The set of [dead] posts on Hacker News is certainly a creative definition of "the news".
It's not possible to run a site like HN without moderation. However, if you delete moderated posts outright, users will rightly complain about censorship. I'm not referring to the politics of the last 10 years when I use that word; I'm talking about 2006 or so, when pg was first designing HN. The solution he came up with, which has held up well over the years, is not to delete moderated posts, but rather to tag them as "[dead]" in a way that anyone who wants to read them is welcome to.
So what you call "hiding the news from people without an account", I call "not deleting anything and making sure that anyone who wants to can read the complete set of moderated posts".
(p.s. for those who like precision: HN does also have deletion, but only the author of a post is allowed to delete it, and only if it didn't have replies. We sometimes delete posts when users email and ask us to, but we never do this as part of moderation.)
Apologies, I did not mean to imply that the set of [dead] posts was "the news".
Rather, I understand and appreciate the moderation strategy as it applies to discussion.
That said, there's a subset of intellectually stimulating news that also happens to not be great discussion material.
In the hypothetical where there's some important news that warrants being seen but you know the discussion would be impossible, why is there no option to just lock the discussion?
Again, this is a hypothetical where the* news is deemed intellectually stimulating, important, or otherwise deserving* to be shown.
I trust you have a reasonable answer, I just didn't see it in your comment.
I respect the efforts you put in and the wonderful place it carves out on* the internet. Thank you!
Apologies from me also, for misreading your comment and getting a bit defensive!
I don't think locking comments out of threads would be in keeping with HN's mandate. We try to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1]. Preventing users from commenting, and reading each other's comments, would go against that.
I also feel like it would be a shallow technical trick to avoid facing the deeper issue of us all learning how to be with each other, including with others who come from different backgrounds and have different views [2]. I'd rather face the hard problem squarely and see what we can do about it together—even though this brings many cases that suck and feel awful.
Also, I don't think the community would like it. HN users would probably just keep posting until they got a thread where they could comment. I try not to fight the community in that way. Having made the mistake of doing so in the past, I can tell you that (1) you can't win, and (2) it is painful!
This is a forum site for discussion between people that have accounts.
Given the technical background of the forum demographic having an account that's either largely anonymous or directly tied to a real identity is no great drama.
The set of [dead] posts on Hacker News is certainly a creative definition of "the news".
It's not possible to run a site like HN without moderation. However, if you delete moderated posts outright, users will rightly complain about censorship. I'm not referring to the politics of the last 10 years when I use that word; I'm talking about 2006 or so, when pg was first designing HN. The solution he came up with, which has held up well over the years, is not to delete moderated posts, but rather to tag them as "[dead]" in a way that anyone who wants to read them is welcome to.
So what you call "hiding the news from people without an account", I call "not deleting anything and making sure that anyone who wants to can read the complete set of moderated posts".
This is in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and there's lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
(p.s. for those who like precision: HN does also have deletion, but only the author of a post is allowed to delete it, and only if it didn't have replies. We sometimes delete posts when users email and ask us to, but we never do this as part of moderation.)
Apologies, I did not mean to imply that the set of [dead] posts was "the news".
Rather, I understand and appreciate the moderation strategy as it applies to discussion.
That said, there's a subset of intellectually stimulating news that also happens to not be great discussion material.
In the hypothetical where there's some important news that warrants being seen but you know the discussion would be impossible, why is there no option to just lock the discussion?
Again, this is a hypothetical where the* news is deemed intellectually stimulating, important, or otherwise deserving* to be shown.
I trust you have a reasonable answer, I just didn't see it in your comment.
I respect the efforts you put in and the wonderful place it carves out on* the internet. Thank you!
Edit: edits
Apologies from me also, for misreading your comment and getting a bit defensive!
I don't think locking comments out of threads would be in keeping with HN's mandate. We try to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1]. Preventing users from commenting, and reading each other's comments, would go against that.
I also feel like it would be a shallow technical trick to avoid facing the deeper issue of us all learning how to be with each other, including with others who come from different backgrounds and have different views [2]. I'd rather face the hard problem squarely and see what we can do about it together—even though this brings many cases that suck and feel awful.
Also, I don't think the community would like it. HN users would probably just keep posting until they got a thread where they could comment. I try not to fight the community in that way. Having made the mistake of doing so in the past, I can tell you that (1) you can't win, and (2) it is painful!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 is a longer post about that if anyone wants more
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This isn't a news site.
This is a forum site for discussion between people that have accounts.
Given the technical background of the forum demographic having an account that's either largely anonymous or directly tied to a real identity is no great drama.