Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrcwinn | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why this was flagged and removed from the HN homepage.

It's annoying, but I can see why it was flagged. The thread isn't going to be very interesting. It'll just be a bunch of people being rude about Musk (justifiably) and a bunch of people excusing his behavior.

> The thread isn't going to be very interesting.

I was going to reply and say that it's important for people to see the tweets anyway, but then I realized that the people most in need of seeing the tweets are the ones who did see them and flagged this submission.

I wonder if there are any "undecideds" remaining, or if everyone here has already sorted into pro-Musk/anti-Musk groups?

I heard some people started to change their minds about Trump after he mocked a disabled reporter, so I don't know.

This is about a person working in tech that started a successful startup company, and was fired from another tech company which acquired the former. The firing is really public, and of questionable morality (perhaps even questionable legality), where the CEO of the bigger company is trying to publicly humiliate his worker.

This is indeed very interesting to HN (you can see that by the number of upvotes and comments). It touches on what we can expect when working in tech, and how tech billionaires treat their workers. The low value comments about Elon being rude or justifying his behavior will be voted down as they are less interesting than the actual matter at hand.

They won't be voted down though. I made two rude comments about Musk in this thread and they got almost 60 upvotes between them.

Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but I don't think it's hard to guess in this case; it's a rage thread about a frequent rage topic.

More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060935

Me too! I clicked through, read the thread, came back to HN and it was gone! I resubmitted and it took me here. Maybe dang will chime in.

> Maybe dang will chime in.

According to dang, flags almost invariably come from HN users, not from HN moderators.

It was the Musk fans.

Flagging seems rather arbitrary at times here. There is the vouching feature to counteract this, but I don't see the option right now. I'm not sure if this is only available if the post is dead entirely, or what other restrictions this has.

Because the musk simps are out in force.

Could you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments? We're trying for something else here. Even when the topic is this flammable, such a comment stands out as low-value, and is the kind of thing we rate-limit accounts for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Will you be doing anything to handle the brigading that is happening?

Internet users are much too quick (like, orders of magnitude too quick) to jump to conclusions about things like that. That's why the site guidelines ask people not to post suspicions without evidence, like you did here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063457

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063442

... but rather to email us at hn@ycombinator.com if they think they're seeing manipulation or abuse. We're happy to look at the data in such cases.

I can tell you from long experience, though, that in threads on divisive topics, the Occamesque explanation is almost always adequate.

Musk and right wingers are brigading and gaming the system. HN is easily gamed in this way, just like any social media.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/how-the-a...

I clicked flag to help the site stay focused on actual tech over Twitter drama.

Maybe it's a personal failing on my part, but I used to live in blissful ignorance of what Musk was up to today. Would like to go back to that at some point. If I did care, it's easy enough to follow him on Twitter.

But... you're still here in the thread, reading and commenting. How does that make sense?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com