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Ask HN: Can we have a 30 day moratorium on Musk/Twitter posts?

46 points by dpifke ↗ HN
I don't think we need a front-page story on every rumor or every tweet he makes, and for some reason commentators on these stories can't seem to follow the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Most of the "breaking news" stories have turned out to be false anyways. Nobody's intellectual curiosity is being satiated by this nonsense.

I propose a 30 day cooling off period. There are other outlets (e.g. Twitter) for folks who really want up-to-the-second news about Twitter.

37 comments

[ 7.6 ms ] story [ 82.2 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
Huh? I see one article about Twitter on the front page right now and one article that might be tangentially related. New is getting spammed with that stuff but not a lot is floating to the top. It’s like that quote from the movie The China Syndrome: “the system worked”
Nicksil
>Huh? I see one article about Twitter on the front page right now and one article that might be tangentially related. New is getting spammed with that stuff but not a lot is floating to the top. It’s like that quote from the movie The China Syndrome: “the system worked”

Can't tell if you're just having a go or not, but it's been awful around here the last couple weeks or so.

- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

- https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Insanity, actually. This is what insane people do.

PaulHoule
I see a lot of submissions that get a few votes and then disappear. If you hate it go submit 20 articles about something else, just not all at the same time.
Nicksil
>I see a lot of submissions that get a few votes and then disappear. If you hate it go submit 20 articles about something else, just not all at the same time.

That would be contributing to something I'm clearly opposed to.

Besides, you can't look at the frequency of posts concerning Twitter, Elon Musk, and the like, the last weeks and honestly say that thing's are normal. It'd be one thing if these posts actually contributed something new and noteworthy, but the overwhelming majority are either a low-quality regurgitation of some random individual's contempt or re-posts just minutes or hours apart.

allears
Twitter is a major social media platform. It not only affects social media users, it also shapes our politics and our society, like it or not (I don't).

The current shitshow may be tiresome to read about, and I'm just as sick of the new boss as anybody, but it's definitely important news, and it's definitely tech-related.

Sorry you have to live in this timeline. I'm sorry any of us have to live here.

dpifke
This site isn't for stories about social media or things that "shape our politics and our society," it's for stories that are interesting to hackers: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There are other places to discuss the former. The initial stories about the Twitter acquisition arguably fell into the latter category, but the constant rumor-mongering, ad-hominem attacks, and ideological battles no longer do.

AnimalMuppet
OK, but at least some hackers are interested in the ways that tech companies shape our politics and our society. (Hacking society is about the biggest hack there is.)
1attice
As a hacker my intellectual curiosity is mostly about things that shape our politics and society.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
malermeister
Do you think hackers don't take an interest in tech that shapes our society?

What is it you think we do, then?

Bubble_Pop_22
> What is it you think we do, then?

Focus on the stuff we can control and ignore the noise? Isn’t that one of the hallmarks of supposedly high IQ people?

Separating signal from noise?

Whatever happens at Twitter you cannot change it, and now with it being private you can’t even bet on the outcome.

So maybe it’s best to just ignore and let the actors do whatever they want to do..

giaour
> Focus on the stuff we can control and ignore the noise? Isn’t that one of the hallmarks of supposedly high IQ people?

Isn’t the opposite usually held to be the case? The groups you would typically associate with impractical learning for its own sake (university professors, public intellectuals, novelists, etc) are seen as smart cookies

marginalia_nu
Very little in this discussion is actually about what is happening. It's mostly people airing opinions about what is happening, or speculating about what might happen. In short, it's gossip.
krapp
That's what happens in most threads, though.
goldenchrome
Speak for yourself, plenty of us are excited and optimistic.
tomjen3
But politics is not what this site is about. And nothing about Twitter is interesting from a curiousity standpoint.
muzani
Flag the ones that violate guidelines (isn't intellectually gratifying). There's no downvote button on articles for a reason.
dpifke
It feels a bit Sisyphusian at this point. I think I've probably worn out my flagging privileges (they get taken away if you flag too many stories).

The sequence seems to be:

1. Musk posts something on Twitter. (This gets posted to HN.)

2. Ten different news outlets publish stories about his tweet. (These all get posted to HN.)

3. Hundreds of "notable people" publicly react on Twitter/blogs/newsletters/etc. to the news stories about his tweet. (Some of these get posted to HN.) Some of these contain speculation that's essentially fanfic for/against their made-up image of Musk, whom they've never met and with whom they've never conversed.

4. News outlets start publishing stories about the tweet reactions, elevating gossip to "news" in the process.

5. We get a whole new news cycle about how the gossip—shocker!—turned out to be false.

Then for each of these stories, the HN comment section invariably devolves into name-calling and the same, tired, boring ideological battles about whether or not all billionaires are bad.

Maybe some sort of delay instead of moratorium? Or a ban on news stories about tweets (keeping the option of posting the tweet itself)? Or a stricter banhammer for commentators in these threads who can't behave? Flagging/downvoting no longer seems to be working.

lovich
Do you think maybe it’s because so many others find it interesting that it counteracts you and the handful of others who might care enough to flag it?
preordained
I'd like to on the one hand...but I don't want moratoriums and people deciding they know what's best for the group to be a thing...so, no.
tsol
Yes. Or at least some sort of limit on the number of stories in one day. Both sides of it are annoying. There's a reason they say 'theres no such thing as bad press'
anjellow
Ironically, this is the only article about musk/twitter on the front-page for me.
midislack
Only if we can stop the Rust advocacy for 120 days.
smrtinsert
Why? Open discussion is exactly at the heart of the supposed "free speech" argument.
lost_tourist
That's what the upvotes are for. I don't think obvious tech news should be blocked when you have the option to skip it or just go to one of the several sites that only show the top X HN posts. Censoring stuff never helps.
egberts1
Hackers are all about separating the signal from the noise.

This OP isn't even close; no signal, all noise.

hayst4ck
I think what I would rather see is a new top level tab like ask and show for political/pop culture/"non curious" articles.

There are some types of threads that are interesting, but ultimately hazardous to HN and curiosity destroying.

I would guess that runs the risk of attracting the wrong type of commenters (often like myself) and that bleeding into the front page. It also creates a categorization problem and increased moderator work.

papito
This guy seems to be as exhausting as the last U.S. president, I guess.
cbeach
The bit that exhausts me is how everyone is suddenly trolling Musk, and that these trolls assume we all feel equally indignant about someone trying to stand up for free speech in the public square.

It’s Trump Derangement Syndrome all over again.

papito
"I am acting like an asshole and everyone seems to hate me. Oh, I KNOW, let me act like an asshole MORE! Hmm, more flak. I AM THE VICTIM EVERYONE IS OUT TO GET ME!"
ricardonunez
It has consumed every website. On Reddit, it is the same thing. One way could be like Reddit mega threads. It shows the current event, and it compiles every post into a list without consuming every slot at the top. The problem is that it requires moderation and somebody needs to collect them.
dang
It's a case of a MOT (major ongoing topic) a la Snowden in 2013. I know it's annoying.

We don't want to suppress the topic altogether because when significant new information (SNI) does appear, it's important to have a thread about it—and if we don't, there will be a user rebellion in the other direction ("I can't believe this isn't on HN, I guess it's not a news site any more").

(Also, it isn't possible to suppress a topic altogether - users will just work around whatever automated restrictions we put in, and manual restrictions are inevitably partial.)

The solution is to allow the submissions that contain SNI and to downweight the ones that don't. By downweight I mean that users can flag the posts, and mods can penalize them.

This solution is imperfect because when there are so many raindrops coming in, we can't dodge them all - but at least the worst copycat/followup posts, the ones that just repeat what has been said elsewhere, shouldn't stay on the front page for too long.

More explanation here, with links to additional past explanations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509084.