3 ms·

Given that the first submission had over 70 points after a few minutes, I don't think this is the case. I do think that people are interested in this story, oth

• dang 8y ago
  Yes, some users upvoted it and other users flagged it. The flags greatly outweighed the upvotes, and that represents the community verdict on the topic. This is how HN's system has always worked. There is no evidence of abuse, and the comments users posted, disagreeing that the story was serious, are clear evidence of what the bulk of the community thinks of it. Indignation posts routinely get lots of upvotes. That's a weakness of the upvoting system, not evidence of a good submission. This is one of the reasons why HN needs flags in the first place. Since this whole discussion is a non-story—HN working the way it has worked for over ten years—I don't think further comments are likely to add anything new.
  • falcon620 8y ago
    > The flags outweighed the upvotes. Are you saying there were more flags than upvotes and that this is the trigger for the non-linear movement to page 3?
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Are you saying there were more flags than upvotes Flags, I'm pretty sure, weigh more heavily than upvotes, on a per-item basis.
  • hmyr0 8y ago
    Thanks for your reply. I'm relatively new to HN, so please excuse my ignorance if I'm misunderstanding how the site works, but it seems like currently there is significant feature overlap between downvoting and flagging, and in addition downvoting requires karma. This seems to incentivize flagging of submissions even if they are not "spam or off-topic" as described in the site guidelines. I don't believe this was some kind of Microsoft-coordinated operation to censor criticism on HN, but I am surprised by how a few flags can silence such a popular submission. I also do not consider the submission an "indignation post" or a "fanatic and paranoid dramatization" as it was referred to in a comment. I shared the link with the intent to make people aware of the removal of the repository from Trending, no more than that. I believe that GitHub is well within its rights to remove content from Trending, and I did not at any point complain or attempt to incite a flame war against Microsoft. My intention was simply to make people aware to allow them to make their own decisions about whether or not to continue using GitHub. Regarding "over-promotion" of the story, I posted the original link shortly after I noticed the repository disappearing from Trending. I don't think anyone else posted it before, but if they did, I likely didn't see it because it was also flagged.
    • tomhoward 8y ago
      There’s no downvoting on stories at any karma level. Only comments. On stories, users can either upvote if they like the story or flag it if they think it’s the wrong type of content for HN. So, no overlap. You might consider that dang has been an avid and respected user of HN since it began over 10 years ago, and has worked on it as his primary occupation for 6 years, so by now he knows a thing or two about what kinds of content, functionality and conduct are conducive to a healthy community.
      • hmyr0 8y ago
        In that case, maybe it would be beneficial to add that functionality and to encourage users to downvote instead of flagging. Currently, spam, malware and warez are treated the same as submissions some people consider uninteresting, and while that does eliminate many controversial topics that could've led to debates, it also removes an entire class of content that many people do find relevant and interesting. I have no doubt that dang knows what he is talking about, and arguably flagging on Hacker News is very effective at combating spam. However, no system is perfect, and neither is Hacker News[1]. I believe that the majority of HN users is mature enough to have sensible discussions even about controversial issues, and that showing submissions that most people like won't lead to an unhealthy community, even if a small number of people do not find the submission interesting. [1]: https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html
        • tomhoward 8y ago
          Before you comment or think too much more about this topic, it might be helpful to (re-)familiarise yourself with the guidelines about what is on-topic vs off-topic on HN [1] In particular, what is on-topic is: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. That's it. Anything is allowed, and is embraced by the community, as long as it is intellectually interesting and cultivates interesting discussions, and people flag things that that are repetitive and lead to boring, predictable discussions. Remember that the topic that triggered this discussion was Github's decision to remove from trending, a repo that was trending only due to activist campaigning, not due to being an interesting software project. There has been no shortage of discussion about the MS/Github deal in the past week; there have been multiple stories about it on the front page at almost any time since the acquisition speculation began. For this particular micro-drama to be deemed below the standard of intellectual curiosity that HN expects, does not indicate any failure that needs to be remedied. Can you not believe that after so many years of observing and guiding this community, that dang has developed a good sense of what the majority of the community wants and how best to keep it healthy? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html