Ask HN: Did HN lost its soul? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did HN lost its soul?

4 pointskelsolaar3 comments

Yesterday, we posted on HN a link to our blog in celebration to reaching our first 1000th Github star.

We are working on a niche domain, i.e. colour science, and the team was undoubtedly happy with the achievement. This morning, I noticed that the thread is flagged, which is mildly saddening:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24625977

When did people start to flag development successes? When did celebrating become not desirable? Celebrating success stories is an integral part of what makes HN.

AFAIK, talking about Github stars has never been an issue here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=true&query=%22github%20stars%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story

I have been on HN, mostly lurking, for over a decade, and I have certainly always enjoyed reading about other development projects celebrating their achievements. Seeing other developers happy and joyful is a motivation factor for our work.

I'm not sure why that post would necessarily be flagged (and I can't see it since it has been flagged). But there are a couple of odd things here: first, your example of talking about GitHub stars is more about using the stars, eg, what they are, projects that organize them, etc. Relatively few of these posts appear to be projects that just have gained a number of stars. But those posts still do exist, so your conclusion that people are just flagging development successes doesn't seem to be correct. Secondly, your post getting flagged probably doesn't indicate that HN is "losing its soul".

I'm guessing that there was some difference between your original post and the ones you're comparing it to that is causing it to be perceived badly. You should reevaluate your submission, see if there's anything that might be breaking any of the site's guidelines, then edit it and resubmit.

Thanks for taking the time to answer!

> Secondly, your post getting flagged probably doesn't indicate that HN is "losing its soul".

My assumptions are possibly entirely incorrect and this is why I'm asking. Stack Overflow gives some hints as to why a question is closed. Here, I have nothing and I can only compare between the few threads about reaching Github stars milestones and my own thread on the same topic.

> I'm guessing that there was some difference between your original post and the ones you're comparing it to that is causing it to be perceived badly.

This is what I would be genuinely interested to understand, what did I do wrong and why is it badly perceived?

my assumption would be that multiple people thought it read like spam, instead of an open source project

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