

Dear parents, you need to control your kids. Sincerely, non-parents - drharris
http://themattwalshblog.com/2013/09/15/dear-parents-you-need-to-control-your-kids-sincerely-non-parents/

======
drharris
Hypothesis confirmed. I posted this as an experiment to see how moderation
occurs. People were clearly interested in this (7 points in 15 minutes), made
it to #11 on the front page, and then was killed completely. I was mainly
curious how these articles (non-startup, non-tech) that are quite interesting
get killed so quickly, and now I know.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Lots of us flag "non-startup, non-tech" articles like this. They belong on
reddit, not here. Think of HN as /r/startups + /r/coding or something, of
course general interest articles like this are going to get moderated out,
with the help of flaggers.

~~~
drharris
That's fine, but from the guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups.

Certainly if it's not interesting to the community, it wouldn't get upvoted
enough to make it very far.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Amost _everything_ is interesting to hackers, we're a curious open-minded
bunch by nature. But notice the guideline says "good hackers", implying an
expectation of posts and discussions of a deeply technical and analytical
nature. Rants about day-to-day annoyances need not apply.

Also, HN can't be a site about everything, or it becomes a site about nothing,
no different from any other news aggregator out there.

The theme of tech and startups and stuff directly related to them (like legal
issues) needs to be enforced, and is.

Mind candy posts like this get unthinking upvotes, and that is exacerbated b/c
unlike reddit, you can't un-upvote after you've thought better of it. Hence
the mods cull posts like this, and the community flags it to help the mods
catch it.

