Musk-led Twitter laid off some employees by mistake, asks them to come back

For sure we're getting an allergic reaction now—the hivemind is breaking out in hives. This happens when a major ongoing topic (MOT) [1] gets tons of followup stories [2] that don't contain significant new information (SNI) [3].

The solution is to downweight SNIless followups. Users do that via flags and mods do that when we see them on the front page.

The flipside, of course, is that when there really is SNI, the topic becomes viable again.

We came up with this approach after the Great Snowden Snow-In of 2013 [4] and it has held up well, though when HN is being pelted, some followups inevitably sneak through. It still requires a judgment call about what counts as SNI, but at least that's semi-objective and there's an underlying principle to it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...