Nobody's forcing you to read or comment on something you don't like. If you don't think it should be here, flag it and hide it and move on. If it gets removed it gets removed, if it doesn't, well you've hidden it so it doesn't matter anyway. It wouldn't have made the front page if people hadn't been interested in it and upvoted it.
The story isn't really politics or crime, it's a company forking an open source project and taking over the name.
I personally find these kinds of stories interesting. Especially this, I've seen some underhanded attacks on open source before, but this one's one I haven't really seen and it seems pretty insidious to me.
> It wouldn't have made the front page if people hadn't been interested in it and upvoted it.
u/dang has stepped in before and quoted the rules when things go off the rails. Clearly, the esprit de corps is not the best measure for what is best for HN. I don't think it's right to handwave the rules just because the majority vote to ignore them.
But,
> The story isn't really politics or crime
Mostly agree. It's in that niche category "publicizing my issue w/ Megacorp for traction" and HN has been used/abused as a vehicle for it often. Mods haven't stepped in, so I guess it's ok? And as a programmer, I would sympathize with the underdog as well, even it were against my own employer.
I would sympathize with the underdog too. Thats not the problem. The problem is that we collectively support "the wrong" way to resolve such problems. Wrong as in it doesn't solve anything but a specific incident. We know nothing really changes and next week we have another similar incident. And we also know that 99+% of similar incidents never get resolved because they could not reach the virality needed. This is some kind of mob internet justice that just doesn't work at scale and we should not be participating here this platform is for news.
It's a dim view of hackers I think, that sees them as not interested in anything outside a very narrow intellectual range, as this would render them not someone to emulate but someone to pity.
> that people abuse HN for their own personal problems
Just the record, the person who wrote the issue (and is affected by the problem) and the person submitting to HN is not the same person. So I'm unsure how I could be claimed to use HN for my own personal problems, when I'm not the one with the issue here.
Not that you did, but it could be argued that because it’s Facebook (and we’re on HN), you were looking for something to post that’s negative about them because “fsck FB.”
Doesn't really matter and there is no way to know if the HN poster is the affected person or not.
What we know is that it creates an incentive for affected people to post future problems like that here if we keep giving these posts attention until they are resolved.
Which part of them exactly? Seems like something or interest to hackers, so it would generally be on topic but for an exception.