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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

@dang: holy crap, what is going on with this thread? 95 upvotes in 1h and it's dropped to #14?

When there's an ongoing major story, we downweight follow-up posts (ones that don't contain significant new information) as quasi-dupes. Otherwise the front page tends to fill up with copycat articles. This is the lesson we learned from l'affaire Snowden of 2013.

Arguably it shouldn't be on the front page at all, since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10337299 is, and that's the thread the HN discussion crystallized around. Edit: and then there's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338904. But I think that on the day the story broke, a few different angles are ok.

(p.s. I only saw this by accident. If you want to make sure that we see something, please email hn@ycombinator.com. We can't read all the HN comments but we do read all the emails.)

Interesting that you don't see this post as containing significant new information. The Business Insider article had only the briefest of mentions of the NSA, and nothing about the political consequences, and doesn't have any perspectives from US privacy and civil liberties organizations. The EFF unsurprisingly gives more context on all of these aspects. So the net result is a textbook example of Hacker News' "objective" policies penalizing alternate perspectives.

There's a fallacy here (what's its name? maybe just sample bias?) where you're assuming that we've analyzed this as closely as you have, therefore must be making as precise a judgment as you, therefore must have an opposite agenda to you, therefore must have a hidden opposite agenda to you.

But that's not how HN moderation works. In reality it's probabilistic: all we do all day is guess. There's no hope of reading every story closely and making precise calls. Not even close!

If you'd do what other users (including other users who feel strongly about mass surveillance) do—consider the tradeoffs and help clarify which stories are best by HN's standards—you'll get better results than accusing us of sinister silencing.

I don't think he's accusing you of anything sinister. To me, it sounds like he's saying "here is the result of your policy". It's almost as if you're both saying the same thing :).

You're probably right. A moment of defensiveness ;)

Indeed :)

It still amazes me how easy it is to misread these things—invariably because one has a pre-existing picture that the new data snaps into. Sorry for making a wrong assumption.

Dude, it's Ycombinator - what do you expect? If you submit a Techcrunch article about it, it'll be at the top in 20 upvotes.

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