Hacker News Reader

Comment by mintplant | Hacker News Reader

Top of the front page in less than a minute. What does it say about us that our first response is to rush over to HN?

I really like that. It makes the internet feel more like a community; reminds me of old slashdot days.

I agree about the community aspect. The lights go out and you step outside to see if it's the same for the neighbours and the rest of your street.

Took the words out of my mouth.

I suppose that the logic is "hey, I wonder if it's just us... surely someone on HN will complain the instant that things go south, better check there first."

Checking twitter never occurs to me...

I was more,

Someone asked on IRC, I checked - it was down - then I was, It got to be on HN

Whenever I'm looking for real time information, the first thing I do is type search.twitter.com into chrome, hit tab to autocomplete into a search command, and search some keywords. Highly recommended! Also works if you're curious if an earthquake just occurred in your general area.

I was happy with that. The first thing I did was try from a couple different proxies then try a different gmail account and I was in wtf mode. Google's status indicator was showing everything was fine. I then checked HN and it was at the top. Their status indicator reflected the state of affairs 15 mins later.

When I clicked the "status dashboard" button I saw a board of green dots. I didn't trust that so I came here because I figured it'd be the first place I could confirm that gmail was in fact down.

The cynic will say "karma whoring" but I think it's actually because it increases the likelihood that something will happen.

For example, when there were coinbase issues, people wouldn't get responses for weeks. However, once a post about the delays hit the front page, the founders finally responded.

So no, I'm not surprised this happened and I wouldn't be surprised to see a swift response

Do you seriously think upvotes on HN have any impact on Google's motivation to get Gmail back up?

In the specific case of google, clearly no. But I've seen cases, such as with coinbase, where a post on the front page of HN really did lead to action.

My summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932224

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6929705

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5427985

I agree: I think the effect of HN commenting on its downtime is nonexistent for high-profile products from a giant company. Maybe if Slashdot picked up on downtime of a Google Labs product in 2004, you'd see an accelerated response, but that Google doesn't exist anymore.

The most I could see is some people from Google commenting here to give some slightly more technical than average canned response in order to flatter potential recruits. (And even that is so unlikely that I wouldn't assume any Google employees commenting here are doing that unless they gave the game away somehow.)

My coming to HN wasn't to see about Gmail, but because I couldn't waste time reading email at the moment.

"What does it say about us that our first response is to rush over to HN?"

Would have to have some statistics to back up that "about us" though, right?

Although I have some gmail accounts for various purposes main mail is actually non gmail. I just happened to browse by and see the link. The question is why did I care to click through? I guess because I was curious what others would say about this or what they knew about it. Not that it mattered to me since as I said it's not my main email source. So what we have is really the same curiosity of when there is a car crash and you end up with a "gaper" delay.

About me it indicates that I am totally dependent on Google for acquiring information about work-state and communication. I think that's OK, since I work here, but I'm not sure.

I think it is a testament to how quickly relevant news for people like us rises here. Hacker News is working as intended and I think it's fantastic.

I came to HN because it is the one place where I knew I might find some intelligent discussion of why it was down.

Fishing for Karma! :)

yep saw 500 ran a search on HN

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