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Comment by xenophanes | Hacker News Reader

It being pure distilled drama would be a reason for it to be #2 on front page. You didn't even reply with a different opinion about what reason it's high on the front page.

So he has an opinion that he's willing to write out and expose to critical evaluation. You don't. You're thinking & conversing wrong.

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Take 2:

"He explained why on that post, but if you're wondering when this page falls off the top of the front page, keep in mind the possibility that it was flagged off by users like me. "

People are honestly interested on how this issue is going to be handled by Drchrono. People are more interested in how pg handles (or in this case, handled) the conflict of interest between supporting a YC company and supporting the ability to have open discourse on what is a public forum.

These are the reasons why this thread is so highly rated, has a high possibility of not being downvoted into oblivion, and why people are taking an active interest in the previous killed thread.

"This thread is pure, distilled drama."

One man's "distilled drama" is another man's intelligent discourse. YMMV.

That's better :) I haven't been paying much attention to this stuff but one issue I'd raise is that HN does seem to allow (encourage?) complaint threads about other companies like paypal, and also sometimes google, apple, facebook, and many others. Some of them are things where one might think "contact that company directly" is the answer, but there are reasons that isn't always best, such as the company being non-responsive.

Those discussions often do attract some level of drama, but I don't particularly care. HN has stuff I don't want to read including some drama and some non-drama, and my solution is to ignore it.

> the ability to have open discourse on what is a public forum.

I think that's the mistake right there. HN is not a public forum.

For what it's worth: I agree. We're guests here.

Then communicate to your users that its your playground, not an open forum. Or is the fear that if you do that the audience will go elsewhere?

EDIT: Annnnnnd PG killed this thread as well.

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