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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

why should eddie van halen be discussed and memorialized here when kobe bryant’s death was relentlessly flagged and censored from discussion?

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Few things are more horrible than angry internet arguments about whose life was worth more. Please don't go there here, even if you think a past story should have had more attention on Hacker News.

The answer to a lot of these questions, btw, is randomness. Even when it's not the whole answer, it's usually part of the answer, and another part of the answer is judgment calls which may not look so different from randomness. If you're expecting consistency in moderation, that's your problem right there!

the flagging of the dozens of posts about kobe's death over many hours certainly wasn't simply random. randomness would posit the likeliness of at least one of those stories escaping flag-death, as happened with this particular story (a number of van halen stories didn't make it to discussion, only this one).

Yes, that's a good point.

Nerds don't like sportball, but programming nerds like abstract creators. Eddie was a mind bending genere pushing creative force. His impact was bigger than sportball. Often other obituaries are noted here. Sportsball not so much, unless it's statistical sportsball. Van Halen is probably a stretch tbh, so I don't want to defend it too much either. This site is still better than twitter.

so no value judgment there, huh? nerds who like sports are just not the right kind, right? certain creativity like plucking strings in various patterns is just inherently better than others? and how was his impact greater? how is one kind of entertainer better than another?

startup founders could learn a lot from kobe, from focus and discipline to creativity and tenacity. he also invested in startups.

I often do a "Van Halen day" where I put on my headphones, crank it to 11, and play all the important Van Halen albums for about 5 or 6 hours (basically all of them up to 1984) - and I get shit done. It's amazing what switching from electronic "beats" to Van Halen for a day does for my programming.

Van Halen was a musical pioneer, an inventor, and as you can see from other comments, part of HN constituents' culture.

you don't think one of the most prolific athletes in modern human history ticks a few peoples' "culture" boxes here?

Eddie had a world-wide following and a patent. He inspired many geeks including this one. Kobe worked hard as well but was mostly an LA phenomenon with limited nerd-overlap.

Yes the rules are rather arbitrary, but this particular outcome isn't too hard to understand.

that's your biases talking. basketball has roughly a billion fans worldwide (china is #2 after the US in b-ball fans) and every one of those fans knows who kobe is. van halen probably has in the few millions, mostly americans. and basketball is probably the most popular major sport among nerds (and many other demographics).

yes, the outcome isn't too hard to understand--hypocrisy. if you don't care about basketball you just ignore the posts about it. it takes willful malice to actively flag dozens of posts about the death of a singular athletic talent like kobe. he also has an oscar, a much rarer achievement than a patent.

The Lakers don't have all those fans, that's more than a stretch. The NBA has been declining in popularity for years as well. Finally, knowing who a person is, is rather unimportant in the scheme of things.

Face it, running back and forth throwing a ball, even with excessive style simply doesn't move people the way art does. I do have additional respect for Kareem for that reason, he's shown himself to be a deep thinker outside the court.

forget the lakers, every basketball fan, a billion people around the globe, appreciated and respected kobe. and if you can't recognize the sheer intelligence involved in actively, relentlessly achieving your objectives in a fast-paced, highly dynamic environment at the limits of your physical abilities, while hundreds of others at their physical limits and billions of dollars try to prevent you from doing so, then you may want to reevaluate your perceptive facilities.

face it, flickin' strings in rhythm is entertainment, not art. art engages the brain not just the heart. that's why i have great respect for 2pac, a ghetto poet with deft lyricism that gripped your soul using just his brain-inflected voice.

Lol.

thank you, i'm here all week. be sure to tip your server!

Rest in peace, John Lewis.

yes, an actual leader and statesman of the civil rights movement, who deserves mourning and reflection, moreso than any entertainer.

Agreed. Sadly, there's no defense or explanation of this, other than that moderators are arbitrarily (and in a very exclusionary way) defining what constitutes "hacker culture".

It isn't the moderators, it's the users. More people here care about Eddie Van Halen than did Kobe Bryant. I won't theorize about the rationale behind that but the decision about which celebrity obituaries stay up and which don't seems to be entirely up to the zeitgeist. If people have nostalgia for the work of someone who died, they won't flag the thread. If they don't care about the person, or other biases are at work, they will. No greater explanation is necessary than the dice roll as they do.

The culture is the culture. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Are the moderators not the ones deciding which threads get removed and which don't?

Users are the ones who flag threads, not moderators. Mods will unflag threads if they don't feel they should have been flagged or otherwise manipulate rankings but as far as I know flagging is entirely from users.

Not at all. Posts are removed when they're flagged by users and the mods don't seem to intervene. I wonder if they even have the power to intervene. I remember one post where dang (moderator) was basically trying to negotiate with one or two users who had flagged the thread to unflag it, after the title was changed (or maybe it was something discussed in the thread, this is a bit vague in my memorey, sorry). The post stayed flagged.

Bottom line: it's not the mods, it's the users. That's HN.

it's hypocritical and worth calling out for discussion, not justifying with a shrug. if a particular user doesn't care about kobe, why then care enough to flag? just let it go and move on to items of greater interest. it's not a political issue rife for flamebait, certainly no moreso than van halen.

I agree with you. But there's nothing you can do to change it.

I'm not saying you should stop calling it out either, but the only result will be that eventually you will annoy the mods - not because of what you're saying but because you're being repetitive and "repetition is the enemy of curiosity" - and they'll either ask you to stop and you will, or you won't and they'll ban you.

none of this discussion is ban-worthy by any reasonable measure, but rather should impel thought, not simply reaction.

> "repetition is the enemy of curiosity"

that's certainly not true. expertise requires repetition (as kobe would tell you) and no one would disdain researchers for their repetitive curiosity.

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