Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

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Rank speculation about newsworthy deaths never go well on HN and historically have caused more pain for family and friends, and contributed to large amounts of misinformation being spread. I'm speaking specifically of Bob Lee, and also Tony Hsieh.

You say "Maybe this one will stick this time" but the main posting about this received over 360 comments, which is a lot for HN. It's not like the whole thing has just been nuked with no chance for productive discussion. But I'm not seeing much productive discussion. I don't mind these being de-ranked for now.

If it turns out to be an eBay stalking scandal type story, then we'll have a lot to talk about.

If it turns out that even being a successful whistleblowing can lead to life experience so awful that you want to kill yourself halfway through the depositions, then maybe we can talk about what can we as a society can provide whistleblowers to help them navigate these incredibly difficult times (financially, emotionally, socially, and spiritually).

While it did receive 360 comments, you cannot find it on any of the pages, going back 20+ pages.

While you can find many much much older articles that are far more dead just a couple pages back.

You wouldn't get the news at all about this tidbit of information if you didn't check HN in the right few minutes.

I for one get a lot of my news from HN, as it's a news aggregator and a lot of other mediums are more censored.

People are clearly interested in talking about it and have opinions about it and find it newsworthy given the TIMING and possible MOTIVE.

YOU even had an OPINION you inserted in, but you don't feel others should be able to see this or put their POV or COUNTERPOINTS in?

The reason we're talking about this is because the Emmy award-winning network executive/producer/writer/reporter Anne Emerson made it her biggest story on ABC4 today[0]. The YouTube video has almost a million views, which is a lot more than these HN threads will have. It's the top post on r/interestingasfuck today[1], tied for 2nd most popular this week. It's referenced in the top post of r/wallstreetbets today[2] (bullet point #2).

I inserted nuanced opinion to help steer discussion away from emotional knee-jerk responses with no substance, to something a bit more productive. I haven't seen a lot of that in these threads, so I'm happy they're getting de-ranked. I don't think it's fair to characterize me the way you are.

0: https://abcnews4.com/news/local/if-anything-happens-its-not-...

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/top/?t=day

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/top/?t=day

Just an FYI, there are some guidelines and a FAQ linked at the bottom of this page. A useful one:

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.

In other words, don't SHOUT EVERYTHING. Just like when speaking with people in person, shouting is generally a rude thing to do. If you want to emphasize something, just use asterisks around it: *emphasize* becomes emphasize (double up the *'s like ** or use \* if you want to include an asterisk literally).

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