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Ask HN: Why did this article just silently disappear from the front page?

16 points by golergka ↗ HN
I managed to take a screenshot that shows this link on position 9:

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/

But after I read it, the 'discuss' link leads to empty page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24014806

Why was it removed?

23 comments

[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] thread
bezmenov
I can attest to the page disappearing and appearing “empty”. The page is now back, although flagged and dead.
byoung2
From the guidelines[1]:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Maybe enough people flagged it for being off-topic

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

wcerfgba
I don't like these guidelines because they are vague and subjective -- just because an article does or does not gratify one person's intellectual curiosity, it doesn't mean it won't / will gratify another person.

Flagging is heavy-handed, because it hides the post unless you have showdead enabled, and it prevents the post being able to gain upvotes which would otherwise justify it being posted.

When a post gets 10 upvotes in 50 minutes, it's clearly satisfying _some_ people's curiosity. If you're not interested in the post you can just scroll past it, you don't have to flag it out of everyone else's view...

giantg2
Welcome to democracy. As the previous person said, maybe enough people flagged it. Democracy and majority rule can be a convenient cover for the oppression of the minority - just look at slavery in the early days of the US.

I actually tried to comment on it asking for a TL;DR since it seems to stereotyping people from my perspective and was too verbose. Concisely writing about a topic is s virtue in my book.

dragonwriter
> I don't like these guidelines because they are vague and subjective

They are intended to be subjective: since it's about fit to the audience.

> just because an article does or does not gratify one person's intellectual curiosity, it doesn't mean it won't / will gratify another person.

One vote/flag doesn't have a giant effect. The idea isn't to have stuff that might appeal to someone’s intellectual curiosity, but will do so for the HN community broadly. HN isn't the only community around and isn't intended to be, and it isn't trying to be all things to all people.

> Flagging is heavy-handed, because it hides the post unless you have showdead enabled, and it prevents the post being able to gain upvotes which would otherwise justify it being posted.

Tools to adjust the signal-to-noise ratio need to, well, actually have an effect to work.

> When a post gets 10 upvotes in 50 minutes, it's clearly satisfying _some_ people's curiosity.

Yes, and the formula weighting votes, flags, and activity already considers that.

> If you're not interested in the post you can just scroll past it, you don't have to flag it out of everyone else's view...

Conversely, if you are interested in content that doesn't appeal to the HN community generally as expressed by the mechanisms established, you are free to use a different link-sharing and discussion site (there are plenty) or set up your own.

gwright
I think it is quite ironic that an article about an epistemology that rejects criticism of itself was flagged.
wmf
HN is intrinsically a system of oppression, man.
giardini
Haha! Thanks for these two posts - made my day!
password4321
https://hckrnews.com shows dead discussions.

unfortunately it looks like http://hnrankings.info does not.

i don't think there's a way to find out exactly what happened without emailing the mods: hn@ycombinator.com. i also doubt they go into the details that much.

ColinWright
In your profile set "Show dead" to "Yes" and two[0] submissions[1] show up ... there may be more. They have been flagged by "the community" and so are dead. As I write this I see that it has been submitted yet again[2].

Edit: Now that's flagged dead as well

Submissions are sometimes flagged as just being so far wide of the general community interest so as to be irrelevant to the vast majority. But sometimes they're flagged because they are divisive, and known (or expected) to produce flame wars and unpleasant exchanges.

But whatever the reason, it would appear that this article is thought to be interesting by some, and inappropriate by others. That's part of how HN works.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24015300

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24014806

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24019257

thu2111
The fate on HN of this well written and intellectually curious article is a neat proof of the point it's making.
yesenadam
Beware of "Being downvoted proves I'm right!" - that way lies madness.

EDIT: My thoughts exactly GP,

> sometimes they're flagged because they are divisive, and known (or expected) to produce flame wars and unpleasant exchanges.

I had a look at the article. I thought it was well-written and interesting, but already I was imagining and dreading a huge messy HN comment page, with a lot of whited-out comments etc, not really worth reading.

Sometimes I upvote stories/blog posts I think are really bad, but the comments are really good and I want to encourage them. People coming along later saying "I cant believe this crappy story has 500 votes!" or "Why was this flagged??" miss that point - people also vote on the comments as a whole, even if there's none there yet. Many people mostly just read the comments, so not surprising they'd vote on them, not the story.

thu2111
As you say, the article is well written and interesting, it's also about a highly topical issue relevant to many in the tech industry.

It's also about why critical theorists flat out refuse to engage in debate over their beliefs. And Hacker News, a community that has more than its fair share of critical theorists, is witnessing a systematic effort to stop people even meta-debating why critical theorists don't debate.

Obviously defining a flag-worthy story as "one with a lot of flagged comments" is circular logic. The sort of people who want to avoid debate at all costs will certainly white-out and flag people who try to debate them. It's visible on so many threads here. That doesn't mean the article or comments aren't good.

Sad to say but Hacker News is really nowhere near as good at promoting intelligent curiousity as its staff like to believe. The software just isn't good enough to do that and nor do the owners ever upgrade or experiment with it to try and make that situation better.

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nebukadnezar
It is pretty discouraging to see this kind of censorship happening. The article seems reasonable and if you disagree, good for you, argue about it or just get over it.

This whole woke stuff/cancel culture reminds me of the little red book waving youngsters during the cultural revolution in China.

Very scary to see this happening again.

The fact that this can be so easily be removed, suggest that the algorithm for flagging is not very good and needs to be improved.

As said above, discuss instead hide behind your cancel button.

wmf
There are plenty of places like TheMotte where you can discuss this. We don't need to discuss every topic on every site.
rotterdamdev
HN is ran by radical leftists, so no surprise.
non-entity
Yeah, surely the product of a venture capitalist company is run by radical leftists.
[dead] rotterdamdev
Their companies are pushing diversity hiring quotas to push white males out of developer jobs. Do your research.