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Show HN: Smothering Discussion of Cryptocurrency on HN
At the weekend I clicked on a post on HN linking to Maciej Ceglowski's twitter that turned-out to be a scathingly brutal criticism of Bitcoin.
The HN post was climbing the front-page, and after I'd read the twitter thread I came back to upvote it. Right now I don't remember whether my upvote registered - my HN page was still open, and the post was still visible to me - but when I returned to the first page, it was mysteriously gone.
Only a couple minutes had passed, and I couldn't understand how a controversial Pinboard post had gone from climbing fast, to off the first page so quickly.
It wasn't on the second page, or the third page. I clicked on my browser history, but it seemed to be confused, as trying to return to the post simply got me back to the first page, and still no sign of it.[0]
So I decided to dupe the discussion - this is usually a sure-fire way to check whether a post has been deleted by the original poster, or if I would just get returned to the discussion I was duping.
To my surprise I was now the 'first' poster of this tweet on HN. So the original poster had deleted their post after all (I thought).
Within just a few short minutes my post had also disappeared - almost instantly flagged into oblivion while also climbing fast on the first page.
dang does a great job of moderation, but even he was misled into thinking there was an innocent explanation for the flagging:
"Edit: oh, the much simpler answer is that it was posted twice and both posts were on the front page. People flagged the dupe. That's fair."
The truth is, the two posts never got the chance to be on the first-page at the same time, because some people seem to be hellbent on censoring information on HN, and nearly succeeding.
This critical discussion of crypto was disappeared before it could become popular.
[0] I'm not sure whether having showdead set to 'yes' would have made any difference here?
- detaro 5y ago... because HN doesn't have enough repeats of the exact same discussions of cryptocurrency? Crying "censorship" here is a bit over the top.
- null_object 5y ago>... because HN doesn't have enough repeats of the exact same discussions of cryptocurrency? Crying "censorship" here is a bit over the top. It seems to me that you've misinterpreted the flow of events that I've described. There was never a chance to repeat "the exact same discussions of cryptocurrency" on HN, because both times the posts were flagged into oblivion almost instantaneously. They were never concurrent, because the first post was killed before I inadvertently 'duped' it.
- detaro 5y agoNo, the question of why we should have that topic again also applies to the first submission. Again, it's like you can't find enough "cryptocurrencies are bad" discussions in the past few weeks. I didn't flag it, but I understand why people do it, just because someone else has said the thing on Twitter doesn't make in an interesting or relevant new submission. (The same applies to other topics too, e.g. "Tesla good/bad" takes that don't discuss any or only trivial new developments)
- null_object 5y agoThe significant factor for me, was not that the flagging was due to 'discussion-fatigue' of a popular topic, but that in the case of both submissions (the original and my inadvertent dupe) it was used as an underhand way to counteract the extremely fast velocity to the top of the front-page.
- meiraleal 5y agoIf most hackers want to discuss it, why not? Including discuss why HN community and moderation seems to be proud of not supporting crypto? I'm starting to see a parallel between Hackernews/Web 2.0/Startups and crypto/web3.0/blockchains and the downfall of the former.
- gandalfian 5y agoI assumed it was because it was a brief twitter post pointing to the article. Why not submit the actual article? It does seem to have lots of points though and still gaining so? Perhaps it was just too populist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27336846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27336846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27335574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27335574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27335940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27335940