Ask PG: Why is Bitcoin so severely penalized on HN?
Every bitcoin story gets buried rapidly, and now we can't even post something about Satoshi (goes dead directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364582
Why is that?
Why is that?
I guess some people are flagging Bitcoin articles in general because there are just so many of them and they are not particularly interesting.
Some of them Trigger the flamewar detector. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7359084 is an example with appalling quality comments.
There have been many submissions about the identity of satoshi in the past few days. I'd link to a few but I genuinely cannot use the HN search on mobile.
If your submissions are not generating interest, assume they are low quality even though it may be bad luck. If your submissions arrive dead, find better sources.
The system provides good feedback. It's up to each of us to act on it in ways that meet or exceed the norms of HN. One way is to create and blog original content and then submit a link.
The community here appears reasonably open to fair discussion, unlike some other sites.
I don't know why your post is dead, because I can't see it, so I can't comment on that issue.
In the wider world, news about a tech personality would be interesting and "in the public interest". Here - it's too close to the bone. Thus I have seen two posts being removed by the OP who posted it, and I imagine that other posts have become flagged.
In short whilst I agree that this news item is probably the worst kind of journalism, HN is self censoring, which I find more interesting, as do you OP!
It could have well been killed manually.
Bitcoin gets treated faily on HN as long as the discussion has some technical merit.
For example posting comparing coding styles of Dorian and BTC Satoshi, that shouldn't get buried.
Similarly, there has been almost nothing about Ukraine on top of HN, because nothing too hacky has been posted just general news.
But I think it would improve things if there was some more transparency about which posts were banned, which moderators or people flag posts, why they were banned, etc.