed") which strips all the viral crap from it. And checking quickly w/o my CSS applied, I see that while some of the site's content may be quality, much of it still matches my recollection of it.
Given that, I feel that supporting the site in any way condones a behavior which is, IMO, very highly toxic.
I'd prefer "banned unless moderator overrides" be in place, and I think actually, keeping the ban in place would be even better. It's weaponized clickbait.
As for lightweight stories: they're, net net, toxic.
If there's lightweight coverage of a topic, there's almost certainly a heavyweight coverage somewhere. Almost always upstream (source study, report, release, comments), occasionally in a detailed analysis commentary.
My focus for much of the past year and some has been "big issues": population, resources, sustainability. Of which a significant component is energy. The good news is that there's huge amount of research going into advanced energy technology: new methods of capturing, converting, storing, or using it. And virtually ALL of it is absolute, total, complete, 2000% bullshit in terms of actual informational value.
In one case (the Haberno enhanced geothermal well project in Australia), I found that reading the company in question's own financial filings with the Australian securities regulator was far more informative than the ... whitewashed is putting too pretty a face on it ... completely useless press "progress" report. If attaining 2% of your initial generation goal in 5x the time and 10x the budget is "success", well, I don't know what to say.
The problem is when the crap reporting of useless bullshit makes it difficult to see through crap reporting of the good stuff out there. The US Navy Research Lab's recently (past month) publicized research on electricity-to-fuel synthesis from seawater was abysmal. But the underlying technology and story are actually among the better prospects out there in terms of not only providing moderate-scale liquid fuel sources for the future, but very large (national or global) potential, with high-but-tractable costs, and with applications to utilizing surplus intermittent generating capacity for fuel synthesis and long-term storage (diesel fuel stores well). But the 1) profusion of crap elsewhere and 2) abysmal quality of the reporting on this technology made this almost impossible to see.
I still think my own write-up (which could use some improving) is among the best there is on the topic:
>Enough that I look on the URL with extreme prejudice. //
Which is fair enough, but do you think HN should be pandering to your prejudices? Isn't it better to ignore all prejudices and judge the story on the text, information, presentation it carries?
You can flag stories, you can link a better source within the thread, but ultimately you have to trust the community to regulate itself or seek a differently structured community.
Personally I'm finding the more I learn about the editorial policies of HN the more worried I am - I thought it was meritocratic, without grudges and prejudices but instead I find that there are secret editorial policies and over-bearing moderations.
Fine if HN is to be curated then let that be clear, post a list of banned sites for example; don't pretend it's user moderated when the postings are being heavily censored. [I'm not saying curation is wrong, just that it makes it a different beast and that secretly moderating the content and having ban-lists and such is wrong IMO].
The site has always been curated, from day one. What's changed is not that there are new secret policies, but that the moderators are now sharing them with you; HN is more transparent today than it has ever been.
If you want a pure user-generated user-moderated experience, that's fine and totally reasonable. Go to Reddit. That's what they're about. HN is not Reddit.
Which is the point, it's never been explicit IMO that shadowbanning and URL black lists are part of the site. Finding out that's the case is unnerving, what other manipulations are going on under the hood that normal users aren't aware of. That's why I say IMO, to be forthright, one should make these things publicly known - there should be a page giving the list of moderators, what powers they have, what URLs are banned, what procedures (like shadowbanning) are used, ...
The FAQ says there are editors, and indeed it tells us now that there are 30 of them. It says they can edit, ban users; but it doesn't say that they block entire sites or anything of that sort. It doesn't mention hellbanning/shadowbanning and such.
The little inklings of the secret undercurrents strongly suggest that there would be, for example, manipulation of story rankings and such. I'm not saying that happens but with such an opaque system it seems most likely. The feeling starts rising then that one is in a "Disney for adults" where you're being manipulated to the extreme but you're not really conscious of it.
"Little inklings of secret undercurrents" strikes me as pretty silly (though delightfully written!) since I've done nothing for the last month but plaster the site with transparency and feedback. I have a list of dozens of things we can do to make HN better, and haven't been able to get to any of them since becoming public as moderator—I've been doing nothing but answering questions, explaining things, and worrying about answering questions and explaining things.
If, after massive effort, some people still accuse us of every insidious practice in the book, I'm doubtful that the lesson to draw is "try harder". It might be, if (a) there were a hope of convincing everybody, (b) it weren't very costly, and (c) it didn't prevent us from doing other important things. But (b) and (c) are definitely not true, and it's looking sadly like (a) isn't either.
As I just wrote above: I'm more than happy with the methods of shadowbanning / hellbanning and of URL blacklists.
Noting these more prominently in the HN FAQ, or simply noting that this is a managed site, wouldn't be a bad thing IMO. The black hats have already figured it out, the driven-snow innocents will have their bubbles gently burst, and those of us who've been around the block a few times will just nod sagely.
NB: not to say that some hellbans / shadowbans don't seem to be perhaps misapplied. One thing I've encountered on many systems is that while blocks and bans are features, they don't leave a trace (or much of one) as to when the block/ban was instituted, or why. Google+'s "block" feature (and management of it) are among the worst I've encountered. Reddit's moderation log isn't a complete solution but at least provides a complete registry of what admin actions have been undertaken, by whom, and when.
I'm also a big fan of time-outs, both automated and manually applied. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years/forever.
Yes, since you joined you've been vocal and overt in your editing practices so far as I've noticed, and that's appreciated.
I'm reacting - I thought this site centred around values where merit rose above appearance. The implementation of a block list for certain domains seems to move sharply against that. Perhaps I missed the memo where it was mentioned that certain sites are banned from submission to HN. If a domain is getting spammed to the submission page then I can understand it being blocked but interesting stories/commentaries can centre around rubbish and abusive domains; I thought we [HN] rode above all that, that's all.
Blocking low quality domains is a good thing to some extent, it's just not being aware that's how the site runs that makes it surprising/unnerving. Steering the site to maintain focus requires controlling the submissions accepted, of course; just I thought this was being done using flagging and upvotes [alone] in the open. Ergo, my reaction. Maybe like finding your straight-laced lawyer has nipple-rings.
All the stuff you're talking about has been the case not only for years, but since the beginning of HN. I'll venture, also, that what you'd actually get if HN worked the way you imagined it did is a much, much lower-quality site. Indeed, HN would never have been HN. You're free not to believe that, of course.
There certainly are some drawbacks to transparency!
The shadowbans and blacklists are sort of an open secret (though this wasn't always the case). I'd prefer a bit more transparency on this.
Truth is, though, that it's virtually impossible to run any user-contribution-based forum without such controls. Turns out that most people aren't assholes, but there's just enough that things go pear-shaped without controls.
It's something I've long pondered, turns out, reading up on Geoffrey West and his scaling effects that both positive and negative scale effects follow pretty much the same growth laws, they just have different constants. For cities, both economic activity and crime will rise with size, at about the same rate. Which means that though there's a greater economic benefit to larger cities, you'll also have to increase police spending.
My point is that Buzzfeed, still, commits the crimes for which I first indicted it (if only in my own mind). Which for numerous and profound reasons I see as a Very Bad Thing.
Tossing the occasional sacrificial treat to those who prefer real meat, while continuing to attach their weaponized clickbait to their site's pages, does nothing to redeem them.
I'm aware that dang is a mod here, though I'd share my PoV. He's welcome to consider it or not. But I flagged this item and will continue to do so for other Buzzfeed, or similarly weaponized-clickbait-laden sites.
As for banning sites -- HN has apparently been doing that without significant notice to date. If you've got an issue with that, take it up with dang.
I feel that a mix of user-selection and site editorial voice is one of the few ways that a site or channel can maintain its focus -- see the degredation of numerous reddits (e.g., /r/dataisbeautiful is rather much more "data is interesting". I've not seen a truly innovative graphical presentation of data there for quite a while, and numerous craptacular infographic presentations (prohibited by subreddit guidelines) where the primary focus seems to be that the underlying data, or more usually, the subject of the underlying data, is intruiging. While that's fine and good, it's not the focus of the subreddit.
Others I can think of do markedly worse.
A good curation system will balance what's happening in the outside world, reader interests, and editorial voice. There's no surefire method, there's an art to it. I actually really like several of the posts dang's submitted (which I'll note go through the same moderation queue everything else does), even the ones which don't hit the front page.
Buzzfeed, AFAIK, was blacklisted from HN for awhile, but it looks like the new mod regime has taken off the blanket ban...and that's a good thing. The majority of Buzzfeed is still linkbait but they do have sections written by real reporters, with some of the best writing and research I've seen from online outlets. My personal favorite was this in-depth exoneration of MSG: http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnmahoney/the-notorious-msgs-unlik...
disclosure: one of my former colleagues is a Buzzfeed editor (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/rieder/2014/02...), and he's been in charge of hiring an investigations team. He's a Pulitzer winner himself and just hired one of this year's Pulitzer winners, as well as a Pulitzer finalist (HN user jsvine)...the late Michael Hastings was doing investigative reporting for Buzzfeed before his untimely death. So the investment they're putting into non-listicle-journalism is non-trivial.
It's really too bad that they're mixing the in-depth coverage and the crap on the same domain. It indelibly taints their better articles with the stink of their low-quality drivel. On the whole, the site is a worthless spam farm that steals content from reddit and other sources. The existence of a handful of good stories isn't enough to overcome that reputation.
Buzzfeed has some great longform articles too. Their piece on the history of the AUMF is great (especially for those who weren't paying attention/were too young to care at the time).
This is surprisingly good from them, however.