> I guess because it makes zero sense the way it is. What's the point?
There are over 10.000 different bang shortcuts. They’re very valuable for several reasons, especially if you make DDG your default search engine. “Denmark !w” will take you to Denmark’s Wikipedia page, saving you the time and bandwidth it would take to click on the link through the DDG/Google result. Similarly, you can search “hello !gtda”; and sure, for short translation queries then you could also just type “hello danish” in Google, but try doing that with an entire paragraph. You could also search “duckduckgo !gandi” to see available duckduckgo domains on Gandi (or whichever domain registrar you prefer).
> And what DDG user would ever want to be redirected to Google? They're using DDG for a reason (and for 99%, it isn't the search engine quality). It just makes no sense.
DDG users aren’t (or at least they shouldn’t) append !g to all their searches.. it should only be used as a last resort (and even then they should still be using !s instead of !g). DDG’s primary selling point is privacy, but even if they were just as evil as Google (and there were no other privacy-friendly alternative available) then I’d still be using DDG as my default search engine thanks to the bang shortcuts.
> DDG could proxy the traffic the way startpage does.
That would defeat the purpose of the bang shortcuts, which is to take you to the search results on other sites. Besides, they already offer this through !s.
The bang shortcuts just take you to the other websites.. sure, you gain a few things, like Google not knowing what you typed to arrive at the final search, typing speed, etc. but DDG can’t really do anything to protect your privacy once you’ve ended up at google.com.
I would assume they send the IP so that Bing will return location specific search results for weather, local businesses and such. I see no reason to assume malicious intent.
What’s stopping them from performing an offline IP location lookup and requesting location specific search results without sharing the IP with Microsoft?
Yeah their documentation is dreadful, but they could just append loc:countryCode to the query before making the API request: e.g. ‘attractions loc:dk’.. at least that works for me despite some people mentioning this filter is no longer supported.
Not sure how DDG and other search engines that rely on Bing does it, but it’s certainly possible without sharing the users’ IP with Microsoft.
It's really not. If you spent 10 minutes on HN Algolia and looked through all threads that reference China in the title (e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china&sort=byPopularity&prefix...), and then visited the comment section of any thread that had no relation to USA (e.g. "WeChat is Watching: Living in China with the app that knows everything about me", "Report on forced organ harvesting in China", etc.) then you'll always find Chinese nationalists/shills resorting to US whataboutism.. You can try to do the same with any other country, and you won't see this trend.
It's also very common for threads that are negative towards China to quickly disappear from the frontpage for no reason despite just recently appearing, or even being at the first position. An example from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336543. I really don't understand how you can deny this.
> you'll always find Chinese nationalists/shills resorting to US whataboutism
You've broken the site guidelines again with this. That's not cool. I'm not sure what to do besides repeat the explanation and links I just gave you.
> You can try to do the same with any other country, and you won't see this trend
Of course. That's the geopolitical battle of the moment. It was the same with Russia a year ago. All this shows is what controversy is hot right now.
> It's also very common for threads that are negative towards China to quickly disappear from the frontpage
Moderators routinely downweight hot controversies and political battles, as well as articles that repeat what has already been discussed recently. If we didn't, the front page would consist of nothing but that. Your mistake is in jumping to the conclusion that this has anything to do with our own political views or some secret bias about China. It does not. Our job is to protect HN from (a) mind-numbing repetition, and (b) earth-scorching flamewars. Why? Because those things kill intellectual curiosity, which is the point of this site. Everything we do as mods follows from that principle.
By the way, that last bit can be inverted to get a reliable test for moderator action on HN. If moderators do X, can you find a path from the principle of intellectual curiosity to X? If so, that's probably why we did it. If not, you can always ask us what the path is. We're happy to answer questions, but (again) as the guidelines say, it's better to send them to hn@ycombinator.com.
Could you clarify one thing: if a thread has already reached the frontpage (and is in a position where it should only continue to gain popularity rather than disappear, e.g. 50 upvotes in 20 minutes), does mass flagging the thread have any influence on its score? Because from outside observations it surely seems like it does, especially when you take into consideration that I’ve on several occasions seen a thread get knocked out, only for a moderator to push the thread back to the frontpage again.
I would also argue that by allowing users to resort to US whataboutism then these comments break multiple rules by introducing flamewars and engaging in political battles.. which, in my opinion, result in you failing to prevent (a) mind-numbing repetition, and (b) earth-scorching flamewars.
I’m also very curious about the logic behind down-weighting this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336543. In my opinion, it’s very high quality journalism, with two journalists risking their lives to give unprecedented access to a region that’s been technologically cut off from the rest of the world. I also believe it’s the first time we saw what China did to the children of the families that had been sent to the camps.
Normally I'm happy to answer questions like this. But when you repeat the very provocation that I just asked you twice to omit from your HN comments, my trust in your good faith diminishes.
It's unfortunately common for some users to question HN moderation as a way of challenging the mods to political or ideological duels. Our experience with that is that no matter how patiently one answers, every answer is met with a fresh flurry of litigious questions, because the purpose is not to learn but to fight. This is risky for us—it amounts to a DoS attack on the site, quickly exhausting our time and energy, stealing resources from other users and from work we might do to improve HN for everybody.
I'd be delighted to be wrong, but your comment seems to signal that you don't want to use HN as intended, which includes respecting the way it is currently moderated. So first I need a reason to believe that you actually do want that, and then I'll be happy to answer whatever you like.
If you feel my tone was aggressive, condescending or negative in other ways then I’m sorry.
I think it’s an unfair interpretation to believe that I don’t want to use HN as intended, I’m just tired of seeing every thread that’s critical of China head down the same path. You said:
> That is not at all an accurate description. This is a classic example of how people feel like the site is biased against their point of view even when it's the dominant one.
The US whataboutism is undeniable, you also acknowledged it yourself, while highlighting the same thing happened with Russian threads. I think it’s naive to believe that “all this shows is what controversy is hot right now”. Because it’s a common and effective tactic that occur on all social media, and in threads that aren’t related to China/Russia, everyone usually seem to be able to behave and stay on-topic.
As for mass flagging and quick downvotes, I can only make assumptions based on personal experience and careful observations (been using HN for over half a decade and tend to refresh the site every few minutes). You seem to blame/credit moderators for causing the threads to disappear, whereas I was under the impression it was often caused by mass flagging.. so I’m genuinely curious if flagging a thread has any effect on its position, or if it simply alert a moderator to take a closer look.
Every thread that paints China in a negative light on HN always follow the same pattern:
- USA whataboutism
- Mass flagging (resulting in the story getting knocked off the frontpage despite having a great upvote, comment and submission ratio)
- Comments negative towards China receive 1-5 quick downvotes before slowly climbing back to normal again
It’s really unfortunate that an otherwise well moderated community is so easily defeated by this abuse, and that there appear to be nothing being done to fix it despite many obvious and simple solutions (ignore flags and downvotes by those who abuse them, ban shills that resort to whataboutism from posting in threads containing /China/Chinese keywords).
That is not at all an accurate description. This is a classic example of how people feel like the site is biased against their point of view even when it's the dominant one. It's known as the hostile media effect: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
Your comment also broke the site guidelines against insinuations of astroturfing. People having opposing opinions on divisive topics is evidence of nothing other than that the topic is divisive. But the insinuation poisons discussions badly. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN. More on that from a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20370575.
This is a ridiculous suggestion. There is never a huge amount of posts that criticize the US gov, so it doesn't get enough viewing time even though there are a huge amount of horrendous actions the US are doing and elsewhere (UK etc).
Banning comments about whataboutism? LMAO. Censorship because people comment about how bad the US are? And youre bothered about Chinese ruling?
What’s stopping you from using multiple apps? You can probably convince most of your family and tech-savvy friends to download Signal/Jami/Keybase/whatever you might prefer.
No need to cut off people or uninstall insecure apps like Instagram to get to enjoy the benefits of communicating securely with some (rather than none) of your contacts.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who had less than 3 chat apps, and I can’t really relate to not remembering which contacts use which apps. Also, is a 50-100MB chat app really an issue when you have a 32+GB device? Even if only 1 person was willing to switch then I’d argue it’s a very small price to pay. Especially when the alternative is supporting an evil corporation that violate people’s privacy.
As for centralized logs, I would like for that as well, and I think something like Volt would be our best bet.
There are over 10.000 different bang shortcuts. They’re very valuable for several reasons, especially if you make DDG your default search engine. “Denmark !w” will take you to Denmark’s Wikipedia page, saving you the time and bandwidth it would take to click on the link through the DDG/Google result. Similarly, you can search “hello !gtda”; and sure, for short translation queries then you could also just type “hello danish” in Google, but try doing that with an entire paragraph. You could also search “duckduckgo !gandi” to see available duckduckgo domains on Gandi (or whichever domain registrar you prefer).
> And what DDG user would ever want to be redirected to Google? They're using DDG for a reason (and for 99%, it isn't the search engine quality). It just makes no sense.
DDG users aren’t (or at least they shouldn’t) append !g to all their searches.. it should only be used as a last resort (and even then they should still be using !s instead of !g). DDG’s primary selling point is privacy, but even if they were just as evil as Google (and there were no other privacy-friendly alternative available) then I’d still be using DDG as my default search engine thanks to the bang shortcuts.
> DDG could proxy the traffic the way startpage does.
That would defeat the purpose of the bang shortcuts, which is to take you to the search results on other sites. Besides, they already offer this through !s.