Ask HN: Help flag the NSA stories | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Help flag the NSA stories

15 pointsjasonkester8 comments

Every once in a while, an off topic story will come by that is so inflammatory that people think they need to discuss it over and over everywhere on the internet.

When that spills over here, it drowns out interesting stories, but worse it attracts the sort of users who really like to fight about things on discussion groups. Seeing a homepage filled with 20 flavors of a single story, all of which are off topic for the site, all of which are full of bad behavior, just makes this a worse place.

So please, help out by flagging a dozen or so copies of the same off-topic NSA story that's on the homepage right now. They're the exact reason the "flag" button exists.

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http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Politics... crime... TV news... probably off-topic. Certainly several dozen copies of the same thing is a little excessive.

(Perhaps if I were American I might feel more strongly on the issue. Being Australian, I clearly can't assess that.)

I am going to repeat some advice I once received, you can not change others you can only change yourself. As applied to this situation, the NSA story has dominated HN front page less than 24 hours, and things will go back to normal, but not because you or anyone else forces others behavior. In the meantime, what you do have control over is the fact that you are only a click away from reading an unlimited cache of interesting stories all over the web, you do not need them feed to you through HN. Or take PG's advice and stop reading HN and get back to hacking. Give it another 24 hours and I imagine you will come back to a diverse HN front page.

For the record, I do not want to discourage you from trying to change/modify the behavior of others, but sometimes it is important to focus internally and the things we can immediately control.

I've flagged this submission. You are welcome! :)

And I've joined you by flagging the OP as well.

Some people don't seem to understand the cost of democracy and need to put aside their sense of entitlement for just one or two days for the greater good.

I am flagging you down... :) If the front page is filled with same story, it is because people wants that. That is the logic of the HN.

And I'm upvoting him. Because hes right. I don't want to read 3 of the same stories. And this happens way too often with HN. He knows what hes talking about.

Sorry if trying to preserve and fight for democracy disrupts your daily news reading flow. I bet you're the type of person that gets easily upset about people protesting in the streets against the government, too - because it makes you late for the movies or something.

And yes, I realize my comment is against HN's behavior rules, but in times like this, I think it's silly to say something like that. HN also played a big role in stopping SOPA/PIPA before, by keeping those sort of stories popular on the front page. I'd like to believe it can do that again, when there is a lot more at stake than in SOPA's case here.

Alas, I no longer have a flag button, for reasons mysterious to me - I don't think I abused it, I seldom used it except for spam posts, no more than a dozen times a year.

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