Comment by matsemann
2 days ago
Anything slightly negative about certain people is immediately flagged and buried here lately. How this works seriously needs a rewamp. So often I now read some interesting news, come here to find some thoughts on it, only to find it flagged and buried. It used to be that I got the news through HN, but now I can't trust to know what's going on by just being here.
> Anything slightly negative
The flagging isn't to hide "anything slightly negative" about particular people. We don't see any evidence of that from the users flagging these stories. Nobody believes that would work anyway; we're not influential enough to make a jot of difference to how global celebrities are seen [1]. It's that we're not a celebrity gossip/rage site. We're not the daily news, or the daily Silicon Valley weird news. We've never been that. If every crazy/weird story about Silicon Valley celebrities made the front page here there'd barely be space for anything else. As dang has said many times, we're trying for something different here.
[1] That's not to say we don't think we're influential. The best kind of influence we have is in surfacing interesting content that doesn't get covered elsewhere, which includes interesting new technology projects, but many other interesting topics too, and we just don't want that to be constantly drowned out by craziness happening elsewhere. Bad stuff happening elsewhere doesn't mean we should lose focus on building and learning about good things.