

Ask HN: How did the Erlang articles disappear on HN yesterday? - socratees

Were we censored or did we flag the articles by ourselves, or did the admin remove all the Erlang entries from appearing on the front page? How did we get rid of the Erlang articles? I'm just curious about it.
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jacquesm
I guess enough people flagged it to take it away.

There is a lower limit where stuff will get auto killed if enough people
flagged it.

What bothers me most about these silly flooding tactics is that you've
potentially burned a lot of good content about Erlang from ever appearing on
HN.

Erlang is a neat concept, and I think that those that flooded the 'new' page
with Erlang stuff have done more damage than good.

What you could have simply done is to flag the articles you thought had no
place on HN instead of trying to monopolize the discussion by flooding.

~~~
daleharvey
I think its pretty certain the articles were manually removed, they all went
at the same time along with every new submission almost immediately.

I dont disagree with having them deaded though, although my site was one of
the ones that someone submitted, and I actually think it was submitted because
it was useful.

~~~
jacquesm
Imagine a series of counters as attributes to the articles submitted. If
enough people decide 'enough Erlang, let's flag that stuff down' then you can
imagine a flurry of activity by a limited number of users (say 10 or 15 or so)
that would remove all the articles within a minute or so, which is when the
_last_ person to be able to do so clicks 'flag' for the relevant articles.

Don't attribute to 'divine' intervention what you could easily achieve with
the tools at hand.

~~~
mbrubeck
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=686303>

_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."_

On the other hand this change doesn't seem to be in the latest news.arc from
arc3.tar, whether it was removed, not included in that distribution yet, or
I'm just looking in the wrong place.

~~~
jacquesm
What's distributed is not necessarily what is running on the site. I think
there may be some secret sauce, if only to make it a bit harder to game the
system.

