

Ask HN: Why are all the Eich posts being deleted? - pbreit

Are they being flagged or have admins decided it&#x27;s not what they want here? The subject certainly seems relevant to the audience.
======
dang
It's a combination of user flags and us burying/killing duplicates. We kill
duplicates unless they have an active discussion, in which case we bury them
(i.e. demote them in rank while leaving them open).

There are also penalties for flamewars. Originally I turned up the penalty
because the discussion was so horrible. Users pointed out that a story of this
magnitude needs to be on the front page, which was a good point, so I
lightened the penalty.

By "horrible" I mean violating HN's values of intellectual substance and
personal civility so badly as to be irremediable. There are some topics the
community here has empirically proven itself to be incapable of discussing
without that happening. I resisted this view for a long time—ask tptacek or
davidw, my adversaries in this debate for years!—but my position either was
wrong or at some point became so.

I don't know yet what the long term solution is, but the status quo is
untenable, especially because these things aren't static—they get better or
worse, and the trend has been worse.

~~~
ig1
Driving content off the front page may well make the discussion worse.

It takes time and effort to write a thought-out comment on contentious issues
and if I invest that time only to find that the post has been flagged off the
front-page then I'm much less likely to invest the effort next time.

It'll essentially mean good comments are driven away from contentious posts
resulting in a downward solution.

Flagging should be focused on bad comments and not on the contentious stories
themselves.

~~~
brudgers
When I find myself entering into discussions like those surrounding the Eich
story, I often get to the end of a long and thoughtful post and realize that
it was just catharsis and my view doesn't add anything but my _reaction_ to
the thread.

I think part of being a good HN commenter is avoiding contentious discussions.
That's not the same as avoiding contentious topics, but recognizing that the
tone and tenor and volume of a comment thread is hopelessly bad. Stories are
bigger than a particular submission.

Objectively, the submissions for the Eich story are low quality by HN
standards, and the submission for something like Eich isn't the story. The
story is a hydra and over time the heads which grow back look more like this
than a retweeted press release and the discussion is becomes more that the
reactive tweets.

What is unique about HN are headlines like "The Inside Story of Eich's
Resignation [2014]" that will make the front page in 2018. To me, there's
nothing wrong if people are forced to go elsewhere to passionately opine on
breaking news as it breaks. Threads with 100 comments in the first hour are
mostly noise and noise attracts mostly more noise.

None of this is to say that the Eich story doesn't touch on deep important
issues, or that I would not prefer that HN could handle such stories. But the
problem with the comment threads were not caused by individual behavior but by
group behavior. It's not a few bad actors but the collective result of group
interaction.

~~~
dang
_I often get to the end of a long and thoughtful post and realize that it was
just catharsis_

"Just catharsis" is an excellent phrase for that. Precisely so.

------
yaur
We know that they algorithmically detect flame wars and automatically demote
threads that devolve into them. It would be shocking if the Eich threads
weren't setting those off.

------
wglb
Duplicates.

