Cool story bro.
I think HN's real problem is a certain amount of "monoculture" unlike reddit's communities, but sure, whatever makes your karma counter go up.
I think HN's real problem is a certain amount of "monoculture" unlike reddit's communities, but sure, whatever makes your karma counter go up.
Anyway, I'd also like to point out that the exact same issue mentioned in the article, apart from forums like HN and Reddit, also exists in companies. Any authoritarian system. An example is Boeing.
The same kind of problem also caused the 737 MAX crisis currently underway at Boeing. Criticism wasn’t tolerated in the company and engineers who brought all kinds of design issues up were sidelined by management — silenced and suppressed [1]. This resulted in critical flaws getting into their products, in this case the 737 MAX aircraft, which resulted in two crashes killing a few hundred people.
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/engin...
If anything, the HN response to this event has demonstrated to me that uninformed, smug, back-of-the-napkin takes from computer programmers on domains totally outside of their experience will be richly rewarded on this site.
They aren't really that interesting, though. HN is for interesting stuff, not for "I'm too lazy to go to CNN to get my daily dose of news".
In general it is. With daily updates on the latest speculation and "if this is true, everyone will die" predictions? Not to me, no. It has little value and is mostly just providing a place where people can indulge in their fears of mortality (boring!), their new found hatred of China (boring!), some ideas of pandemics spreading they gathered from Plague, Inc. (fun, but not really that interesting) and their general feeling of uneasiness and tribalism ("it's really Trump's fault, you know?" - "no, it's the progressive's fault!" - "Shut up, you two, it's obviously capitalism, err Russia").
A general recap might be interesting at some point, and so would more details be. Articles that trigger "should I buy face masks and lock down my house now" comments aren't, imho.
So-called "censorship" on the level of a forum like HN is of laughable unimportance. That pales in comparison to the kind of censorship the Chinese government practices. (And no, it's not a "slippery slope", or any other hand-wavy argument you can make about similarities.)
> We are finally seeing some stories about COVID-19 break through to the front page and get some interesting discussion - it's taken over a month.
Perhaps for the most part hackers don't find it interesting, at least not in this forum. I've been reading about it elsewhere, and have been happy with the coverage I've been getting. I'm certainly not going to downvote/flag an article about it on HN, but frankly I don't come here for that. (Heh, and yet, here I am, reading comments and even posting.)
> If anything, the HN response to this event has demonstrated to me that uninformed, smug, back-of-the-napkin takes from computer programmers on domains totally outside of their experience will be richly rewarded on this site.
That's hardly unique to this type of article, or any article, really. People often have uninformed opinions about things outside their area of expertise, and aren't shy about expressing them. I see no more (or less) of that here than I do in most other HN comment threads.
And regardless, who are you to say? Are you a doctor, or, better, an epidemiologist? Are you an expert political scientist? Have you deeply studied this history of authoritarian regimes vs. democracies? Your opinion that all this is just "back-of-the-napkin takes" is no more (or less!) valid than the takes you criticize. And you're the one throwing around accusations of smugness!