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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

We changed the URL from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/12/apple-announces-bigge... to a third party article I just googled. If there's a better third-party article, we can change it again.

Yes, HN has the rule "*Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but corporate press releases are so awful to read that I increasingly think we need to make them an exception.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

All the more so because they have a strong incentive to bury the lede (I mean in general—not saying that about this announcement), and while third-party sites have other crap incentives, like sensationalism and clickbait, they at least don't do that.

View on HN

Looking at the original press release, I much prefer it to this third-party site. All the third-party site really did was remove a tiny bit of fluff, but it's having intermittent loading issues and is absolutely covered in ads if you aren't using an ad blocker. It also removes some of the actual content!

I mean, basically the web sucks right now. Classic rant incoming: There's definitely a need that sits between boring PR release and ad-filled regurgitation. You can't tell me that heaps of ads are actually helping the monetization of content, we're on the other side of the slippery slope. Thank goodness for adblock, I guess.

I would always prefer ad-free information directly from the source, and to follow HN guidelines without leaving them open to interpretation (call me an HN fundamentalist I guess).

Corporate press releases are never ad-free—the ads are just inlined. Worse, they're written in a demoralizing bureaucratic antilanguage that makes me, at least, want to bite my head off.

I think this was the wrong move. The original source is better in this case and you are letting your anti-corporate bias and personal opinion affect your decision making as a moderator. What makes this so awful to read to you?

3rd party sourcing isn't anti-corp. The purpose is to seek a more neutral position. Apple is clearly motivated to say positive things about Apple.

It has never been about seeking a neutral position. What is neutral about Vitalik shilling the Ethereum ecosystem?[0] He's clearly motivated to say positive things about it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33878216

The posts here don’t have to be neutral! There are a lot of blog posts, opinion pieces and opinionated comments. That’s actually good.

Anti-corporate bias is a pretty good bias for the editor of HN to be accusable of. It's a lot more common to hear the opposite and I know which one I prefer (and makes my life easier).

I don't mean to be flippant—you're right that personal opinion is affecting my judgment. I plead that (1) this is inevitable; (2) I do my best to make calls that are good for the community as a whole; and (3) there are vastly more times when I squash my personal preference in favor of #2.

The basic point here is that corporate press releases are their own genre and that that genre goes against HN's mandate at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I see your reasoning but I disagree. HN articles don’t need to be unbiased. The reason being, if you want a more neutral take, just take a look at the HN comments.

HN submissions are usually primary sources, and the HN comments are where you have the discussion. Sometimes even the top voted comment is just a summary of the actual submission, but rephrased to be less biased or more clear. If HN can’t point out the buried lede or explanation and get it upvoted then there’s a larger problem, but in practice I don’t find this to be the case (though maybe I’m wrong).

Does the article provide anything which the HN comment section wouldn’t?

This is my feeling. The article is the reference material for what we discuss in the comments; the comments provide interpretation.

For sure HN articles don't need to be unbiased, but corporate press releases are particularly soggy and misleading. I'm sure there are exceptions but boy are they rare, especially as company size grows.

https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/06/app-store-pricing-changes-dev... might be a better URL, perhaps?

Ok, changed to that from https://appleworld.today/archives/101157. Thanks!

What could a third party add to a primary-source's press release other than speculation? Sure in some cases there could be some "sources say..." or "when reached for comment Apple clarified that..." but in general I think its going to be a rehashing and speculation in general.

Context.

Added context by 3rd parties has a strong tendency to either add more fluff or replace the biases of the company with the biases of the particular article not just clarify. One benefit of reading the direct press release is you at least have a clear understanding going into it that the company is going to be biased towards itself. Couple that with having every bit of new information released unfiltered and it's why I prefer starting with the press release then building context instead of trying to get both at once.

Translation from corporate-speak to english.

Very often the PR is designed to bury the lede. Third party sources typically highlight whatever is in the company's interest to bury.

I'm not saying that was the case here, because I didn't read the articles. However, the pattern is so close to universal that it wouldn't be surprising.

I think in a lot of ways thats what this comment section should do. Much better to have the conversation centered around the primary source IMO.

That's a good point.

I think that in general the third party articles you find soon after the press release will just be copy-pastes of the press release (no time for real analysis) with bits removed. So it depends on whether you're optimizing for more information (the PR) or less misreading skimreading/headline reading.

Do you want to cater to the most thorough commentators or the masses?

That is true, and it definitely makes the solution suboptimal. I mean here I am defending the sort of websites that in HN's context mostly count as crap. That's bound to have downsides. The defense is extremely targeted to this one scenario though.

The site you picked ironically is failing to load for me on Safari in iOS, likely because I have an ad blocker enabled. It just keeps going into a reload loop.

I would second everyone else’s sentiment that going with the official PR statement is better , especially because Apple are really good about fast loading pages without ads, and none of these other sites provide new information that’s not in the press release.

Additionally many of the third party sites are really bad for accessibility, whereas the official Apple one is excellent for those who need readers.

> https://appleworld.today/archives/101157

> The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

I know it's breaks schema but I feel like a post should be able to have multiple URLs associated with it.

Totally agree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33888722.

Newsroom post is just better, I don't understand the need for this.

Are you going to verify that the alternative article is accurate and doesn't interpret the official information in a bad way (I mean in general--not saying that about this announcement)?

I agree, especially when original source is completely lacking in context. So basically I think the better article should be submitted.

But in this case I think Appleworld is a poor choice. 9to5[1] are generally much better. Avoid Macrumors and Appleinsider unless it is absolute necessary.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/06/app-store-pricing-changes-dev...

Ok, changed to that from https://appleworld.today/archives/101157. Thanks!

Respectfully I disagree with this.

The article you linked is mostly just a copy+paste of the apple page, with a few paragraphs removed.

I personally don't think going from the direct news source -> random news source you just googled that copy+pasted most of it anyway is worth doing.

> but corporate press releases are so awful to read that I increasingly think we need to make them an exception.

Is it really that much better if they just removed 2~3 paragraphs? They added nothing of value other then trackers and ads.

I do ask seriously - does removing 2~3 paragraphs really make it that much better?

Are we really going to move to having one person (no offense) to arbitrarily change the URLs from the official news source to a random one from your google search results?

tl;dr - doing this removes the benefits of first hand reporting, has effectively no different content, and you appeared to have randomly selected one that offers no clear benefit in it's content.

I don't know the mechanics of this or if it would just be manual, but when there is aggregation of submitted links (which I would assume is the case for a story like this), it does seem like the main PR link should be the title URL, but could other links all just be collected in a single comment?

I really prefer the actual PR links myself, corporate BS or not, because that gives me the language I need to then search out the other stories that are based on that PR. If you start with a blog, now I have to do the process in reverse to find the source. I think the HN policies are just fine in this regard. And even if other links can't be collated into a comment, I generally trust HN readers to provide additional information or helpful links when appropriate.

Maybe the policy should be that whichever page is chosen should at least link back to the main PR source, so you're only one step away from getting there.

In this case the page links the PR prominently in the first line of copy, so that seems OK.

You make an excellent point: the long-term solution here is a proper way to aggregate links. This is on our list and we'll get there eventually.

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