https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616456
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640098
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22640451
In at least two of the three, moderators intervened to keep the thread up. If you (or anyone) know of other submissions that are intellectually interesting and have this quality of people working on the problem, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We might be able to do something.
Do we really need the HN frontpage to look like a mirror of /r/covid19?
Not to mention that, for people who use Facebook / Twitter / etc., our feeds are pretty much jammed full of COVID-19 talk all day long.
I'd kinda like to come here and find a nice story about implementing LISP on Plan-9 running on MIPS using an XFS filesystem, or something else to get my mind off of the virus stuff. It's important, but I don't find that it's so important to warrant thinking about it to the exclusion of everything else.
The front page would be filled with little else if they did not.
The censorship appears to extend even to adjacent news, like CA municipalities adjusting liquor regulations, et c. The story about a letter from the CA governor to the president was censored, as well.
Set up a script to diff the front page every 5 mins to see what I mean.
Their site, their rules. It still sucks, though. :(
Examples:
By contrast, the story where the CA governor issued a stay-at-home order got plenty of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633798.
There's room to disagree on which particular stories ought to clear the bar, but I hope the principles are at least clear in my explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644521.
Perhaps you might want to publish a log of the things you aggressively downmod (contrary to the votes they receive) for being offtopic in the interest of curiosity/transparency? Maybe something like /leaders, a URL that isn't linked to from the frontpage? It would clear up confusion like this Ask HN.
I think there's value in links that get a lot of support, and it seems a shame to throw them away totally, even if they don't belong on the frontpage. I'd certainly peruse the stuff on such a list. Unlike /newest, it'd be mostly high-quality stuff, as otherwise it wouldn't have trended high/needed downmodding in the first place.
Most users don't care that much—I know that because if they did, we'd never hear the end of it—and those who do tend to be the litigious type who raise two new objections for every answer you give them. To play that game is to agree to a DoS attack on yourself. It sucks up limited resources that should be going into making the site better for everyone: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
That said, we're 100% in favor of satisfying users' curiosity about how HN is operated and moderated. We just do it ad hoc, by answering specific questions, rather than building meta facilities. From my perspective the issue isn't secrecy, it's efficiency. If meta facilities would actually be more efficient, that would be a great reason to build them. I would love it if software could alleviate more of our load. Unfortunately, I fear that they would have the opposite effect. The founder of a well-known forum that is older than HN once told me that introducing a meta section was the worst mistake they had made and that we would be crazy to do that.
If you go to the “new” items, a substantial fraction of the posts are about the virus.
With that many posts, it may be that few get enough votes to hit the front page.
Source: I load HN way too much.