

Ask HN: Objecting to stories being killed - tc

I concur with the value of keeping meta-discussion on HN to a minimum, but sometimes it really surprises me when a story gets killed.<p>At one point, you could object by commenting in the thread under an existing comment.  That often caused moderators to reverse the kill if a legitimate point about relevance was raised.  It seems this has been disabled.<p>This came to mind today when I noticed that the stories of recording studio engineers about the experience of working with Michael Jackson, about his work ethic and management style, was killed after 77 points [1].<p>If anything, that set of stories is the very most relevant, and definitely the very most interesting, of all the things about Jackson that have been posted here.  The stories are told from a very 'hackerly' perspective, and the peripheral environment of the stories -- recording studios and the related technology and business environment -- are interesting to many people in this audience.  The comment thread had some interesting tidbits, and looked in no danger of going astray.  And as a point of comparison, I very much doubt that a much less interesting or timely 400 word blog post about the "value of a strong work ethic" would have been killed on HN.<p>Anyway, this is all just peanuts in the long term for HN, but it seems we should work out a way of raising a legitimate objection to a moderator kill without resorting to an 'Ask HN' comment such as this.<p>[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685603
======
pj
Aren't submissions killed through flagging? It's the community that kills
posts, rather than the moderators. I haven't looked at the code, but I think
it's something that is automatic. Some clarification on that?

Preface: I love meta-conversation. It's like introspection and from
introspection, there is growth...

I am with you. I thoroughly enjoyed the post. I like knowing that MJ was a
very nice man and very genuine. He was an authentic person in a sea of frauds
and bluffers -- a breath of fresh air.

Anyway, this is just a problem with community. Communities are just aggregates
of the individuals. I lurked at HN for a long time before I decided to join in
and try to add value. I like HN because the community here values truth above
all. There was a desire to have open conversation and see all sides of an
argument and really dig deep into a topic to figure out what is going on.

I think the MJ issue is one of those. It's an interesting story. A long life
of hard work, sacrifice, a rollercoaster of a life. His is the kind of lesson
we can learn from.

But the community here is very ... narrow minded I would say. It's young. It
hasn't "Learned the hard way" so to speak. It's quick to adopt new
technologies. It's slow to learn from the past. This community _wants_ change.
It _wants_ something different. But Michael Jackson stories have quickly
become "the same." This community wants to get away from that.

Anyway, I'm just rambling here. Flag me if you want, [dead] my comment. I'm
just talking. I don't have an agenda, but it seems more often than not,
agendas are being pushed here. Propaganda.

Some of the agendas around here: Open Source, No SQL, Anti-Microsoft, Anti-
higher education, Programming language elitism, environmentalism, healthcare
reform, pirating copyrighted material, and getting rich quick to name a few.
Some are my agendas, some aren't, but anything contrary to these positions is
ignored or flamed for community selection bias. There are people in the group
who are not like that, of course. I appreciate lots of comments on both sides.
Some of those things I mentioned above I dont like so much, but I tolerate
them. Nothing is perfect right? Really my goal is to find truth, but it seems
like truth is becoming less of an agenda around here. Logical and rational
conversation is becoming [dead] as well.

As the community gets larger, it's going to approach "main stream." And there
is a mainstream even among programmers, the l33t ones. I feel like I'm talking
to myself 10 years ago. I thought I knew a lot more than I did. I'm not wise
by any measure, but I see myself in hacker news, so I can reflect on it with
some hindsight, because it is a lot more like myself 10 years ago when I was
... more naive, more optimistic. I didn't know that change isn't always good
back then. I was invincible. I could fix the world. I can still fix the world
though. :)

Anyway, none of this matters. I'm just occupying brain waves while I am in
transition, so I come here to entertain myself. Perhaps that is the crux of
it. Hacker News is about entertainment -- entertainment of a "different" sort
and that's why pop entertainment is flagged. Michael Jackson is part of that.

I have noticed over time, that to have constructive conversation, you must
first agree, then explore. That happened a lot here. "Yes, that's possible,
let's see.. let's think about that a little bit." But less thinking is
happening and more "regurgitation" is the norm. It's normal I suppose. The
only solution, if you find that what you are looking for is starting to "go
away" is to start another community or find a new one.

Ask yourself, "From what did this community start?" That nerve is the focus
from which dendrites sprout and axons connect and so I'll get off my soap box
after I say, I still love hacker news. I think it's still the best aggregator
out there. It's a pretty smart community. It humbles me all the time and
that's what we need in life is a little humility. I wander around in the
"real" world and I feel too smart for my own good. I come here and I feel dumb
and it's awesome. It's good to know that there are people like this community
out there.

EDIT: Wow... this topic was on the front page, then dead, then on #2. It is an
example of itself.

~~~
tokenadult
_Some of the agendas around here: Open Source, No SQL, Anti-Microsoft, Anti-
higher education, Programming language elitism, environmentalism, healthcare
reform, pirating copyrighted material, and getting rich quick to name a few._

Yes, and as you note below that, not all participants here sign off on all of
those agendas. I might characterize my view of higher education as "skepticism
about credentialism," for example.

~~~
davidw
One of the reasons some of these stories get killed is that it makes it easier
to get along peacefully without forcing this or that political/economic
"agenda" on anyone.

------
pg
If a story has enough flags, that alone will kill it, without moderator
intervention. I just added a point threshold to prevent this happening to
stories that have received a significant number of votes.

~~~
Zak
What I'd actually most like changed is that dead links become unclickable. The
fact that a link doesn't belong here doesn't mean I don't want to see what it
was.

~~~
pg
Try e.g. <http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=686224>

~~~
maxwell
Or <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/47550>

------
jgrahamc
I found the story very interesting, but I agree with the removal of this
story. It wasn't Hacker News, it was an interesting story about Michael
Jackson. I would have been very happy to read that story on Reddit.

~~~
tc
Could you elaborate on what is HN if not things that hackers find interesting
(particularly " _very_ interesting")? Not to be pedantic, but:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Also keep in mind that some of us no longer follow Reddit, so we might prefer
if HN took a slightly broader view than Erlang innards.

~~~
abstractbill
_Could you elaborate on what is HN if not things that hackers find interesting
(particularly "very interesting")?_

In my opinion something is on-topic if most hackers would find it interesting,
_and most non-hackers would not_. Otherwise you might as well just drop the
"Hacker", and call it "News".

~~~
anigbrowl
Very true, but then much of the marketing and entrepreneurial fluff that gets
posted here is neither news, hacking, or especially useful from a business
standpoint. A few people treat HN as their personal viral marketing vector.

------
colins_pride
When 10% of HN really likes a submission, it goes to the frontpage. Then if
10% of HN really dislikes it, the submission gets killed.

That some stories then get un-deaded is testimony to the faultiness of the
system.

------
speaker
A bigger problem is the ongoing, secret, and unaccountable knocking-off of
contributors who've done nothing wrong, often on a loose suspicion of them
being other people. This is doing an incredible amount of damage to this site.

I mean, really, what percent of HNers would've wanted time_management banned?
Less than 5%? 2%?

------
xenophanes
"I concur with the value of keeping meta-discussion on HN to a minimum, but"
decided to post a thread of pure meta-discussion. Are you _sure_ you concur
with that value?

~~~
colins_pride
He felt he had to resort to it.

You can be generally opposed to something, but accept it as the least bad
option in a specific situation.

~~~
xenophanes
What proportion of meta discussion here, do you think, comes from people who
felt that, just this time, they had to resort to it?

Also, what proportion of student cheating do you think is by students who are
generally opposed to cheating, but feel they really had to do it just this one
time?

~~~
UnWhye
In some cases, either could be necessary in order to improve a situation.

------
occam
There's also politically correct censorship going on, amazingly. This morning
I submitted this: [http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-
englis...](http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-english-
speaking.html) . It was dead on arrival, marked [dead] immediately, presumably
because that blogger is "divisive" and "racially insensitive". Please read
that and judge for yourself if it is interesting.

~~~
allenbrunson
i'd say it's a lot more likely it was killed because of the political slant.
very few political articles are allowed to live around here, because they lead
to divisive and unproductive arguments.

~~~
tokenadult
From the guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

Stories about politics have a very high threshold to clear to be on HN,
because there are many other places to discuss politics online, and few others
to discuss the core HN topics.

~~~
occam
Yes. But the article is question doesn't seem to be about politics:
[http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-
englis...](http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/07/medias-bias-toward-english-
speaking.html)

~~~
tokenadult
I suppose reasonable minds can differ, but it doesn't delight my mind. I
should be deeply interested in such an article, as an American who reads a
foreign language (Chinese) and has lived abroad, but maybe precisely because I
have that background I've seen better.

~~~
occam
Of course you don't have to vote it up. But why was it killed?

~~~
tokenadult
I gave that answer up-thread. I think people interpreted it as a political
post. (Personally, I had nothing to do with flagging that thread. I didn't
even notice it until it was dead and the metadiscussion began.)

