I am just wondering what the purpose of being the first person to post "Facebook down" 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?
Genuinely curious!
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Discussing downtime events also holds practical value. If we are affected by the outage, having a news entry about downtime on hacker news allows us to share to one another useful information regarding how to respond to it.