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Comment by dang

5 months ago

I think you're right, but it's not clear to me what we could do differently about that. Ultimately it derives from the fundamentals of the site. Most people don't see most of what gets posted here. I don't either.

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dang

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stubish  5 months ago

I think the situation has demonstrated a weakness. Elon Musk, unarguably the single most Hacker News person on the planet due to his control of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and others, and now tied up in US politics with DOGE, has completely disappeared from the front page of hacker news, except for the articles you personally have deflagged. And you can't do that 24x7, such as the weekend Treasury Payments got shutdown and apparently nothing newsworthy was done by DOGE or Musk. I was watching articles mentioning either DOGE or Musk in the headline begin flagged in minutes. The same article might stay up for several hours if the headline had been edited to remove the offending words (but that might just be a side effect of getting less traction). And you get stuck with making the call which articles to unflag, based on limited information as they don't hang around long enough to meaningfully get upvotes or beyond the first 15 minutes of irrational blathering in the comments.

  • dang  5 months ago

    I agree, it's a weakness. Are there specific stories that you think should have gotten major discussion but didn't? If so, I'd like to see links.

    • leanstartupnoob  5 months ago

      I would like to see some discussion on the Dark Gothic Maga video (How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no

      On one hand it comes across like a conspiracy video, but on the other hand she plays direct video clips of major tech figures talking about dismantling the government and dividing the world into small nation states. Trump and Musk have also both stated they want to eliminate large amounts of the federal government.

      I would love to get some perspective from those who have personally interacted with those people over the last 10 years.

      This video probably falls under what you consider "activating", but it seems like we need to have conversations around this type of issue rather than letting rational voices get drowned out by the sea of angry shouting.