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The story was explicitly brought back. You can upvote a dead story, but I'm not sure whether the submitter gains karma for that, and whether that causes the st

by palish 18y ago

The story was explicitly brought back. You can upvote a dead story, but I'm not sure whether the submitter gains karma for that, and whether that causes the story to move higher up the front page. But the story will remain dead unless necromanced. This seems like a good time to share some thoughts about killing submissions. The troubling aspects of the current "dead submission" implementation are: - You can't comment on the submission itself, only reply to existing comments. I understand the motivation for this, but it feels too close to censorship. - After a submission is killed, there is no way to visit it. It is good that dead stories are no longer clickable, but I wish there were some way to reconstruct its URL for the highly motivated. - No reason is given for killing a story. Sometimes a reason is posted in comments, but it's not mandatory. Requiring a one-line justification from the executioner would be both educational and personal. Also, given that this unabashedly-political article is apparently supported by Management, it seems really hypocritical to disable dantheman's long-standing account without warning, apparently for submitting one off-topic political story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 ... It would be "important" if courts were using evidence despite police errors, right? Then why is Gaza "important enough" to be featured on Hacker News, but the US isn't? I wish I could be certain that there's actually a double-standard in play here, but it's not mandatory to provide a reason for disabling an account (or for killing a story), so there's no way to find out unless I ask. More mysteriously, dantheman's off-topic submission was never killed; his account was simply disabled. So what's going on here? Has he emailed yet? On a personal note, I'm not looking to pick a fight. I'm just concerned about my fellow users and about the direction of the community. It would be great if dantheman's account wasn't actually disabled for submitting a political story, and all of this was just a misunderstanding.

pg 18y ago
Dantheman's account wasn't disabled for submitting that comment, but for reinserting editorial remarks in a submission title after I'd reverted it to the original. There's currently no way to lock story titles, so the only way to avoid an endless cycle of reverts was to disable his account for a few hours. I only replied to that comment because there was no other way of contacting him; he had no email addr in his profile. I reinstated his account as soon as he emailed me.
- palish 18y ago
  Thank you for clarifying. I wonder if that's a symptom that a private messaging system would be useful for HN? But I'm really glad that dantheman learned from the experience instead of just leaving the site entirely, and I wonder if there's a way of making it obvious what happened so that other users could also be taught to avoid bad behavior. But it probably doesn't matter much. Sorry for my possibly-inflammatory post; I'm fine with it being deleted if you'd like.
  - pg 18y ago
    There already is private messaging within HN. We use it to communicate with founders and applicants. The main reason it's not turned on for everyone is that I worry about the attendant bureaucratic hassles. There are probably all kinds of laws either guarding people's privacy or insuring they have none from governments, and I don't even know what they are.
    - olefoo 18y ago
      If you're providing a messaging system analogous to email you should be covered by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio... However, given the nature of the site membership, and the potential for a deal gone bad to result in the subpoena of any private communications a given user might have had, it's easy to see why you have not enabled this feature.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

by palish 18y ago

pg 18y ago

Dantheman's account wasn't disabled for submitting that comment, but for reinserting editorial remarks in a submission title after I'd reverted it to the original. There's currently no way to lock story titles, so the only way to avoid an endless cycle of reverts was to disable his account for a few hours. I only replied to that comment because there was no other way of contacting him; he had no email addr in his profile. I reinstated his account as soon as he emailed me.

palish 18y ago
Thank you for clarifying. I wonder if that's a symptom that a private messaging system would be useful for HN? But I'm really glad that dantheman learned from the experience instead of just leaving the site entirely, and I wonder if there's a way of making it obvious what happened so that other users could also be taught to avoid bad behavior. But it probably doesn't matter much. Sorry for my possibly-inflammatory post; I'm fine with it being deleted if you'd like.
- pg 18y ago
  There already is private messaging within HN. We use it to communicate with founders and applicants. The main reason it's not turned on for everyone is that I worry about the attendant bureaucratic hassles. There are probably all kinds of laws either guarding people's privacy or insuring they have none from governments, and I don't even know what they are.
  - olefoo 18y ago
    If you're providing a messaging system analogous to email you should be covered by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio... However, given the nature of the site membership, and the potential for a deal gone bad to result in the subpoena of any private communications a given user might have had, it's easy to see why you have not enabled this feature.

deleted 18y ago

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