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Let's hope this one doesn't get flagged and buried by the aggressive "I want HN to be a tech-only news site" crowd, like the other article did. edit: to add mo
by enraged_camel 10y ago
Let's hope this one doesn't get flagged and buried by the aggressive "I want HN to be a tech-only news site" crowd, like the other article did.
edit: to add more content, we may be witnessing history here. I think it would be a huge mistake for us to stick our heads in the sand in a misguided effort to avoid politicized discussions.
- chillwaves 10y agoWhich is unfortunate because I left work thinking I could catch up on the comments when I got home. I was wrong. Is there a way to find the old thread? I value the discussion this community has to offer. ETA: Thank you both
- pvg 10y agoThat's not why people flag these, I imagine.
- chillwaves 10y agoCare to imagine an alternative explanation?
- pvg 10y agoIt's regular news which is already listed as offtopic and worse, it's big, controversial political news which, for whatever reason, generates poor-quality discussion here. You don't have to believe HN is only for 'tech news' to think that.
- enraged_camel 10y ago>>It's regular news which is already listed as offtopic Um, no. the guidelines define "on-topic" as "anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." The fact that so many people upvoted the stories means there is an overwhelming desire to talk about them.
- pvg 10y agoYou're quoting half the guidelines. Right after they say "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." There are a zillion posts by moderators that go into great detail why 'lots of people upvoted it' is not a criterion for something being a good fit for the site.
- enraged_camel 10y agoYes, it says MOST stories about politics. Not all.
- pvg 10y agoYep, it's a little subjective. What I'm trying to tell you is that loudly berating people whose subjective views are different from your subjective views is a singularly ineffective way to convince them to see things your way.
- dang 10y ago> The fact that so many people upvoted the stories HN doesn't run on upvotes alone, so this argument doesn't prove anything. It's a constitutional democracy, with plenty of checks and balances to try to keep the system from running overheated. In this case the story fell squarely in the "most" of "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics"—why? because there's too little information in it to count as intellectually interesting. Indeed, if a story's entire information content fits in its title, that's a bad sign for HN suitability.
- pvg 10y agoYou're not doing your argument any favours by misrepresenting the reasons people might flag such stories and then basically calling people who have some other view on it blinkered and narrow-minded. I mean, think about it, that's not exactly an invitation to have a reasoned and enlightening discussion with you on some point of disagreement.