← Back to context

Comment by cassepipe

8 days ago

I see you are new here. It's not about being political or not, it's about whether this is going to end up in a flamewar or not.

Here are the guidelines : https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Moderation is decentralized, downvoted comments tend to disappear. Flagging is a power people who have a lot of karma have, if you think are one of them you can vouch (unflag) for a comment. There is one mod, dang Here are the moderator last comments so you can have idea of the work he is doing: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

5 comments

cassepipe

Reply
timeon  8 days ago

I wonder if site being hacked belongs to hacker news.

  • lolinder  8 days ago

    Whether something belongs on Hacker News doesn't really depend on the news item so much as on what kind of discussion comes off of it. Some of the most insignificant stories are great Hacker News topics because they spawn amazing discussions.

    This thread on the other hand? There's one comment near the top that mentioned some interesting facts about the U.S. Digital Service, and a second comment that's third from the top that tries with limited success to get people to talk about the hack.

    The rest of this thread is just mindless snark. That's fair, DOGE is stupid and deserves snark, but it's a waste of space on the HN front page.

    A decent metric for whether something belongs on HN is: is the conversation more interesting than the Reddit equivalent would be? The answer here is pretty clearly an emphatic "no", so I think that this belongs on Reddit instead.

kccoder  8 days ago

It would be so uncivil to have a conversation about how the US govt is being carelessly lit on fire because it might lead to a flamewar.

  • lolinder  8 days ago

    There is no conversation here. There's one thread near the top that tries to talk about the actual vulnerability, the rest is knee-jerk snark.

    I totally understand why people are knee-jerking, but it's not a conversation and it doesn't belong on HN. We have other forums for knee-jerk snark. I'll be happy to see another DOGE post here the next time there's a topic that has enough meat for a useful conversation to come out of it.

    In the meantime, I suspect that dang just left this here to avoid the appearance of silencing the topic. I hope that people who see this come away better understanding why so many of these threads get flagged to death.