Then again, so many people had their comments down-voted into light gray in the original Osama article that I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of flaggings came from people that wanted to stem their own decline in karma. That would make for an interesting dataset.
This link, however, is likely the first time in history that something so covert and meticulously planned has been exposed in real-time by someone experiencing it himself. We get the opportunity to see it from his perspective without the media's filters - just raw data. This is incredibly fascinating to me.
I will have to archive this guy's tweet stream when I get home.
This is history, people.
That said, this stream is rather interesting, and it belongs here too.
We don't know how many people flagged that article, whether it was manually pushed down by a moderator etc. All we can guess is that it is artificially moving down because other articles (with much lesser upvotes and same age) are ahead of it.
My request for more transparency (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495953 ) was itself killed with no transparency :)
Here, someone in close proximity to a reasonably significant historical event used social networks to broadcast his observation of said event. If this has happened before, it hasn't been very many times, and it's undoubtedly been only quite recently. We are witnessing a new historical phenomenon that will undoubtedly be worth a line in a history textbook.
Moreover, importantly, the comments on this article don't completely suck. There's some meta-noise like this, but much less complete political stupidity.
Yes, UBL's death is significant to just about everyone. But it's not really intellectually gratifying or interesting, nor was much of the commentary surrounding it in the previous thread. There was lots of unfocused complaining about fallout from 9/11 including the TSA, DHS, wars, and political changes, but very little of it was new or enlightening. Definitely worthy of a flag.
Here, I find it tremendously interesting to see a (distant) eyewitness account of a significant historical event, given in real time over social media and not filtered by any other entities after the fact. Much more of the commentary here is intellectually gratifying as well. This was worthy of an upvote.
But yes, I agree - this is not the main story.
If there's one thing that I find most useful about HN it's that articles here are constantly making me think about how our world is changing, and what new tools and solutions might enable compelling needs that arise from those changes. Major news events are relevant, and I'm more interested in what HN'ers have to say about them than most other communities I'm a part of.