Every '… is down' posts. | Hacker News Reader

Every '… is down' posts.

10 pointszachinglis11 comments

I wanted to complain on the GitHub thread but I wanted to hear the rest of the community's opinions before I spoke.

What's everyone's views on the "Github is down", "Heroku is down." To me, they clutter what's meant to be about news, and exciting new developments. Often I think of these as karma bait (though I don't always assume that of everyone - I believe there are genuine people.)

It doesn't help anyone though, does it? If Github's not working for me, I'll check "isitdownforeveryoneorjustme", ask on Twitter or prod someone on IM. To me it's noise?

Do people find them interesting? Or beneficial to the community? If so, what is it that I'm missing?

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They do seem a bit pointless, especially when the problem will be self-evident, and verifiable with one Google search. They get even more pointless when they get spammed, because nobody checks the feed before posting.

It's also fairly off-topic. It's categorically not news, nor is it startup promotion. I don't get the logic either. just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. I could post what I had for lunch as a thread, but I won't, I understand context. I'm getting fairly angsty about it now, or at least sounding angsty. But it doesn't bother me a lot, I just move on to the next item. I still think it should be kept to a minimum though, after all if we don't keep some semblance of order then HN will just waste away with low quality items and people will move on. Although that might not be a bad thing if a better replacement pops up.

I think "x is down" posts are relativley meaningless anyway. For many (especially the larger) services with multiple components,spread over many servers and data centers, what does it really mean to be down? If I can't sign in is it down? If nobody on the west coast of Canada can get in, is it down? If you can read, but not post is it down - if the front end is up but the database is not, is it down?

It's pretty rare that 'gmail is down'... much more likely that x% of gmail users are having issues. Let's save the 'x is down' post for when it really is 'down'.

I see it as useful sometimes if I didn't hear about it from some other means. Maybe they also serve as a discussion point for people to have a bitch about the downtime?

I'm curious as to how it's useful if you didn't hear about it. If you attempt to go to the site, you will see it's down. You will waste negligibly more time than reading the words "Site is down" but you will only waste this time if you actually try to go to the site. It's not particularly useful if you aren't trying to use the site but it still takes up a slot on the front page.

Like a traffic jam. Its obvious once you're in it. Sometimes, nice to know not to bother. Etc.

Unlike with a traffic jam, bothering has a very small cost, especially as compared to the cost of reading "X is down" on the HN front page.

Understood, but still if XYZ is down at 9AM and you don't need to go there untill 11AM, you're not likely going to check. So then, you go about doing PQR task all morning, to then find out its still F@cked at 11AM. So, the cost is not the 30 seconds to figure it out, but the whole AM you wasted.

Or alternatively, all the time you pre-emtively are checking all over the place at T-1 for using it at T. Depending upon the resolution of this, that can be a PITA and a waste of time. Far more than you skipping over 1/30 of a page on the internet.

Alternatively, there may be some better way to do it. There could be a list/screen for relevance to the community or a seperate page or whatever. But one needs to address or dimensionalize the tension between information flow and efficiency a bit more than your first formulation.

These are services that a lot of HN users use. Also, the discussion and cause of the down time could lead to good advice for members.

I do wish that if, say, GitHub is down, people wouldn't post a link to GitHub that won't load because GitHub is down.

If people want to post a link to a GitHub status page that provides more information, then fair enough. And if people just want to discuss the outage and there's no good source of information to link to then make it a self-post. But linking to a site that's down seems perverse.

Very good point about the discussion. I just look back to when Heroku was going nuts and remembering a good 15 "Heroku is down" posts every time it went down again.

Postmortems are interesting. The "is down" posts are not.

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