Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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Musk flamewars have been around for years (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26528522) and have gotten more common and nastier of late. HN is for thoughtful, curious conversation. Curiosity withers under repetition and fries under indignation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), so it's easy to understand why users flagged this post.

Online rage, celebrity gossip, cults and anti-cults, ideological battle, internet tropes, and personality drama are all destructive to the intent of HN. This topic is rich in all of those and then some. There's no curiosity here, no interesting new things, no respectful or playful exchange—just people hammering on what they already feel, going after their objects of hatred and each other. That's not what HN is for, and destroys what it is for.

If anyone assumed otherwise, now would be a good moment to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and recalibrate one's image of what HN is supposed to be!

Edit: I just inserted "or celebrities" into the guidelines. It was already implied, but it won't hurt to make it explicit.

Perhaps the site should be renamed "Hacker Discussion" rather "Hacker News"? Though I'm not sure "Hacker" is accurate either...

Don't you think that certain links can be newsworthy despite generating predictably ugly discussion threads?

It does seem that you're saying the site is not about news per se.

Sure, it's not about news in that sense. Is that not clear from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html?

Not really. The fact that "Off-Topic" is even necessary shows that "On-Topic" is not particularly clear. Different people find different things interesting and have their intellectual curiousity gratified in different ways. And a lot of stuff appears unflagged on HN that falls between the two categories.

You seem to have this personal weird exception to the guidelines, which is "Please submit the original source... unless it's a corporate press release." ;-) But you still allow meta-links about corporate press releases, which may put the PR in larger perspective but don't otherwise clearly gratify intellectual curiosity.

Of course people find different things intellectually interesting, but a site dedicated to intellectual interest is still a completely different thing than general news.

I'll diss the corporate press release any day! Beyond that I'm not sure I follow your specific point. What do you think we should do differently?

> Beyond that I'm not sure I follow your specific point.

The question is why HN allows a meta-link about a corporate PR (for example, a Verge story about the PR, since you don't like the direct link) but not something like this? Why is "Corporation X announces Y" intellectually interesting, but this isn't?

Anyway, if this submission remains flagged, then this newer one should be flagged too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35063232

If by "this" you mean today's Elon drama, I've already answered that at length:

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35061369

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35061343

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060863

Thank you for the guidance @dang - rereading now. Feel free to ignore the rest of this discussion message @dang - unless there is some Cautioning I'm overlooking it on your part to me, here?

* "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." -- is what I'm noticing from the Guidelines. I dismissed @luckylion (hi!) as categorizing this subject as being off-topic for HN.

Reframing in the context of the Guidelines:

I learn from the topic an appreciation for Accessibility (the technology-area that enables marginalized groups). Specifically, how it can be possible for a severely handicapped designer to contribute, greatly in this case, only having the use of fingers for up to 2 hours.

And I learn, how bias by leadership poses difficulties countering it non-linearly / disproportionately to that marginalized individual. Specifically the disabled ex-employee contacted the CEO through Tweeting, the next-most-convenient technology route after failing to successfully use corporate facilities (https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1632931816750346242).

It is hard in my experience to contradict and correct the dominant paradigm when it's at fault. As a technologist, I think about the problems society faces, in this case posed by Twitter Inc's reliance on Tweeting, to a disabled individual.

So I did/do think this subject is appropriate for HN - it's something to be built on; I disagree with the subject's flagging since many of the spin-off discussions are what deserve flagging for "celebrity" character politics.

Certainly the key-takeaway, ADA / Civil Rights violation + character-maligning by innovator of another innovator, is dressed-up in "celebrity". Though not tragic; the now-fired disabled employee seems to be excelling at life.

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