@dang - maybe let one twitter story through to the home page?
I agree that this is a major ongoing topic (MOT) and needs to be discussed. At the same time, so many of the submissions are repeats of things already posted. This is a classic situation that comes up a few times a year (the FTX saga is another going on right now).
Obviously some of the gazillion Twittermusk stories contain SNI [1], and some (most) are just follow-ups [2] or repetitive angerwars, and we have to make a distinction between the two or HN's frontpage will consist of nothing but.
With user flags and the flamewar detector also downranking stories, it's possible for this strategy to get overapplied, in which case a MOT ends up getting insufficient oxygen. That's not good for HN either! It isn't because of sinister plutocracy or anything like that—it's a failure mode of the strategy I just described. User pushback is helpful!
More on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667968
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
p.s. HN has worked this way for a long time - coming up on a decade now: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Some accounts are allowed to submit links frequently, even a few minutes between submissions, while other accounts are being blocked from submitting and can only do so once every few or 24 hours. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." Is this some type of new punitive action?
It also looks very unfair, when applied to accounts that are clearly not spammers (and maybe submit a few times in a day or week) or appears as a punitive action because of some difference of opinion with a mod.
We're happy to remove the rate limit when we believe that an account is going to use HN as intended in the future. However, you just broke the site guidelines badly a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33686024. Posting like that will get you banned here! — regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are — so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make sure not to post like that in the future.
Once you've built up a track record of not breaking the site guidelines, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look and hopefully remove the rate limit.
I’ve personally been visiting new and flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts I see (i started doing this after getting sick of all the Twitter/mastodon posts hitting the front page).
I don’t want the front page to be all Twitter all the time, and most of the posts boil down to speculation and gossip and the ones that don’t, usually don’t offer anything meaningfully new and interesting.
I suspect there are plenty of others like me.
Likewise it doesn’t need continued speculation about what Elon really meant when he posted ‘blah blah blah’.
Substantive things will get through (this one did).
Yay Elon/Boo Elon drama won’t.
If you really need it, feel free to browse new yourself and vouch.
Nope, it doesn't.
> Substantive things will get through (this one did).
Are you only flagging the non-substantive things? Because that's not what you imply above ("flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts").
If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter.
And it’s not like I have an army of bot accounts continually refreshing and flagging.
I’m just using my one vote to signify I’m not interested in hearing about Twitter drama.
>If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter.
Is just flat out wrong.
It still achieves my objective of less Twitter drama on the front page.
Are the goings on at Twitter relevant to "the industry"? Sure. But, the inability to have serious discussion about it speaks poorly of the those that populate that industry.
Somewhere between the 10,000th iteration of "see how billionaires are evil?", "see how Musk is a genius?", "see how Musk behaves badly?", and "Look at what's Musk accomplished?" nothing new is said. Anything novel or serious that does manage to pop-up gets drowned out in the sea of noise.
I join you in downvoting all of these. There are good discussions on HN, but these discussions are them.
The system tends not to be able to do this without human intervention—either the flags win (in which case the story gets smothered) or the upvotes win (in which case HN becomes Twittermusk News with a side dish of SBFTX). Human intervention is needed to keep the teeter-totter from teetering one way or tottering the other*.
We're super open to feedback. If you (or anyone) want to influence the balance, you should make your case to hn@ycombinator.com. That's the only reliable message queue.
More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667761
(* Unfortunately. It would be so much nicer to just write code to deal with this.)
I think for the most part it's been working well.
i hope the reason is because of the risk of flamewars, rather than YC leadership's desire to protect the reputation of someone who is hagified in SV circles and currently crashing and burning very publicly.
It's been massively disappointing to watch since Musk's behaviour has been abhorrent and has resulted in a lot of unnecessary hurt and despair for innocent employees. The same employees who may end up running future startups.
Not exactly the results I'd expect from someone who really knows how to run a company.
If one of Musk's middle managers had messed up this badly, Musk would have fired them already. But Elon deserves the continued benefit of the doubt for some reason.
So... not the general operability of the service?
And second of all, he thinks Twitter can’t lead to deaths? Let’s say the Iranian government was given unfettered access to DMs and metadata for all Iranian citizens with an account. Not hard to imagine scenarios that end in death.
I'm not even sure what paulg's point is. Are people actually claiming they'd do a better job than Musk, or are they simply commenting on the missteps and bizarre behavior. You don't need to have run a successful tech company to know that spending your time as a CEO antagonizing your employees on social media, and then threatening your remaining employees with an ultimatum is not a good idea.
Then the next tweet says
> In both those companies, people die if the software doesn't work right. Do you really think he's not up to managing a social network?
Thing is, I agree that Twitter needed to be shaken up. But, Musk has made the wrong choices every step of the way. It's like he's giving a masterclass on how to be a terrible leader. It's amazing the miscalculations Musk has made. First, his longest tenure, most experience employees likely just got a huge payday on their stock/options - so of course they will peace out. Second, his antics are driving up the price of hiring new employees. Third, Musk still had a lot of goodwill before taking ownership that he's now squandered. I could go on...
The only thing I can think is he looked hard at the financials and the debt load he saddled the company with and panicked.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It's on the front page now, after 100 upvotes.
It doesn't hurt that this episode has brought some friends around to agreeing with my dismal view of Elon :)
I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.
(well I guess everyone's is)
Last time I looked, Let's Encrypt had one big beefy Postgres database to issue pretty much every single TLS certificate on the Internet. Computers are fast.
Moderation as good as HN would require at least 3 costly staffers, fully loaded cost something like $30K-$250K each, fully loaded depending on where they live.
If doing HN were easy there would be a dozen awesome competitors.
Moderation is pretty much JUST dang.
HN DOES have competitors, lobste.rs is pretty much directly competing, and more importantly, this very concept of "simple board to post links and comment" was borrowed to build freaking REDDIT
I've written a bunch about this in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) read those explanations and end up still having a question which I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.
Your comment may be suffering from the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We're all more likely to notice shit we dislike.
I mean, subjectively most of those accounts deserve to be dead, but don’t pretend this is something it isn’t.
One interesting thing I heard recently was this idea that even in communities of the most rusted on free speech absolutists, there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why?
It's totally possible to believe that unrestricted free speech is the best policy and to also not implement that policy.
Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. Generally free speech maximalism is about allowing all controversial speech for various reasons which tend to include the importance of dissenting voices.
Doing it right requires the intellectual honesty to draw a line between these two comments: "lol hitler did nothing wrong gas the **s! 1488 woo!" and "Hitler did nothing but implement some social control policies which would be widely accepted in today's society, if presented differently."
I obviously don't agree with either sentence. But the second one should be permitted and vouched against downvotes while the first can be deleted without a second thought. Honesty required.
I'm pretty sure, looking at twitch chat, that this isn't universally true.
Then the next question is, if this supposed truism isn't universally true, what other moderation decisions and flagging, aren't?
Free Speech absolutist don't put any concern the listener may have on the content, but the fact that the speaker is being prevented from distributing their message. Not to mention, one of the points cited by free speech absolutists is "who determines facts/truth/value" and who determines the entity who gets to do that. That means you can't make a judgement value about the spam being spam and have to treat it as something SOMEONE somewhere might desire.