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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Yep. There was a question on Programmers that was something like "What is the good/bad decision you made in your mid-20s about your career". There were a ton of great answers, and I was so proud of my heavily upvoted answer that I linked it on my website. Only to get a note a couple of months later that the link was 404ing.

I looked, and guess what: Not only did the mods close it out of some insane sense of tidiness, and not only did they hide it from normal viewing; they apparently deleted it entirely. All our writing, all the good comments, all the voting: gone forever, without warning or apparent recourse.

So fuck them and their petty, arrogant bureaucracy. I will never write an answer for them again.

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There was a discussion on stackexchange about Java books or such that was always linked to in case of duplicate questions. Then it got entirely deleted and so all the links to it from dupes got worthless too - and yet the dupes remained and still point to the 404 page.

Mods are getting too trigger happy? In fairness if you give random "trusted" strangers power to delete anything they deem inappropriate they will start abusing their power, that's in human nature.

But to them they're not abusing it, they're just interpreting the rules very literally and strictly.

The problem is that any gameified system, like a karma or reputation system, attracts people good at interpreting rules strictly and finding efficient ways to exploit them. So you're actually selecting for literalist rules lawyers.

Apart from giving them a feel of a power, what does the fact of closing a thread (whether legitimately or not) give to the mods? Do they have some karma incentive to do so?

There's no incentive in closing a question, other than helping the site reach it's goals, and the primary goal for any Stack Exchange site is useful, not interesting or popular (not that they are mutually exclusive, but also not to be confused).

This specific question was turning into crap fast, with answers like "Sounds like your friend is a bit of a dick. Noone wants to work for him." (since deleted). Closing it only prevents further answers, as it was obvious they were deteriorating. Still, the closure and any closure, is reversible, people always have the choice to vote to re-open if they feel the closure wasn't justified.

So true.

That's why I consider this the most brilliant bit of Wikipedia's policies: "If a rule prevents you from improving Wikipedia, ignore it." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

There's a great discussion of that here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_ru...

Last time this blew up on HN, some of the principals of SO turned up here, as did a bunch of mods. They were mostly unable to discuss the issues in terms of serving the audience; they just kept falling back on The Rules. An attitude, I'm sure, which quickly drove off anybody with common sense. So now they have achieved glorious groupthink: everybody they normally talk to agrees with them about The Rules.

Maybe someone has mirror it?

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

That would be great. If somebody has old mirrors, please let me know or mention it here.

It would be pretty simple to mirror selected articles.

For example: If you're worried a page will disappear, go to foo.com and paste the address. If it does disappear, you can go back to foo.com and retrieve the content, link to foo.com instead etc..

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