Why are you laughing? This site gets displayed on the Drudge Report several times a month. In fact, I just checked and this story is there now in the left column:
Assuming you are laughing at this article because you think it's bogus, I believe melling is asking why you are laughing if millions of people are being exposed to misleading information. That's not what most would consider a laughing matter.
> Why are you laughing? This site gets displayed on the Drudge Report several times a month.
That is a negative indicator for its reliability.
> Millions of people read the site monthly
Yes, partisan propaganda masquerading as news is a thing that has been a problem.for human society for a long time, and for the internet nearly as long as it has been widely used, and Drudge is a well-known and powerful example of that.
You are probably getting down votes for insinuating a conspiracy that the admins/moderators are doing this. If it was deleted you'd see [dead] next to the title. I would assume a more benign reason: other HN readers are flagging it.
[dead] doesn't indicate admin action either, at least not directly. It happens when either (a) a lot of users flagged the submission; (b) the site is banned; (c) the submitter is banned.
This site has shown up repeatedly on HN, and always been dismissed due to bad science. Maybe this article is different, but who's going to bother wasting their time to find out?
Alt-right gonna keep shoveling billionaire propaganda and/or InfoWars/Unabomber beliefs onto every and any memetic channel, because shouting lies loud/often enough is sadly rewarded by changing sentiment in low-fact environments. (Doesn't really work so well on HN because of pervasive motivation for fact-challenging and argumentativeness.)
Enough people believe "where there's smoke, there's fire", that if you keep pumping smoke over and over, some of them will eventually assume that there's a fire.
Users were right to flag it, since this is a classic flamewar topic, and discussions of those tend to be predictable, ideological, and angry—none of which gratifies intellectual curiosity, which is what this site is for.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 48.8 ms ] threadhttp://www.drudgereport.com
Millions of people read the site monthly.
But the pathetic lack of scientific education/knowledge in the general US population is laughable.
That is a negative indicator for its reliability.
> Millions of people read the site monthly
Yes, partisan propaganda masquerading as news is a thing that has been a problem.for human society for a long time, and for the internet nearly as long as it has been widely used, and Drudge is a well-known and powerful example of that.
I'm pretty sure when I saw this it was on the front page, now it's totally disappeared, except from the "New" tab.
[All these downvotes, but no reply. Am I wrong about this? If so, say so.]
Users were right to flag it, since this is a classic flamewar topic, and discussions of those tend to be predictable, ideological, and angry—none of which gratifies intellectual curiosity, which is what this site is for.