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Ask HN: Is HN Indifferent to Covid19?
It's bizarre that HN frontpage contains trivial posts about some haskell function or some vuln in tesla cars when the world economy is grinding to an abrupt stop with consequences years ahead. Is HN removing covid posts or are people here really blind to what's about to hit them? Tech should probably be singularly focused on mitigation solutions at the moment.
- GardenStick 7y agoAlgorithms are used to curtail posts about the virus? Conspiracy. /Me slinks into the dark
- wglb 7y agoI’ve seen a lot of related posts. If you go to the “new” items, a substantial fraction of the posts are about the virus. With that many posts, it may be that few get enough votes to hit the front page.
- sneak 7y agoNo; many hit the top ten of the front page quickly, within minutes. It appears that they are being manually censored periodically, or perhaps by a keyword cronjob that runs at a greater than 5 minute interval. Source: I load HN way too much.
- wglb 7y agoClick on the support link at the bottom of the page.
- sneak 7y agoNo, they are simply aggressively censoring stories that trend. It appears to be a manual process. The front page would be filled with little else if they did not. The censorship appears to extend even to adjacent news, like CA municipalities adjusting liquor regulations, et c. The story about a letter from the CA governor to the president was censored, as well. Set up a script to diff the front page every 5 mins to see what I mean. Their site, their rules. It still sucks, though. :( Examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22643306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22643306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633570
- dang 7y agoI think your examples are clarifying. Adjustments to liquor regulations and a governor writing a president aren't significant enough stories to devote precious frontpage slots to. If that's where we place the bar, certainly the front page will be filled with little else. By contrast, the story where the CA governor issued a stay-at-home order got plenty of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633798. There's room to disagree on which particular stories ought to clear the bar, but I hope the principles are at least clear in my explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644521.
- sneak 7y agoAbsolutely, and thanks for the clarification. Perhaps you might want to publish a log of the things you aggressively downmod (contrary to the votes they receive) for being offtopic in the interest of curiosity/transparency? Maybe something like /leaders, a URL that isn't linked to from the frontpage? It would clear up confusion like this Ask HN. I think there's value in links that get a lot of support, and it seems a shame to throw them away totally, even if they don't belong on the frontpage. I'd certainly peruse the stuff on such a list. Unlike /newest, it'd be mostly high-quality stuff, as otherwise it wouldn't have trended high/needed downmodding in the first place.
- dang 7y agoThe reason we don't is that it would likely spawn more meta-discussion and litigation about how HN is moderated. We don't have the resources for that (or the stomach). Most users don't care that much—I know that because if they did, we'd never hear the end of it—and those who do tend to be the litigious type who raise two new objections for every answer you give them. To play that game is to agree to a DoS attack on yourself. It sucks up limited resources that should be going into making the site better for everyone: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20resources&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That said, we're 100% in favor of satisfying users' curiosity about how HN is operated and moderated. We just do it ad hoc, by answering specific questions, rather than building meta facilities. From my perspective the issue isn't secrecy, it's efficiency. If meta facilities would actually be more efficient, that would be a great reason to build them. I would love it if software could alleviate more of our load. Unfortunately, I fear that they would have the opposite effect. The founder of a well-known forum that is older than HN once told me that introducing a meta section was the worst decision they had made and that we would be crazy to do that.
- anigbrowl 7y agoThe latter (ie I don't think the moderators are removing them, although many are being flagged). . There's also an element of glibertarianism that colors which stories get attention.
- mindcrime 7y agoWhy is it so important to you that we get our COVID-19 news here? There is no shortage of other outlets / sites covering it in excruciating detail. For example, https://covid19.reddit.com https://covid19.reddit.com Do we really need the HN frontpage to look like a mirror of /r/covid19? Not to mention that, for people who use Facebook / Twitter / etc., our feeds are pretty much jammed full of COVID-19 talk all day long. I'd kinda like to come here and find a nice story about implementing LISP on Plan-9 running on MIPS using an XFS filesystem, or something else to get my mind off of the virus stuff. It's important, but I don't find that it's so important to warrant thinking about it to the exclusion of everything else.
- dang 7y agoI answered this question in the discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22643381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22643381.
- buboard 7y agothat is ... sad? I was hoping that the audience here would do a more critical reading of news , so the info at the frontpage would at least be useful. Plus we need to motivate hackers to create solutiosn for this crisis. I think HN is underestimating the gravity of the crisis , and it's obvious by the absolute triviality of the posts right now (how to create a pencil effect in SVG? Seriously?)
- dang 7y agoThere have been major threads in the last few days that could loosely be described as hackers working on the problem. Here are three examples that come to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640451 In at least two of the three, moderators intervened to keep the thread up. If you (or anyone) know of other submissions that are intellectually interesting and have this quality of people working on the problem, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We might be able to do something.