Steve Jobs passed away one year ago - HN Frontpage

I said I had the same thought, but in this particular case, that's my problem for opening a thread about Steve Jobs died a year ago, what'd you expect if not people sharing how big of an influence on their lives that man has been?

I wouldn't write off things like that. Maybe you could have discovered something totally tangential but equally worthwhile somewhere else.

exactly the same here. same first computer

In many ways John Lennon was the same. Read a biography of him and listen to outtakes from Beatles recordings to see what I mean.

Imagine if we all had that kind of passion and devotion to being and creating the best. Imagine if we all created such amazing things that Steve Jobs and John Lennon looked... normal.

;-) (everything is subjective and people affect other people in different ways)

It'd have been really nice if the HN votes would have caused one or two generic stories and otherwise the really unique takes on it to rise to the top, but the HN voting system + crowd isn't capable of making such a selection. Indeed you'd need a downvote button, or at least some way of flagging what you consider to be near-duplicates. Reddit does this very well (both because of their system and their crowd), none of the programming/tech subreddits (that I saw) were dominated to exclusion of nearly any other news topic to the extent HN was, that day.

> I guess I always thought flagging was for inappropriate material, scams and obviously false things. Do most people use flagging as a downvote substitute for stories?

That's a bit of a false dichotomy, IMO. What is a downvote for? You downvote inappropriate material, scams, obviously false things, duplicates and low-quality content. Preferably you do not downvote things just for disagreeing with them (just like nobody upvotes things just for agreeing with them, right?).

So in this case, the guy considered all those stories about the same topic (with really minor variations in their "take" on it), to be near-duplicates and flagged them. Now, we don't know what happens to flagged posts really, so at this point anything could have happened: Maybe it flooded some sort of for-manual-review moderation queue which annoyed the mods, or maybe they did understand the reason for the flagging but decided that "NO. HN needs to mourn and the front page will be our shrine!" and bumped up some more Steve stories. The latter is not completely unlikely (even though it probably just were normal user votes), we all have seen stories that appeared or disappeared from the front page that couldn't have been caused by regular votes. So yes, the moderators could have er, moderated things a bit so we'd see one or two generic news stories from quality sources about Steve's death (rightly featuring at the very top), but bumped all other stories that did not offer a significantly different take on the news to the second page, in favour of more original content (which might have also been about Steve, if that really was the only thing people could write and think of that day, as long as it was something worth clicking).

Though the mass flagging was of course unnecessary, it's not like mods didn't see that every single post was the same thing.

I don't understand why we're saddled with a few hundred people who conspired to kick this community in the nuts for a day and a night as some kind of self-flagellating tribute, but I don't consider them my peers. If I were pg for a day I'd stop counting votes from anyone who upvoted three dozen clones of the same wire story with almost no accompanying discussion.

This is another reason I want micro-payments for any article I read - content producers will realise that I value good journalism enough to actually pay for it.

Longform is an excellent source of better journalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playboy

See the intro for a description of the short stories and interviews included in Playboy.

Nothing's happened to journalism, there's just lots more of it, so you have to do some work to get your filters in place.

Second although Jobs was known to be whim back in 1985 he wasn’t as successful as it was when he died so my guess is that the interviewer wouldn’t have any problem to push him a bit and make the best out of an interview. Years later people seemed to be frightened of the idea asking him the wrong question.

Lastly, in 1985 Jobs was like thirty years younger than when he died. He would be burning to express his thoughts and his vision of the future. Plus he was still the underdog back then, there were some huge corporations around and Apple compared to them was nothing.