HACKER Q&A
📣 nomilk

Are posts critical of Google getting flagged shortly after submission?


An anecdotal suspicion only (sample size = 3); I don't have any data as evidence except what's stored in my own memory.

The submission YouTube Premium is getting a big price hike internationally [1] from half an hour ago rocketed to ~34 points within 30 minutes, then mysteriously stalled and got zero new upvotes from minutes 30 - 40. (I totally get that could happen to absolutely any post or purely by chance, but just seems sus).

Two other posts I noticed this happen to were YouTube deletes LTT video for teaching people how to live without Google [2] and Google removed 'number of results' default setting for some users [3].

Both got large numbers of upvotes in the first 30-90 minutes but either got slammed by downvotes or flags shortly afterward.

Perhaps something for @Dang to investigate.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41626035

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41466182

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41466138

  👤 yen223 Accepted Answer ✓
I've seen so many posts critical of Google here on HN that it would be surprising if there was any such suppression going on.
👤 goles
The one post got 79 comments in under an hour.

Probably tripped the overheated discussion detector.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

👤 pvg
Perhaps something for @Dang to investigate

You can email such suspicions to hn@ycombinator.com.

👤 calibas
FYI, this post was ranking fairly high on the front page, then it just vanished.
👤 specproc
Easily testable hypothesis, at its simplest we could do:

  flagged ~ google_in_title + title_sentiment + upvotes + num_comments + some_time_var
👤 libria
> Perhaps something for @Dang to investigate.

Then email dang? Why bother asking us? We don't have any of this data.

👤 codingdave
One of those is flagged, the other two are not. (At least as of right now.) You cannot downvote posts, so that isn't a concern.

So sure, there may be some people flagging things... but if the post is not deserving of such treatment, other people typically vouch for it. And it is always possible that HN is doing something more behind the scenes, but odds are it is just the community doing their own self-moderation, with all the pros and cons that come with self-moderation.

👤 bschmidt1
[flagged]
👤 OutOfHere
Critical posts are often downvoted andor flagged to extinction. It's not unique to Google. If your post is not on board with the "SV moneymaking at all costs" mantra, ethics be danged, you'll likely find it disappear.