5 ms·
I like the current guidelines which I'll summarize as "interesting things of interest to hackers." I agree that "7 degrees of reddit" or whatever is bending th
by bugsy 16y ago
I like the current guidelines which I'll summarize as "interesting things of interest to hackers."
I agree that "7 degrees of reddit" or whatever is bending the rules too much.
Something like a hard ban on politics might lose things that are of interest. For example, what role are technical tools playing in the arabic revolutions right now? Obviously Wikileaks, reddit, youtube, twitter and facebook are playing major roles. And what role are hackers playing? Assange, Anonymous, and the Egyptian Google guy are all using technical skills to create worldwide revolution. That's pretty exciting, using technology to make political change. But should discussing it be banned? Is it necessary to ban that to get rid of the various latest cop shooting incidents reposted from reddit where technology is at most a minor role.
- tptacek 16y agoNot only do I think a lot of the "how technology is changing the Middle East" comments shouldn't be on the front page, but so does Paul Graham; he manually buried a bunch of them last week, despite hugely high ratings.
- bugsy 16y agoNow THAT'S politics.
- tptacek 16y agoThat's a semantic game. We all know what the word "politics" in the site guidelines means.
- bugsy 16y agoSo the articles are interesting and have huge ratings so they are of interest to hackers and they are about technology, but one person with power decides he doesn't want to see the topic discussed, so he squashes all discussion with the thumb of a dictator who must not be questioned. How is this not politics.
- tptacek 16y agoJust so everyone's clear, the mighty-thumbed dictator we're talking about here is Paul Graham.
- dwwoelfel 16y agoHow do you know that he manually buried them?
- tptacek 16y ago(a) Because he did it before with TSA stories. (b) Because one minute there was a 200+ story at the top of the page less than a day old, and the next minute there was no such story at the top of the new page, and yet the story hadn't been flagged.
- dwwoelfel 16y agoAccording to this comment, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1936734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1936734, any admin can "kill [an article], mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing". That implies that pg may not have buried it, and that he didn't make some special exception for that one topic.
- tptacek 16y agoAll the Egypt stories vanished from the front page at the same time, but I'm not an admin and concede that I could be incorrect about this. He said specifically he was burying TSA stories a few months ago.
- pg 16y agoDo you remember which stories? BTW, tagging a story as political doesn't cause it to disappear; it just ranks lower, but would probably still be on the frontpage if it had a lot of points.
- statictype 16y agoIs tagging an explicit feature of the site? Since I have not seen it, I assume there's a karma threshold for it?
- tptacek 16y agoNone of us can "tag" things except Graham and his minions.
- tptacek 16y agoThe "Mubarak resigns" one is the one I remember.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]