
Ask HN: Why post about site outages? - emocin
It seems like almost every day a prominent site goes down, and people race each other to post to HN with a one line subject of &quot;reddit down&quot; or &quot;facebook down&quot; and nothing else.<p>I am just wondering what the purpose of being the first person to post &quot;Facebook down&quot; with a link to facebook is. Are we expected to get some sort of value out of knowing FB is down, or is it just schadenfreude?<p>Genuinely curious!
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caio1982
Personally I'd rather flag such posts because HN is a place for news and
meaningful discussions around those and IMHO there are better sites/services
to monitor if whatever is up or down. Now, I'd really like to see a discussion
with links to some post-mortems or analysis about the outage. That would be
super interesting, but not just the service URL with a catchy title, please.

~~~
kelseydh
I don't agree with flagging such posts. As developers we can be on the losing
end of these problems within our own products, and this site can be a useful
hub for receiving information on how to technically handle these incidents.

E.g. after a major DNS outage caused many people with Heroku websites to go
down, developers on Hacker News were able to quickly share advice on how to
get around it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842302)

~~~
caio1982
I respectfully agree to disagree but thanks for the example about Heroku.
That's a very fair point.

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phantom_oracle
I'm guessing link karma?

Contrary to what some might feel/think, having higher karma means something on
HN.

Apparently it means so much that users with massive karma gain some type of
influencer status with things they post, thereby cementing their place/s as
"top" contributors in perpetuity (which isn't a bad thing, considering how
much traffic it may drive, if you need to market something).

I suppose this is why some folks who left HN, did so because it was an echo
chamber for the "top" karma people and those trying to get there.

This is just a theory though, so take it with a pinch of salt. The true
intentions of posting those pointless site-outage links could be less
nefarious.

~~~
emocin
Yeah but if the post is devoid of details, why would anyone upvote it?

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dang
Those posts are pretty well all off-topic. Hearing that a site is down doesn't
gratify intellectual curiosity [1]. Hearing _why_ it went down is different,
of course, but that kind of article takes longer to appear.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
kelseydh
Usually you can find the reason for _why_ a site is down by reading Hacker
News _comments,_ not the article. That's why downtime posts on Hacker News are
useful.

I come to Hacker News to read _comments_ about the issue when major internet
news breaks, because it's likely that somebody with a technical background
intimately aware of what's going on will post here. With one good self post to
discuss the issue, there's a hub for discussion and often interesting
technical information about the issue that gets shared that the general media
won't cover.

E.g. when Cloudflare recently had major downtime:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842302)
People on Hacker News posted explanations of what was going on _and_ how to
get around the issue almost right away, beating Cloudflare's own customer
support blog by 3-4 hours easily. I remember it well because I had hundreds of
customers contacting me immediately during that downtime incident. The
information I got on Hacker News was crucial for helping me respond
effectively & quickly during that crisis.

~~~
dang
That's a good point.

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uuoc
I suspect it is schadenfreude.

For what it is worth, I ALWAYS flag every "X is down" post I see appear in the
new list. If there were more flagging of them, the posters would get the
message and quit posting them.

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thrusong
Sorry for posting one today- it was my first. I only did it because I'm a big
Facebook fan and always enjoy talking about the downtime. They don't really
give postmortems anymore, so this is the place I come to to talk about it.

~~~
emocin
That's fair, like I said I was simply curious. It didn't seem to make a ton of
sense to me, but it sorta does now :)

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publicfig
Many developers run business dependent on platforms. It's nice to have a place
for discussion to see if it's a localized instance or a widespread issue.

~~~
caio1982
[http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/facebook.com](http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/facebook.com)

[http://is-it-down.com/facebook.com](http://is-it-down.com/facebook.com)

Et al :-)

~~~
po1nter
Even better:
[https://developers.facebook.com/status/](https://developers.facebook.com/status/)

~~~
publicfig
Have you tried going to that link? It's down as well.

edit: Seems to be jumping between in and out. It's a bad sign when your status
page is tied to your actual site unless this is for traffic related reasons.

