What's the reason this is being flagged?
See: http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
"It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4".
"Minimize awareness"? Obviously we don't try to do that, nor would we want to, or even think that way.
The reason there was a penalty—the mildest possible—was procedural. For several months after the Snowden news broke back in 2013, HN's front page was overrun with copycat stories that were simply follow-ups and added no new information. Many users complained about this, and they were right. So we applied the best tool we had available, with the intention of taking it off when the flood died down, and so we eventually did.
I don't see how a blanket penalty works better than manually removing the small number of genuinely pointless articles.
It's true that during the initial period there were major revelations coming out every few days. But I was talking about later.
7. Hacking Oklahoma State University's Student ID (snelling.io)
94 points by samsnelling 5 hours ago
9. Introduction to Facebook's Flux architecture (ryanclark.me)
204 points by wayfarer2s 8 hours ago
11. Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald: AUAA (reddit.com)
376 points by ahamdy 4 hours ago
The higher up on Hacker News an article is, the more awareness will typically be allocated to the story. If a story drops from the front page, significantly less attention will be allocated to it.
While the penalties might not have been intended to minimize awareness of these stories in the greater scheme of things, they were certainly meant to minimize awareness of the stories on Hacker News.
If there is an effect of 'minimizing awareness' at work, I don't think the effect is very large.
You're assuming most HNers a) move past the first page b) search for submissions, or c) frequent /newcomments. My counter-assumption would be that is not true for a majority of users.
I hope, at the very least, the homepage should have a disclaimer saying that the links are not a collective effort by the community but rather a filtered list by administrators.
As other replies to you have mentioned, the discussion surrounding those articles were vitriolic and heavily partisan, to boot.
I disagree that HN wants to minimize "awareness" of these topics, but mods have been clear in the past that, while they agree the topic is important, it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on
I get HN's policy and the reasoning behind it; I just think it's wrong. Not all important discussions are constructive, and not all constructive discussions are important.
Careful. You are projecting here. This is the very reason that these topics get penalties. When it comes to politics, people assume that everyone must fall on a side and have strong feelings about a given topic.
A relatively small portion of the community ends up flooding everyone with stories related to these topics and it turns a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it. They can't say they don't care because that's seen as being ignorant to people that are passionate so it just alienates them.
Not having a valid counter-argument to being accused of apathy, is ignorance.
> a huge chunk of people off that just don't care to read about it
talk about projecting. i'm sure it was super democratic and indeed the voice of the people that got an NSA/snowden filter put in place and how robin hood of you to spring to its defence.
Are you sure? I don't see anything in your first paragraph that either we or HN's policies would disagree with—quite the contrary. And obviously HN hosts a great deal of just such discussion.
Well, the effect is still the same, isn't it?
> it distracts HN away from the tech/web/startup topics they want HN to focus on
That seems contradictory. If I recall correctly, I've heard the mods explicitly say that they also like non-tech/web/startup topics.
No, that's incorrect. The first thing the site guidelines say is:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
There's no question of the Snowden stories being off-topic. The issue is purely one of balance. The right principle seems to me to be that articles with significant new information are more HN-appropriate than those without it.
Now I don't know if this comment thread is (currently) at the bottom of the page because of +/- votes or a ploy to stifle discussion on NSA and Snowden.