The Black Bar memorial mode should be invoked by community vote | Hacker News Reader

The Black Bar memorial mode should be invoked by community vote

19 pointsgall10 comments

Every time someone important to the community dies, there's talk of hoisting the black bar and questions about why or why not, the ultimate decision being left to the discretion of the administrators.

It makes more sense to let the HN community itself decide who it chooses to memorialize. Setting the threshold sufficiently high (e.g. 3/4 or 4/5) preserves the implicit intention that the bar not show up every time some schmuck we've heard about kicks the bucket while bypassing the criticism that memorialization is an arbitrary thing imposed by admins.

Whether the threshold value should be a ratio of for/against votes or for vs. total possible votes (counting abstentions against) is debatable.

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Honestly, I think this is too much work for what's usually an "edge-case". Everyday, we put up with the admins making arbitrary decisions on what flagged discussions get to stay and which get kicked (on top of the algorithm that filters stories). If we hated their decisions/tastemaking, we wouldn't be repeat visitors to HN. It's hard to imagine many situations in which they commemorate someone who a majority of the community aren't aware of.

And for the many people who will pass and not get the official acknowledgement? For anyone to whom being omitted is controversial, their life will have been rich enough that recognition via HN's status bar is likely of little concern to their legacy.

> Setting the threshold sufficiently high (e.g. 3/4 or 4/5) preserves the implicit intention that the bar not show up every time some schmuck we've heard about kicks the bucket...

When you frame it like that it makes me think the black bar should be done away with altogether.

I think of the black-bar as the Admin's way of paying respect. It's not about me, and it doesn't effect me. Even if it did affect me, I wouldn't feel like it's my place to tell them who they can and cannot pay respect to.

I'd rather not be casting votes on whether any given person is worthy of the black bar.

Instead, lets strongly discourage wasting time talking about the black bar, and just let the HN crew manage it.

To me, it seems best either not to have a black bar at all or not to worry about black bars at all. Probably the former because having _anyone_ decide whether someone was 'important' in the emotionally difficult time of death just doesn't feel easy and positive, affirming, etc.

Why does it make sense to let the HN community decided? Sure HN is a community site but it still embodies Y Combinator and is owned and operated by Y Combinator.

Agreed. It's their site, let them run it.

Does that mean we need some method to trigger the vote?

Do we always have a daily vote in your profile?

Does a certain set of users have access to this (karma?)

Clearly we need an api for this...

It could be ratio AND over 2% of active users voting for (or some such measure).

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