Paraguay seizes major digital bank tied to president, leaving customers in limbo | Hacker News Reader

Paraguay seizes major digital bank tied to president, leaving customers in limbo

apnews.com

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50381177

This topic isn’t newsworthy for HN as presented.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

How is the collapse of Ueno Bank relevant to HN?

- It’s not closely tied to HN or the VC community like Silicon Valley Bank was.

- It’s not a bank that was noteworthy for innovations in HN-relevant topics

- It’s a standard ‘undercapitalization’ collapse scenario with no unique, newsworthy, or innovative HN-relevant economics or politics involved

So I don’t see why this is a worthwhile post here. This is, as of right now, a boring econ/polit event and will definitely be covered “on TV news” (and I say that as someone who enjoys studying and writing about economics!). Without further explanation of specific relevance to HN, it without the eventual ‘what happened and why?’ essays that will follow when Breaking News is replaced by Informed Analysis, I don’t think this (yet) deserves HN’s attention as a community.

HN is, per the guidelines, for anything that satisfies intellectual curiosity. It hasn't been just a tech site for long years now. Paraguay is among the least-known countries in South America even for keen travelers, so this is an opportunity to learn more about it. It is also interesting to me at least that bank collapses (which come up so much in 19th and early 20th century history) can still happen today.

I disagree with the curiosity level of a bank collapse prior to a post-mortem analysis, when it’s not a bank intimately tied to HN’s usual topics. When we understand what led to this, I think this should be a front page topic on the site for sure! But without that analysis, it’s merely Breaking News with rumor and guesses as the primary foundation of discussing the event in any more depth than ‘whoah dang’. That’s not Hacker News? That’s just News.

"Just News" is discussed all the time on HN (I have abundant examples), and people do not complain when it is about topics they like, or about the SV bubble, or about America.

But the moment someone posts something of somewhat niche interest that is not about America or SV tech, some begin the usual complaints about it being off-topic.

This is just weird to see. And FWIW, I do not think this story is "just news"

I love bank collapse in specific and macroeconomics in general as topics to talk at length about (friends and family can confirm), so I’m definitely not arguing in favor of my own interests here.

I’m arguing that this ambulance-chaser upvoting pattern on is an unhealthy thing for the community to do and that the offtopic guideline advises against it, regardless of the fact that I particularly love talking about some of these Breaking News events, too. Yes, the users and the mods disregard that off-topic guideline all the time, allowing popularity to outweigh the guidelines several times a day. No, I’m just as upset by this on topics I care about discussing personally. But someone has to stand up for the community against members mobthink once in a whole, however hopeless it is to do so. Thankfully, most of the time I just stay silent - life is too busy to tilt every windmill. It was fun to try otherwise here, but don’t worry, I’ll go back to letting the mob do its thing after this.

Definitely looking forward to engaging with the topic once there’s more to read and say about what caused it and these various noisy threads are a distant memory :)

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