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It's not a phenomenon; users are not out to oppress or censor anyone. These types of stories are terrible in terms of quality of discussion, and provide almost

It's not a phenomenon; users are not out to oppress or censor anyone. These types of stories are terrible in terms of quality of discussion, and provide almost nothing to satisfy one's intellectual curiosity. This whole thread is he said / she said feces-flinging, and many people would rather have interesting articles on the front page. It's essentially tabloid gossip, and has been discussed to death on reddit / twitter already. I'm not taking sides here, I could care less about GG or a dev who gets into twitter fights. Here's what would be useful to post instead: - Github link to a crowd-sourced code of conduct anyone can help improve - A compilation of useful tips for interacting with / contributing to open source projects I lost braincells reading this thread, and that's not why I visit HN.

geofft 11y ago
Yeah, I do agree that HN could handle the discussion more productively. But preemptively flagging stories as categorically unacceptable for HN seems like a way to make that never happen. There is a good discussion to be had about, say, whether an open-source project should welcome someone whose views make existing members uncomfortable, how much voice an inactive member should still have, how to handle trademarks in a spirit of community while still making names meaningful, what authority a core team should have and when they should feel comfortable removing active contributors, etc. Discussing them in the context of this incident would inform those two discussions you suggested; otherwise we have people constructing codes of conduct from intuition and first principles, which seems most likely to be counterproductive. It is somewhat unfortunate that we don't have a response from core or the Foundation about how they saw things from their end and what their pressures were. But admittedly it's a fairly large cultural shift to be willing to talk about these things openly.
- bbradley406 11y ago
  Agreed! I think part of the problem could be that the first, say 10-20, comments on a controversial story won't be very good. This makes people flag it before (hopefully) a lot of genuine thought and effort goes into the comments. I'm not familiar with how flags affect a post's rank on the front page. Thinking out loud, a system where the first user flag has minimal impact and the impact grows very slowly with each additional flag could work. Even though I find it uninteresting, it's arguably necessary in the same way people post here when they can't reach someone at a large company they're having issues with in the hopes that an employee will come to their aid.
  - geofft 11y ago
    Hm, there's a meta-question of whether the purpose of HN is stories or comments. I think the story itself is worth the hacker community reading, regardless of the quality of the comments. A specific flag for "the comments will turn into a flamewar, but we shouldn't let the threat of a flamewar silence the story itself" might be useful. And in this case, 'dang manually did take action to curb low-quality comments. Having a user-initiated flag that restricts posting by users postdating the story, increases the waiting period on replies, etc. (and alerts moderators) might be more useful than simply removing the story from the front page (but allowing people to come in via external links).

geofft 11y ago

Yeah, I do agree that HN could handle the discussion more productively. But preemptively flagging stories as categorically unacceptable for HN seems like a way to make that never happen. There is a good discussion to be had about, say, whether an open-source project should welcome someone whose views make existing members uncomfortable, how much voice an inactive member should still have, how to handle trademarks in a spirit of community while still making names meaningful, what authority a core team should have and when they should feel comfortable removing active contributors, etc. Discussing them in the context of this incident would inform those two discussions you suggested; otherwise we have people constructing codes of conduct from intuition and first principles, which seems most likely to be counterproductive. It is somewhat unfortunate that we don't have a response from core or the Foundation about how they saw things from their end and what their pressures were. But admittedly it's a fairly large cultural shift to be willing to talk about these things openly.

bbradley406 11y ago
Agreed! I think part of the problem could be that the first, say 10-20, comments on a controversial story won't be very good. This makes people flag it before (hopefully) a lot of genuine thought and effort goes into the comments. I'm not familiar with how flags affect a post's rank on the front page. Thinking out loud, a system where the first user flag has minimal impact and the impact grows very slowly with each additional flag could work. Even though I find it uninteresting, it's arguably necessary in the same way people post here when they can't reach someone at a large company they're having issues with in the hopes that an employee will come to their aid.
- geofft 11y ago
  Hm, there's a meta-question of whether the purpose of HN is stories or comments. I think the story itself is worth the hacker community reading, regardless of the quality of the comments. A specific flag for "the comments will turn into a flamewar, but we shouldn't let the threat of a flamewar silence the story itself" might be useful. And in this case, 'dang manually did take action to curb low-quality comments. Having a user-initiated flag that restricts posting by users postdating the story, increases the waiting period on replies, etc. (and alerts moderators) might be more useful than simply removing the story from the front page (but allowing people to come in via external links).