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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

> Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be?

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.

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Well, that is a misfortune for the rest of us who find it relevant.

The front page doesn’t need 5 posts from random people talking about how they’re moving to mastodon and boy isn’t toot such a weird name for tweets.

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.

> The front page doesn’t need 5 posts from random people talking about how they’re moving to mastodon and boy isn’t toot such a weird name for tweets.

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").

I flag almost everything I see, but I am just one vote.

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.

HN downranks posts that get both a lot of flags AND a lot of votes so

>If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter.

Is just flat out wrong.

Thanks for the correction.

It still achieves my objective of less Twitter drama on the front page.

imron has it right on this point, because upvotes and flags are in a sort of tug-of-war. Minimal flags can't defeat maximal upvotes.

I'm with you. I've seen some fairly low quality discussions on HN, many of which fixate on Musk. The Twitter situation is magnifying it to stupefying dimensions.

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.

Speculation and gossip are annoying, but the actual things that are happening (and there are a lot of them) are worth keeping.

Agree. And substantive things (like this piece of news) make it through.

In principle, sure, but this submission and all the others I've seen is clearly in the "speculation and gossip" bucket. The only non-speculative information here, that Twitter offices are closed tomorrow, is moderately interesting at best and we can see upthread that nobody's really interested in talking about it except to feed tangential speculation.

You're right, and the people complaining are also right because the story does deserve oxygen—just not all the oxygen. It's our job to balance this so it gets some oxygen but not all the oxygen.

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.)

Thanks for all the work you (and other mods) do to keep things balanced.

I think for the most part it's been working well.

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