Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

If we voted every story about every injustice in the news to the top of the site, we'd have /r/politics, not Hacker News. Not every important story belongs on this site; in fact, a lot of important stories need to be kept off the site, because they generate discussions that end up damaging the community. So, like most political stories on HN, I flagged this one, and you should too.

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I wonder if spinoff forums like subreddits could work for HN? Could be a cool project for someone, although it might not get enough community participation unless it was done officially.

It could possibly help to ease the disagreements over these issues.

I think the startup/IT focus of this site makes it very unattractive for the kind of people that usually make political discussion on pages like r/politics so annoying. That is the main reason I like talking about politics here occasionally. If we make a separate HN for politics, that advantage is gone and we will have just another r/politics.

I think you'll find that software and analytical thinking can come into play with many of these articles you don't think should be on HN. While many others believe societally minded hackers are needed now more than ever.

On the contrary: virtually every story can be framed in terms of opportunities for "analytical thinking", and the only purpose served by hashing most of those stories here is to spark pointless incivility.

If we're going to have debates on these stories, I prefer the meta-debate about which stories are relevant to HN over the fight over who hates racism more punctuated by the person complaining about the unfairness of it all.

Individual voters decide what belongs at the top. If it has enough votes, it belongs. HNer's should stop complaining about what belongs or does not belong on top because it would not change anything.

Or if it has enough flags it goes to the dustbin.

I understand that Paul Graham doesn't want people commenting about whether stories are germane or not, probably to avoid exactly the repetitive discussion we're having now, but I disagree with him and think it can't hurt to remind people:

The site has guidelines. The belief you have about the importance of votes is simply not true. Votes are one of the mechanism by which stories are selected for the sites, but not the only one.

Why should anyone listen to you when you're clearly not following the guidelines either though?

From the guidelines: Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

I don't much care, since early flags knocked this story out of the top 100 stories on the site within minutes of me leaving the comment you're replying to.

But since my comment mostly related facts, I'd assume people would want to listen so they can collect additional facts about how the site works, independent of what they thought about me.

A possible point of interest for you - I use http://hckrnews.com/ to get to these stories and I think a lot of other people do to. So, even when you flag things we'll still see them.

The reason I use it is because of the first paragraph on their about page http://hckrnews.com/about.html

We would if we did but we don't.

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