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Ask HN: Happy in the Hacker News Filter Bubble?
I get that there is a need to moderate what gets posted on this website, especially things that aren't relevant to this community. But aren't moral questions about the impacts of Silicon Valleys business models on the local community as well as global society just as important if not more so than "Alcatel-Lucent sets record of 10 Gbps over traditional copper telephone lines" and "Show HN: Sysadmin Casts – simple bite-sized sysadmin screencasts"?
If so, then why does legitimate discussion of the New Yorker's "The Tech Industry vs. San Francisco"[1] get shut down? Will this post itself get killed?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair. I've been repeating this quote a lot lately, but only because it is spot on.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8013773
- vasilipupkin 12y agoyou start by saying you get the need to moderate and then ask why something gets moderated :) sorry, couldn't resist
- wglb 12y agoPossibly was flagged by users. I find myself flagging stories that are going to lead to uninteresting or contentious discussion. And the first two comments prove this out. Many of the low-ranking posts and flagged posts are a result of user action, not moderator intervention.
- krapp 12y agoIt might be useful for killed threads to indicate whether they were killed by users or mods, so there's feedback as to whether the community or the staff were the ones taking issue with the content.
- brudgers 12y agoThere's an error in your premise. The discussion on the article was not legitimate on HN. The questions are important. The problem is that the discussions on HN make - in the words of Spolsky - the internet worse. It makes the internet worse because it makes HN worse. And it makes HN worse because it makes HN look like the rest of the internet. Don't misunderstand me. I have opinions and ideas about solutions and would love to discuss the issue thoughtfully on HN. But the reality is that it isn't going to happen. That thread is a big ball of asshattery and there are many other places on the internet where I can have more fun being an asshat when I am so inclined.
- eevilspock 12y agoWould love to hear your opinions and ideas about solutions. > But the reality is that it isn't going to happen. Self-fulfilling prophesy? Do we just give up on the web as a medium of discourse?
- brudgers 12y agoSolution to competing interests in San Francisco is political. To holding discussions where "Upton Sinclare questions your integrity" is acceptable means taking it down the road. The tone of the discussion does not meet the standards of HN's community. It is no more appropriate here than the topic itself is appropriate for StackOverflow. The issue isn't discourse, it's civil discourse and the discussion was not producing it nor was it likely to. There are sites where that's not a problem. Indeed, anyone who feels strongly about having that type of discussion can start their own site.