zlacker

>>capabl+(OP)
> Still, as an occasional reader, I have noticed certain trends. When stories that focus on structural barriers faced by women in the workplace, or on diversity in tech, or on race or masculinity—stories, admittedly, that are more intriguing to me, a person interested in the humanities, than stories on technical topics—hit the front page, users often flag them, presumably for being off topic, so fast that hardly any comments accrue.

I have noticed this trend for a long time also, and well before this article was first written. It seems to go in waves though I'll cautiously say that it seems to have gotten somewhat better in recent years. I remember a time in the mid-2010s when these kinds of stories would disappear almost instantaneously. Now some of these articles and topics get a good number of upvotes and occasionally even substantive dialogue.

That said, the comments sections on these articles do tend to devolve pretty quickly.

>>belfal+Nh
That kind of stuff has infected so much of modern discourse, if people want to talk about it there are plenty of forums for it. Why should we all stop what we're doing and prioritize discussing a niche political cause who's proponents have been blackmailing people everywhere into paying attention to them and have now come to dominate all sorts of forums and secure power, ironically with no benefit to the people they feign support for.

And when people say they want it discussed, they don't mean they want to read diverse opinions, they just mean they want to see orthodoxy regurgitated.

>>versio+Zy
You can just not read these stories? Or even hide them?

I wasn't really interested in all those Reddit stories last month either, mostly because they were all exactly the same wankfest. So I just hid them. Problem solved.

As long as the frontpage isn't overrun with these kind of stories every day I don't really see the problem. Even when restricted to purely technical topics – and HN is NOT for purely technical topics – there's will always be heaps of stories you won't be interested in for one reason or the other, and that's fine.

>>arp242+mR
The problem is that it’s not just limited to the stories; people in the comments frequently go on annoying or inflammatory tangents.

>>philwe+Q41
I'd prefer a block function, but the HN community (when searching old topics) seems very against it, and the one block extension I found is Chrome only. But In the meantime I guess I just minimize a topic when that happens.

>>johnny+IA1
Here's my HN block extension for Firefox: https://gist.github.com/arp242/3159b9cbbbe148c786e1ca10adaae...

Also includes some other things like changed styling and whatnot; it's not really "for publication" and some tweaking may be required, but here it is. Load it manually via about:debugging.

You need to load a post by clicking on the date, and then you can click "bozo" or "block": the "bozo" just marks the post as someone being a "bozo" but doesn't block it. This is useful because everyone can have a bad day or whatever, and that's fine. It's people who consistently seem to be having "bad days" that are the problem – unfortunately there's a small group of highly prolific posters that I find consistently unpleasant, and with just ~20-30 people hidden like this (some of whom really ought to be banned IMHO) I found HN becomes a significantly better experience.

The main problem I have with this is that I can no longer flag or rebuff their posts (whichever may apply), so these people become the proverbial "missing stairs" if everyone starts doing it :-/