Hacker News Reader

Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

Why is this on HN and getting up-voted?

The questions surrounding citizen surveillance of police activity definitely have relevance on HN, the technology and software created by our industry have facilitated this on a wide scale.

reddit effect. All snowden and such anti-govt stories are being heavily moderated out in reddit so that crowd is flowing in here. This site has completely changed character (in a very negative way) in the past month. So sad and frustrating.

I know we're in a government-authority-hating mood right now, but I agree that this shouldn't be here. Hacker news is not /r/news

OP probably had HN and reddit open in separate tabs, just got mixed up.

What! How is this not related to HN? A lot of people here are from CA and would want to be aware of these incidents. HN guidelines clearly state that if it interests people then it is alright. And since it is clearly on top of the page, it interests a lot of people.

What to Submit -- 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.

I disagree with you, because this is possibly a crime, non labeled graphic content, should be covered on the TV news, etc. Therefor I think it is probably off-topic. HN is not a general cali news source in my personal opinion.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link"

Also from the guidelines.

What if the website software has decided to turn your vote arrows and "flag" links into placebo buttons? I am certain my votes have no effect, nor do my flags; I've tested it.

Silently being relegated to a second-class account (not a "hell ban" at least, I guess) has made me less interested in participating at all. I don't even know why I'm logged in right now.

Then trust that other people (like me) who still have privileges flagged the post already.

Some of us lost our flagging privileges by flagging all the duplicative, non-hacker-related junk on the front page the past few weeks.

I'm not saying it's necessarily right, but: 1) It relates to the general anti-gov't sentiment with Snowden , NSA, et al 2) The man was recording the police with his smartphone

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