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Show HN: Hide all Snowden-related HN links with a Greasemonkey script

36 points by bpodgursky 13y ago

eieio 13y ago
Was this removed from the front page? It was in the top ten maybe 30 minutes ago, and now I can't find it in the first 4 pages...
- bpodgursky 13y ago
  Thread got hellbanned I guess. Hopefully it didn't ban my account as well.
  - eieio 13y ago
    Well I appreciated your post! I see your comment without showdead so I think you're good.
jardaroh 13y ago
Why? :s
- mfieldhouse 13y ago
  Because HN isn't a politics site. In fact it's not even a tech news site. That's what the likes of mashable are for.
  - buro9 13y ago
    Technology is a tool, how you use that tool is an expression of politics, whether or not you consciously think it is. It is inevitable that on a technology site, politics relating to technology will come in.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      Do they need to be ~80% of the front page though?
      - jardaroh 13y ago
        yes. Especially when it is of this importance. Even IF it was 80%, which of course it is not.
        jiggy2011 13y ago
        It isn't 80% right now thankfully, but it has been at many points over the last few weeks. I don't see what purpose it solves apart from making people avoid HN.
- film42 13y ago
  Because this is a site dedicated to programming and programmers' news. I can understand the NSA spying on its citizens being a relevant topic for this site, but now that the only thing keeping the news 'breaking' is his flight path, this story is no longer relevant. Important, sure. But not relevant to this website.
bpodgursky 13y ago
I'm sick of seeing nothing else on the front page. I'll go to reddit/r/politics when I want constant updates on his flight itinerary.
- austenallred 13y ago
  I understand if Steve Jobs dominates the front page when he dies, because he's Steve Jobs. But Edward Snowden has dominated the front page for a week, and little else slips through? I only hope enough people use a script like this that non-Snowden stories can gain traction.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - goldfeld 13y ago
    Are you joking? The death of a man who has contributed as much or more negatively to our industry as he did positively (on different spheres), and who gets the full frontpage only because he attracted a legion of irreparably clueless people, is more important than a case of the world's privacy in danger? (of course, it has been going for years, but it's great to finally hit the spotlight) Sorry if I'm offending someone, but I find the comparison really offensive myself.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pvnick 13y ago
Hacker News is the one place I've consistently found good information related to this extremely important case (that and Greenwald's twitter account itself). It's important to the HN community because we're typically technology-minded and libertarian-leaning, and these topics strike at the core of the privacy debate and "big data" issues. Therefore it seems to me to be a great place for Snowden-related news. Of course if you want to use this plugin go right ahead. But don't start grandstanding with philosophical statements about how "HN is only for startups" and "this site must stay away from politics" because 1) that's false and 2) you're probably not a moderator.
- bpodgursky 13y ago
  I'm not trying to make any philosophical statements. My problem is the HN coverage right now is not insightful, it's a paparazzi-level tracking of everything he says and does. In a couple months when the details have been filtered from the blogspam, maybe we can have an insightful discussion. Right now it is nothing of the sort.
  - clubhi 13y ago
    I can't wait until the NSA releases all the details on it. I'm curios to see if they discover they themselves did anything wrong.
- untog 13y ago
  I took this screenshot earlier (posted it earlier, apologies to anyone that's seen it before): http://i.imgur.com/sjNd5Z7.png http://i.imgur.com/sjNd5Z7.png Out of 24 stories, only two are about something other than Snowden and/or the NSA. I absolutely do think that Snowden coverage should be on HN. But that much? At a certain level you're just duplicating the same information, and repeating all the same talking points in different threads. If we could just stick to one or two articles at once it would be fine.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Respectfully, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. The people who are saying that HN "isn't for politics" aren't making that up; it's right there in the site guidelines. The cognitive dissonance you have here comes from three things, I think: * The moderators on HN take an extremely light touch with moderation; most of the stories that get "dead'd" on HN are killed by user flags, not directly by moderators. I think this is even more the case now that the "flamewar detector" is in place; stories that might have earned a moderator intervention 3 years ago are now left to be auto-buried by the flamewar detector. Buried != dead. * The "no politics" guideline on HN takes a back seat to the politics of the people who run HN. All signs point to Paul Graham being on your side of the Snowden and Manning cases; for instance, if you follow him on Twitter, he has posted supportive links. Similarly, Graham chimed in on a gun control thread in (IIRC) favor of gun control. * Many of the NSA stories that have appeared in the last few weeks have also been highly technical. There's a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game that gets played to try to connect the dots from any political story to hacking and startups, such that Ron Paul supporters have ready arguments for why their stories are germane to HN, but those stories tend to get flagged off anyways. Here, we're talking in large part about the internal retention policies of Google, and it's hard to make an argument that those stories aren't at least somewhat germane to HN. I've given up on the idea of flagging political NSA stories, but I would have a big problem with anyone drawing the conclusion that HN now encourages political stories. It doesn't, and it shouldn't, and it won't if it expects to maintain a civil community. Political discussions on HN spark enmity; people who could discuss eloquently and at length the details of programming languages or linguistics or literature instead follow each other around from threat to thread downvoting out of spite.
aidos 13y ago
I'd like to point out there are just 3 stories on the front page that this will remove - this being one of them.
- bpodgursky 13y ago
  Yeah.. sadly I had to temporarily turn turn off the script to read the comments.
NameNickHN 13y ago
Day 1: Hooray for Edward Snowden. Day 2: No get the hell out of here. We've enough of you. You're boring us.
vardl 13y ago
Why talk about Snowden when we can all discuss flavor-of-the-week javascript and rails crap that few people in the real world actually care about?
andrewcooke 13y ago
fwiw, this seems to have been removed from the main feed (i don't see it in the first 200 or so entries) and "ask". you've got what appears to be a hellbanned thread. oh the irony: 1 - hiding a thread "in support" of posts arguing for less secrecy; 2 - the people who would be most annoyed by this are the ones your script gives the bird to.

36 points by bpodgursky 13y ago

eieio 13y ago

Was this removed from the front page? It was in the top ten maybe 30 minutes ago, and now I can't find it in the first 4 pages...

bpodgursky 13y ago
Thread got hellbanned I guess. Hopefully it didn't ban my account as well.
- eieio 13y ago
  Well I appreciated your post! I see your comment without showdead so I think you're good.

jardaroh 13y ago

Why? :s

mfieldhouse 13y ago
Because HN isn't a politics site. In fact it's not even a tech news site. That's what the likes of mashable are for.
- buro9 13y ago
  Technology is a tool, how you use that tool is an expression of politics, whether or not you consciously think it is. It is inevitable that on a technology site, politics relating to technology will come in.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Do they need to be ~80% of the front page though?
    - jardaroh 13y ago
      yes. Especially when it is of this importance. Even IF it was 80%, which of course it is not.
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        It isn't 80% right now thankfully, but it has been at many points over the last few weeks. I don't see what purpose it solves apart from making people avoid HN.
film42 13y ago
Because this is a site dedicated to programming and programmers' news. I can understand the NSA spying on its citizens being a relevant topic for this site, but now that the only thing keeping the news 'breaking' is his flight path, this story is no longer relevant. Important, sure. But not relevant to this website.

bpodgursky 13y ago

I'm sick of seeing nothing else on the front page. I'll go to reddit/r/politics when I want constant updates on his flight itinerary.

austenallred 13y ago
I understand if Steve Jobs dominates the front page when he dies, because he's Steve Jobs. But Edward Snowden has dominated the front page for a week, and little else slips through? I only hope enough people use a script like this that non-Snowden stories can gain traction.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- goldfeld 13y ago
  Are you joking? The death of a man who has contributed as much or more negatively to our industry as he did positively (on different spheres), and who gets the full frontpage only because he attracted a legion of irreparably clueless people, is more important than a case of the world's privacy in danger? (of course, it has been going for years, but it's great to finally hit the spotlight) Sorry if I'm offending someone, but I find the comparison really offensive myself.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pvnick 13y ago

Hacker News is the one place I've consistently found good information related to this extremely important case (that and Greenwald's twitter account itself). It's important to the HN community because we're typically technology-minded and libertarian-leaning, and these topics strike at the core of the privacy debate and "big data" issues. Therefore it seems to me to be a great place for Snowden-related news. Of course if you want to use this plugin go right ahead. But don't start grandstanding with philosophical statements about how "HN is only for startups" and "this site must stay away from politics" because 1) that's false and 2) you're probably not a moderator.

bpodgursky 13y ago
I'm not trying to make any philosophical statements. My problem is the HN coverage right now is not insightful, it's a paparazzi-level tracking of everything he says and does. In a couple months when the details have been filtered from the blogspam, maybe we can have an insightful discussion. Right now it is nothing of the sort.
- clubhi 13y ago
  I can't wait until the NSA releases all the details on it. I'm curios to see if they discover they themselves did anything wrong.
untog 13y ago
I took this screenshot earlier (posted it earlier, apologies to anyone that's seen it before): http://i.imgur.com/sjNd5Z7.png http://i.imgur.com/sjNd5Z7.png Out of 24 stories, only two are about something other than Snowden and/or the NSA. I absolutely do think that Snowden coverage should be on HN. But that much? At a certain level you're just duplicating the same information, and repeating all the same talking points in different threads. If we could just stick to one or two articles at once it would be fine.
tptacek 13y ago
Respectfully, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. The people who are saying that HN "isn't for politics" aren't making that up; it's right there in the site guidelines. The cognitive dissonance you have here comes from three things, I think: * The moderators on HN take an extremely light touch with moderation; most of the stories that get "dead'd" on HN are killed by user flags, not directly by moderators. I think this is even more the case now that the "flamewar detector" is in place; stories that might have earned a moderator intervention 3 years ago are now left to be auto-buried by the flamewar detector. Buried != dead. * The "no politics" guideline on HN takes a back seat to the politics of the people who run HN. All signs point to Paul Graham being on your side of the Snowden and Manning cases; for instance, if you follow him on Twitter, he has posted supportive links. Similarly, Graham chimed in on a gun control thread in (IIRC) favor of gun control. * Many of the NSA stories that have appeared in the last few weeks have also been highly technical. There's a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" game that gets played to try to connect the dots from any political story to hacking and startups, such that Ron Paul supporters have ready arguments for why their stories are germane to HN, but those stories tend to get flagged off anyways. Here, we're talking in large part about the internal retention policies of Google, and it's hard to make an argument that those stories aren't at least somewhat germane to HN. I've given up on the idea of flagging political NSA stories, but I would have a big problem with anyone drawing the conclusion that HN now encourages political stories. It doesn't, and it shouldn't, and it won't if it expects to maintain a civil community. Political discussions on HN spark enmity; people who could discuss eloquently and at length the details of programming languages or linguistics or literature instead follow each other around from threat to thread downvoting out of spite.

aidos 13y ago

I'd like to point out there are just 3 stories on the front page that this will remove - this being one of them.

bpodgursky 13y ago
Yeah.. sadly I had to temporarily turn turn off the script to read the comments.

NameNickHN 13y ago

Day 1: Hooray for Edward Snowden. Day 2: No get the hell out of here. We've enough of you. You're boring us.

vardl 13y ago

Why talk about Snowden when we can all discuss flavor-of-the-week javascript and rails crap that few people in the real world actually care about?

andrewcooke 13y ago

fwiw, this seems to have been removed from the main feed (i don't see it in the first 200 or so entries) and "ask". you've got what appears to be a hellbanned thread. oh the irony: 1 - hiding a thread "in support" of posts arguing for less secrecy; 2 - the people who would be most annoyed by this are the ones your script gives the bird to.