Ask HN: Why was the Posterous Thread Killed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why was the Posterous Thread Killed?

69 pointsriffer26 comments

Some HN users might be operating under the impression that it was killed for being highly critical of a YC company. Just wanted to give the responsible mods a chance to clarify.

The link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479028

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It was a content-free rant. It didn't add anything to the comment thread that had already appeared on HN at the time. I would have killed it regardless of who it was about. There was nothing in it to engage one's intellectual curiosity.

HN is going to lose a lot of credibility if these kinds of questions don't get answered. For some reason it always seems like Posterous threads get yanked. It sure is incriminating.

Killing can be done by users, too. If a few users (5? 10?) don't like a story and click "flag", it's gone.

Don't blame the site admins for a conspiracy when it's just a few users out of thousands that are responsible.

(The article shouldn't have been killed... I had a good comment there that people can't reply to now. Annoying.)

A fixed number of flags to kill seems silly when the total number of users on the site keeps growing. At the limit everything will get flagged/pulled.

I find it unlikely that the flag threshold is a fixed number. I think I remember pg mentioning something about very new and very highly voted posts having a high and variable flag threshold.

I read somewhere else today that this only works until the topic has less than 10 votes, which does not apply here.

Deleted comment

I think he was talking about posts that go against Posterous.

A thread on link baiting was flagged down this morning, which started a discussion about people flagging stories because downvoting of stories isn't allowed:

   Not to hijack this thread, but since we're having a 
   meta-discussion about HN already... I am (mildly) 
   aghast to discover that people are using the flag
   feature as a substitute for downvoting! There are 
   numerous comments throughout this thread to that effect.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477966

Maybe it's time to allow downvoting of stories?

I suspect people are getting tired of the numerous 'Posterous vs everyone' debates and flagging the articles.

I think it's a stretch to assume something more nefarious.

"Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompeia_%28wife_of_Julius_Caesa...

FWIW pg says he doesn't kill threads critical of yc companies. Here's his response after he killed a thread about wakemate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358627 (I'm not saying that applies here, it might have been flagged by users)

A very good (and reasonable) question.

I agree that killing posts can be suspect but isn't asking why something was killed against TOS as well? Maybe allowing this post to get so high is their way of being transparent.

"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something (e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to complain about moderation). If you want to say something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com."

Edit: post killed shortly after I posted this.

I, for one, flagged the article because I felt:

- the author was trolling

- the post was misleading

Flagging is a pretty drastic response to a post you disagree with. Andrew's article was certainly pretty blistering, but he had an argument backed up with evidence.

Saying a post is misleading but offering nothing to back that up is unhelpful to say the least. There was an active and civil comments thread that seems like the perfect venue to have a more enlightening discussion.

From Andrew's post:

  But I have some beef here Preposterous staff, you call 
  all your competitors, who are all building products to 
  serve similar communities, dying?

Incorrect. This is a deliberate misreading of the original post ( http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous ) which states:

  You grouched about dying platforms that haven't added 
  new features in ages, sites that have made it too 
  complex to perform the most basic tasks and places 
  that smother your content in ads.

Again from Andrew's post:

  Threats of lawsuits are reported, and to me this isn’t 
  about the tools or privacy, it is about a company being 
  a dick and the legal response to just that.

There are many possible interpretations of the situation, but companies generally don't bring out the lawyers because another company is "being a dick".

Again from Andrew's post:

  Saying switching to your service is fine, but by 
  discrediting them, both the community behind them 
  and the staff, you are also attacking the full 
  history of the site, which, a lot of people care 
  about.

I don't see him backing this up anywhere in the post. He makes a big leap from Posterous lacking "community" features and saying some of the platforms they're writing exporters for are dying, to "discrediting" the communities behind sites and "attacking" the full history of those sites.

Then, there's the repeated use of the derogatory "Preposterous", which is roughly equivalent to the old "Windoze" or "Crapintosh".

So, again, in my opinion:

- the post was trolling

- the post is misleading

The trolling alone was enough for me to flag the post.

What argument? Posterous has never claimed that Tumblr was dying, so the whole post was based on a false premise. Go read their original post again if you don't believe me (or read my post in the deleted thread, where I quote the relevant parts).

Isn't the entire Posterous switch campaign something of an exercise in trolling?

I found the thread interesting, even though I like and use Posterous.

Did you honestly feel that it was any more so than the Posterous "Tumblr is dying — come over here" post that inspired it? I felt the article in question was significantly less trollish or misleading.

Can you link to the post where they claimed that? In the one I read, they said that Tumblr was a pretty cool site. Not a single word about the size of the user bases.

So which post did you read?

That's the editor flexing his/her muscles to protect a family member.

Edit: It was killed for being highly critical of a YC company.

I really hope this is not the case.

That's the editor flexing his/her muscles to protect a family member.

Do you have evidence to support this accusation of nepotism on HN?

Well, the author stated that he did not pull the post himself. On what other grounds do you think the post deserved to be pulled if it was for non-nefarious reasons? How often do you see other posts get pulled on HN?

1) I was addressing the specific allegations of nepotism.

2) Users, like you, can flag articles. And given sufficient flags, articles get auto-yanked.

3) I can see the article being pulled for non-nefarious reasons, like the article being an unfunny parody and enough people being fed up with such things.

4) Chill. There is no cause here for you to champion.

The OP works for TechStars... conspiracy!

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