2 ms·

The entire point of clickbait sensationalist journalism is to get people fighting about non-issues. A guy who landed a probe on a fucking comet was forced to ap

by just2n 12y ago

The entire point of clickbait sensationalist journalism is to get people fighting about non-issues. A guy who landed a probe on a fucking comet was forced to apologize in tears because he wore a shirt that these same people disliked. Now even the MSM is pointing out how ridiculous that was. He was called sexist, exemplifying why women don't work in STEM. They just found evidence of organic matter on the comet. This is groundbreaking. But the fucking shirt. Scientific achievements don't generate the clicks and outrage like sensationalist "fuck ethics" journalism. Let's make HN about sensationalist articles about shirts and off-hand jokes at private dinners. Why not just unmod all of the websites that do this routinely. This is hardly as big as half of their "stories", and then let the front page be covered with stories that sit there for 2 days because they have 3000+ upvotes? This place has become a more toxic version of Reddit. Oddly, this story isn't on the front page there, or even on the front of /r/programming. Or even in the first 4 pages. I guess they're doing something better. How about we take it a step further and ban positive mention of Uber, since it seems the majority here hates Uber for one reason or another, even if they're mostly uninformed (and yes, quoting BuzzFeed or PandoDaily as fact makes one uninformed) or do so because someone poked their feelings. Maybe next we can ban gendered pronouns and require people disclose their full names, place of employment, and home address, because anonymity is the cause of online toxicity. We definitely need to lower the downvote bar to 0 so that new people can immediately begin downvoting anyone they don't like or disagree with. Let's see how deep this rabbit hole goes.

dang 12y ago
You obviously care about the quality of HN, as do I, as does the GP. What makes this a hard problem is that the community doesn't agree on what constitutes quality. Serious discussion about how to manage HN needs to begin with the insight that many people here disagree with one, and most are participating in as much good faith as oneself. If you don't take that in, you're not grappling with the real problem. (I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us.) In that case it inevitably feels like there are obvious solutions which for dark reasons we're refusing to implement. In reality, it's just a lot harder than that. That's incredibly frustrating, but we can't get anywhere by ignoring it.

by just2n 12y ago

dang 12y ago

You obviously care about the quality of HN, as do I, as does the GP. What makes this a hard problem is that the community doesn't agree on what constitutes quality. Serious discussion about how to manage HN needs to begin with the insight that many people here disagree with one, and most are participating in as much good faith as oneself. If you don't take that in, you're not grappling with the real problem. (I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us.) In that case it inevitably feels like there are obvious solutions which for dark reasons we're refusing to implement. In reality, it's just a lot harder than that. That's incredibly frustrating, but we can't get anywhere by ignoring it.