FWIW, the HN discussion on the study published on PNAS here:
Perhaps I should explain our thought process. There were at least half a dozen major web publications today putting out variants of this indignant post about "Facebook's unethical experiment". Did all these authors suddenly develop a passion for science ethics? Of course not. It is simply the internet controversy du jour. Those have never made for good HN stories, and the policy has always been to penalize them, because otherwise they would dominate the site.
In cases of pile-on controversy like this one, when the original story has already been discussed on HN—which is pretty common, because HN users tend not to miss a day in posting these things—we usually mark the follow-up posts as dupes unless they add important new information, or at least something of substance. Does this article add anything of substance? It didn't strike me that way, but arguably it does.
As for the PR fluff piece you think is on the front page, why haven't you flagged it? It's impossible for us to catch (or even see) all such things. We rely on users to point them out.
The explicit HN policy used to be to allow controversies like this to wash over the site. We all remember seeing the home page covered in many submissions on the same topic. The fear that this would cause a topic to "dominate the site" has been proven false numerous times. I'm not sure why that would be a consideration.
I wasn't objecting to the puff piece on the home page. I don't think lightweight stuff like that can dominate the site either.
Killing dupes when there is more than one active discussion is one thing. This submission was the only active discussion on this topic. Removing it is just editorial curation that is of no benefit to anyone at all.
The fear that this would cause a topic to "dominate the site" has been proven false numerous times.
It was PG who made it false. He poured countless hours into managing the site and writing code to manage it.
That model hasn't changed. It's more transparent now, because users asked for it to be. Transparency has the side-effect of making it seem to some people like we've fundamentally altered HN when it doesn't work like they assumed it did.
I regret saying anything and I won't comment in the future. Thanks.
Also, sorry for the snippiness in my tone above. I don't always succeed in responding the way I want to.