Anyone else disturbed that mods erased every post on Kobe Bryant's death yesterday? He was a national figure that transcended just basketball, if that was the issue.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If you want to learn about Kobe, tune into literally any other news outlet.
I guess users are flagging Kobe but not Terry Jones because they like Jones more. But this is explicitly what flagging is not supposed to be about.
I would call that sufficiently on-topic, personally.
I love Monty Python but it’s disingenuous to claim they they’re any more “on topic” than a basketball player (and I say this as someone who’s not generally a sports fan).
The only real difference between the two is one is more popular on HN than the other. Which is a real shitty reason to flag an obituary in my opinion.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker-humor.html
And I'm fairly certain this predates esr's tenure (I used to own a copy of The Great Quux's hardcover).
We're just going to have to agree to disagree here.
That just reinforces that things were named after Monty Python rather than Monty Python creating the tech!
> We're just going to have to agree to disagree here.
You haven’t actually disagreed with my point though.
Now that’s what I call nonsensical. By that logic with the recent Cambridge Analytica scandals, the US and China trade wars, etc have all been top on HN and covered on the news, meaning that HN broke their own rules.
Perhaps when the UK decides to use or ban Huawei for its 5G technology, as soon as it mentions the UK PM’s name, I won’t be surprised if this gets flag/dead quickly.
That would be the good faith thing to do.
The fact that the biggest basketball player in a generation died is arguably a "new phenomenon."
There's plenty of stories that are upvoted that are covered by the news. It's not really just about learning that he died so much as having a thoughtful conversation around him and his legacy from this community's perspective.
Sometimes I see <xxx> has died and it's clearly technology related, and I will click the link, and discover that this person was great even if I never knew their names, and I feel enriched.
I certainly wouldn't feel enriched being led to a basketball website.
This just isn't a sports site.
Observing that fact doesn't suggest or imply that sports are bad in any way.
If you posted Bill Manning's obituary to a bunch of NBA fan sites, the users of those sites would no doubt consider those posts off-topic, and they'd be right in doing so. But that wouldn't make them "condescending toward computer science".
Actors and Musicians dying doesn't get flagged.
As for Kobe, TBF, it wasn't the mods, but the users (via flagging). That being said, that definitely rubbed me the wrong way. There were at least 3 posts I saw completely wiped out within minutes.
You have not even mentioned him.
Pity, there was an interesting discussion to be had about the decision to fly the helicopter into bad weather.
There's plenty of other posts about artists, authors, musicians and actors passing away that weren't flagged. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... https://hn.algolia.com/?q=has+died
I'm not saying Terry Jones obituaries should have been wiped too. I'm saying there's a weird editorial double standard here.
The name of one of the most prolific programming languages in the world, Python, is because of Terry Jones. That was his contribution and why he was relevant.
The reason it was “relevant” is simply because there’s more Monty Python fans on here than basketball fans. Which is fine if we’re talking purely about +votes but it doesn’t justify flagging a submission.
So there's some contributions to history, depending on how you value it.
Look, I'm the biggest old-school, anti-analytics sports nut out there, but I come to HN for my fix of tech news. I'll go to reddit for more general news.
What does disturb me is the trending towards reddit-like standards here on HN. There seems to be more downvoting of legitimate questions these days and an increase in cheap comments like "Trump sucks!" for easy points. What I loved about HN initially was the civil discussion that arose from comments as opposed to just burying them. HN is a good environment to raise questions or points you don't understand without groupthink hostility.