Ask HN: Is anyone else here frustrated by HN's flamewar detector? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone else here frustrated by HN's flamewar detector?

17 pointsmd2243 comments

EDIT: Looks like the original thread has since been restored.

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Case in point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7104904

This story was on the front page and inspired some interesting discussion on the applicability of biological models to technological adoption. When I checked a bit later, it had plummeted to #63 and was essentially removed from the sphere of HN discourse. I can only assume this happened because the number of comments outpaced the number of upvotes, which I believe will trigger HN's flamewar detection mechanism.

Mainly I'm just frustrated because I don't think "disappearing" a story is a good action to take just because some commenters aren't on their best behavior. Are flamewars really that dangerous? This seems to be the equivalent of slaughtering animals to prevent the spread of disease. I guess I just think that heated conversation shouldn't lead to the entire discussion being eliminated. In fact, a lot of heated conversation stems from passionate opinions, and those are often really interesting to engage with. Does anyone else feel this way?

Yup, I agree completely. I've seen this happen several times to particularly interesting stories over the past couple months. It's particularly annoying because it's "sneaky" -- no indication that a story is dead, it just suddenly jumps to the third page and stops receiving upvotes.

It feels an awful lot like a "child-proof" or "sanitized" version of HN, almost a kind of "censorship for your own good", which seems contrarian to the independent hacker spirit.

I can understand if a badge next to the comments link showed up ("warning: controversial") or something, but this kind of sneaky-censorship just feels underhanded. An interesting conversation gets going, people are making valuable points, and then... everything's just dead.

>Are flamewars really that dangerous?

Yes, according to the site owner. Once that is out of the way the rest of the facts slot into obvious places and the detector does what it should be doing.

>This seems to be the equivalent of slaughtering animals to prevent the spread of disease.

Foot and mouth had 2000 cases, 10m slaughtered to prevent it. I was well aware of it at the time and the prevention was agreed with even by the people losing out (farmers). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_United_Kingdom_foot-and-mo...

Are you sure it was the flame war detector and not people flagging the story?

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