There have been many, many posts about this for 5+ hours. All successfully flagged away from the front page by you know whom. Disgraceful.
Ah: now this thread is flagged away from the front page. This site is a fucking joke.
Ah: now this thread is flagged away from the front page. This site is a fucking joke.
"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (I don't watch TV news, but I'd be very surprised if this one wasn't all over it)
p.s. Sometimes it's really good for HN to be the place that you don't come to for coverage of something sensational. We just had a ton of threads about the submersible that imploded; not to mention the shit-ton of threads about the reddit that imploded. I don't think it's good for HN to do every implosion.
Edit: after looking things over in the morning, I found myself persuaded by the arguments in favor of this story, so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460937 is currently on the front page. That's probably still frustrating to people who wanted a heat-of-the-moment thread, but that's not really what HN is about.
Oh, it's sensational, is it? Well, yes, I suppose a coup that ends a bloody war (that is contributing, if only ideologically, to the crippling economic policies all over The West) would be rather sensational, wouldn't it?
Edit: Related question, why can I vouch for some flagged comments, but not for others? Edit: Think I figured that out. Vouch is only for dead, not just flagged?
The team here is small so a lot of the decisions are indeed unilateral. We don't all keep the same hours.
> Vouch is only for dead
Correct!
That said - at this stage, the events definitely do appear to be quite significant.
Per the British MoD: "This represents the most significant challenge to the Russian state in recent times."
no it isn't. this is definitely significant.
even if putin crushes prigozhin and consolidates his power, that is still significant. there is no way this isn't significant.
unless you believe that it is literally all made up, but russian media is reporting on it. that seems idiotically unlikely.
There are certain stories where it's better for HN to not be about that. This feels like one of them to me; I'm happy to be wrong if the story turns out otherwise, but the current reports are far too politicized to evaluate objectively.
Edit: after looking things over in the morning, I found myself feeling persuaded by the arguments in favor of this story, so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460937 is currently on the front page. That's probably still frustrating to people who wanted a heat-of-the-moment thread, but that's not really what HN is about.
For example, that story was less likely to degrade into flamewar; this one is highly likely to. That story, although morbid, had more entry points for intellectually interesting conversation than this one. That story was closer to HN's happy place topic-wise; this one is far from it. That story was likely to be accurately reported because it wasn't high-stakes politically; precisely the opposite for this one. That story was less likely to get dominated by predictable talking points and pre-existing opinions [1]; this story is likely to get little else. And so on.
There's a higher-level consideration too: it isn't a good idea for HN to be too consistent. That would be predictable, predictability is uninteresting, and we're trying to optimize for the opposite [2]. The best strategy is the other way around: try to be unpredictable from any sequence [3]. So any time you see $foo-story-1, $foo-story-2, for any value of $foo, it's best to steer away from $foo-story-3. I know this is frustrating for people who prefer formal, predictable rules, but it's good for curiosity.
Unfortunately, it's also frustrating for people who have legit reasons to care deeply about $foo-story-3, and that's a different phenomenon—I empathize with that feeling and it's not something we're doing on purpose. All I can say is that such topics exist for every reader, so everyone ends up getting frustrated in this way. Hopefully it evens out in the long run.
Edit: all that said, I reread the comments and found your and others' argument more persuasive than my own, so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460937 is currently on the front page.
[1] (we did get predictable raging against corner-cutting billionaires, but that was about it)
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Moreover: if you think a post was unfairly flagged, you can email mods (hn@ycombinator.com) and request that flags be suspsended.
Mods can make the call to reinstate a post or let it stand, and I suspect in this case the flags might remain. But occasional political posts (US presidential elections come to mind) and other large news events occasionally clear the hurdle.
(I email with vouches occasionally myself, with mixed results.)
At this point it is clear thing is happening ... and users flagging it are flagging it for very political reasons.
(I don't believe they exist.)
This site is not about politics. I do not flag/downvote such topics but I do not want to see them among science/programming news anyway.
shrug
I really have no idea who would care specifically about censoring it on HN, anyway.
I always thought everything he said was on orders from the highest, either to troll Western media, or else to make the regular military nervous so they wouldn't start a coup.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-war-russia-nuclear-647a54...
If CNN and others are covering it, I think it reinforces my point, that censoring HN is irrelevant.
How is censorship irrelevant? Yes there are other news sources but it’s not a good look for HN.
And increasingly nearly everything that is mainstream news or clickbait shows up on HN anyway, despite the Guidelines page saying it's off topic.
If CNN, Reuters, the AP, the NY Times, are covering something, it will show up 5 minutes later if a given item disappears.
"So accustomed are we to viewing Putin as a master tactician, that the opening salvos of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s disobedience were at times assessed as a feint – a bid by Putin to keep his generals on edge with a loyal henchman as their outspoken critic."
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/24/europe/russia-putin-wagner-pr...
Everyone has the same facts: there are some green men with guns and there are some green men with guns that just arrived. Some people are quick to call some of them Wagner. (Which by itself would also not mean much, thinking the entirety of Wagner group supports the coup is just as much of a leap with no evidence.)
There is indirect evidence pointing to takeover of Rostov to piece together, but it exists mostly in the shape of fragmentary telegram posts. There seems to be a lot of that evidence, enough that it seems plausible, but even people on the ground next to those green men have no idea.
The most striking bit of evidence I saw so far seems a screenshot (but of course without a link) of Russian TASS captioning a photo of some of those green men as "Wagner troops". Just because it's such a detail it would be hard to come up with it as a fake. But that is still assuming this is not an editorial mistake because the photo must have been taken just minutes prior.
(Edit, now there's a video that seems to show Prigozhin indeed in Rostov giving ultimatum to military: https://t.me/nexta_live/55212)