Hacker News is actively censoring links to Arrington story. | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News is actively censoring links to Arrington story.

blog.mattlanger.com

95 pointsyanofsky35 comments

Since I have routinely kept showdead on in my HN user profile, I have developed some sense of which stories are autokilled on submission (almost always because they are from banned domains) and which quickly die after submission (because multiple users with flagging privileges flag them). It looks like gawker.com stories are dying rapidly, perhaps being autokilled on submission, without regard to topic.

On my part, I think that most news about Michael Arrington is probably relevant to this community, but I don't count a story about someone's personal life as "news" until it comes from a reliable source. (After all, even Wikipedia tries to maintain this standard for biographical statements about living persons.) Having just searched Google News, I haven't seen any uptake of any reporting about Arrington in professionally edited news sources. If that kind of story is developed, it MIGHT be worth discussing here. (Meanwhile, we have plenty of other things to discuss here.)

I think the lack of "official" news sources that have covered this so far will itself become a topic of discussion. In the meantime, I think the fact that someone has put her name forward and is herself a part of the startup community is notable -- this isn't just the rumor mill. If the allegations are completely false, then libel suits are in order...but I don't think it's trivial for someone to make an accusation like this in public and continue to stick to it.

Betabeat is the only other news site that has covered it, and it's mostly covered it by recapping Gawker's reporting. Someone submitted a link to a BetaBeat before but it was flagged off:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5492145

Most controversies related to personal conflicts and allegations are usually flagged, not just in this particular case (many of the Adria Richards-related submissions, for example). I wouldn't chalk this up to a conspiracy to protect Arrington or being anti-Gawker as much as HN's editorial stance on these topics in general.

And the whole "donglegate" story didn't go against that same stance?

Many of the donglegate stories were flagged off the front page. That story was broader, involving behaviours at tech conventions, responses to that behaviour, Internet bullying and mobs, etc.

Donglegate was still lousy for HN. Most threads had little useful discussion, a lot of entrenched opinion, and a lot of heat. ("shallowly, but intensely, interesting").

This? This is nothing useful.

100% agree. That story had too much crap being thrown around. On the other hand, this is a serious issue/story involving a very influential person in SV, tech-media and tech-investing. It shouldn't be ignored that easily.

It did, which is why almost all of the stories where removed. The few that survived tended to talk about the issues in a general, timeless fashion and use "donglegate" as an example.

There's obviously no clear litmus test here...so I don't think the editorial decision is an easy one. In the Adria Richards case, HN mods couldn't ban all the submissions, nor would it be in their best interests to do so, because that controversy raised tech-related issues worth discussing.

Anyway, I don't know what the best mix of discretion and freedom is...but HN would lose some of its allure if its policy was: "Only allow links that are explicitly technical/entrepreneurial in nature" Because how many times do hackers need to learn that success in life and business is sometimes (or, rather, often) not based just on technical merit?

How is a story killed after a few minutes (not the auto-dead filters)? Does it happen when a story receives a certain number of flags? Does it require moderator intervention?

No we're not. Gawker has been banned for years.