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Ask HN: Has the HN entry about Sam Altman running for office just been removed?

• jswrenn 9y ago
  It was marked as a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14342198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14342198
  • midgetjones 9y ago
    It doesn't look like that particular link has been previously posted though.
    • dang 9y ago
      Multiple articles on the same story can get flagged as dupes even though they come from different sites/links. The test isn't "is this URL unique", it's "does this story add significant new information". That dates from the Snowden storm of 2013, when the HN front page was dominated by copycat articles that added nothing new, and were just follow-ups to other stories which had already been discussed. Many users disliked that and we realized they were right and came up with the 'significant new information' test in response. It works surprisingly well.
      • midgetjones 9y ago
        Interesting, thanks.
  • smcl 9y ago
    ... of a submission which got flagged and disappeared
  • camillomiller 9y ago
    Which was flagged... Why? Said dupe was ON TOP of the home page, whereas the other entry was definitively not popular. Result: the news has been buried. Am I allowed to say I smell something foul?
    • probably_wrong 9y ago
      Of course you are allowed to say that, but at the same time, I would have totally flagged that story if I had seen it for the same reasons I flagged this one: I don't live in the US, I don't care about politics, and I have no interest in random rumors.
      • midgetjones 9y ago
        Plenty of other people thought the opposite and got this thread on to the front page though. Brilliantly, this also got posted by the twitterbot before it was flagged https://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/864149156004335617 https://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/86414915600433561...
        • dang 9y ago
          > the twitterbot Your use of the definite article compels me to point out that that isn't official at all. Plenty of people do third-party things with HN stuff. We mostly don't mind and we also mostly don't know.
          • midgetjones 9y ago
            My apologies for making assumptions :)
      • camillomiller 9y ago
        This same thread has bene flagged after rising to the top of the home page... What the heck?
        • 9y ago
• minimaxir 9y ago
  Also, in general when a story disappears while not being a dupe: > Users flagged it. That's nearly always the explanation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337524
  • camillomiller 9y ago
    Ok, I'd love to understand why a perfectly regular piece of news was flagged, then. Definitively something not transparent going on, on a very sensitive subject for the community.
    • firloop 9y ago
      I think for better or worse, a lot of HN users don't like seeing politics on the homepage. Similar posts about other polticians get flagged quickly as well. I don't think it needs to be any more complicated than that. I do think politics has some place on HN. Some of my favorite threads last year were after Brexit and the U.S. presidential election results, and I was disappointed to see that two of my recent submissions about the middle east were flagged as soon as they began to gain traction.
      • cannonpr 9y ago
        I agree it's not that uncommon to see stuff flagged and removed, especially of political nature, especially when it's something not viewed in a positive light by the moderators in HN. It's not exactly 'free speech guaranteed' on HN. From guidelines: "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." This allows them a lot of leeway to take stuff down.
        • camillomiller 9y ago
          The rise Of a political class bred by the technology capital. How is this NOT a new phenomenon worthy of interest for anybody who's into technology and its impact on culture and society?
• yev 9y ago
  Maybe people flagged it as not all HN readers live in US and care about US politics.
• dang 9y ago
  I'll answer this in a few minutes. The answer is what it usually is (user flags and/or dupe) but I suppose a bit more explanation might be helpful. Edit: ok, here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14342198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14342198 was flagged as a dupe because it points to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14337507, which at 109 points and 41 comments clearly passes the 'significant attention' test for duplicates (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Did that story belong on HN in the first place? Yes and no. On the one hand it's sensational and super close to home. On the other, it's far from substantive. All that happened is a gossip column published one side of a conversation and then the click-starved trade sites farmed it out in their usual fashion. If there's an 'interesting phenomenon' in HN's sense here, I'd say it's that Willie Brown became an old-school, Herb-Caen-style society columnist after his incredibly long political career. I had no idea. A couple more points about standard HN practice. First, when a story hasn't happened yet, there's usually little value in discussing it. Most stories that haven't happened, never do happen. We call this category "announcement of an announcement" and have learned over the years that it is the low-hanging fruit of offtopicness. Some recent comments on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14311910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14311910 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14314105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14314105. For HN purposes, there's no harm in waiting for the actual thing to occur. Patience is a virtue i.e. a strength. Second, when stories about YC are involved, we moderate HN less, not more. That's literally the first principle of HN moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20moderate%20less%20not%20more%20yc https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&date.... This case is a funny one though. What does 'moderating less' mean? If we mark a post about this as a dupe or penalize it as fluff, some say we're moderating HN to suppress an unwanted story. But suppose it spent the day on HN's front page instead—then others would say we were moderating HN to stealth-promote a political career. That's a classic Bateson double bind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind.
• angry-hacker 9y ago
  All in all I hope we can see Thiel against him to balance it out.