zlacker

Over 100 upvotes in 20 minutes for something non tech related?

>>c1b+(OP)
Right now, on the front page, there are posts about the recreation of the first automobile, the archaeological discovery of cannabis residue at a dig site, news articles about meetings between Zuckerberg and civil rights leaders.

While this site trends heavily towards tech, it is not so narrow-minded that we cannot discuss things not strictly related to that subject.

>>badreq+U
i bring up this argument when anti ccp topics get flagged or modded, but for some reason the argument does not work in that context

>>c1b+(OP)
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN is for (much) more than tech-related things.

On the question of political topics on HN, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, if you think HN has gotten more political lately. The principles haven't changed in 10+ years, although we've learned to do a better job of applying them.

>>yters+54
The argument does work in that context. It's the same across all topics as far as I know.

The moderation question is always: what serves intellectual curiosity? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Once a topic becomes repeated enough, there's a power-law-style dropoff in how interesting it is (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), except to people who have a strong identification with one side of an argument, and that sort of interest isn't intellectual curiosity, it's loyalty to a cause. That may be an admirable quality in many ways, but it's not a good fit for this site.

Nationalistic flamewar, which is the theme you're referring to, definitely falls in this category. That doesn't mean that "anti ccp" stories don't get attention here—they certainly do. Just not enough to satisfy the warriors, and rightly so, since warriors want every story that serves their cause to be on HN's front page.

See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... for how we handle major ongoing topics.

Edit: it looks like we've had a similar conversation before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22870427, which makes me think that your "for some reason" is an insinuation of the sort the site guidelines specifically ask people not to post: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please don't do that here.

>>dang+hh
i see, so this topic is considered 'intellectually curious' while anti-ccp is 'loyalty to a cause'

i am not really sure how you make that determination, i personally find accounts of what the ccp does to exploit its citizens intellectually interesting when it is not widely reported

so, given you exponential drop off comment, i assume that means a small number of highly voted protest posts are allowed, and then past that point they will get modded. is that correct?

and yes, we had this discussion before, and i became confused in this context since protest topics also seem prone to intellectually uninteresting flamewars hn wishes to avoid

it seems there is an exception in this kind of case where a controversial topic is allowed if it is new

technically, police brutality and protesta are not new topics, but i suppose this exception is the current national impact?

>>yters+nn
The issue isn't the topic itself but the amount of repetition around it. Curiosity withers under repetition. You would see exactly the same pattern if the current topic ended up getting repeated a lot: the users who felt most strongly about it ('loyalty to a cause') would want every single article to be on the front page, and would feel like the mods and/or community must be pro-police-brutality if that didn't happen, just as some people feel like we must be pro-communist or pro-China or whatever.

I tried to explain that above, and linked to past explanations of the same points. If you want to take a look at those past explanations, and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be curious to know what it is. Perhaps it would be helpful to describe what these links contain more explicitly:

(1) We try to optimize HN for intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(2) Curiosity and repetition don't go well together: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(3) With submissions on a MOT (major ongoing topic), the main thing we look for is SNI (significant new information): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

As far as I can tell, the complete answer to your question follows from those three points.

>>dang+ko
Yes, #3 is the key point, that there are exceptions to the flamewar constraint if there is some new, interesting information for a current major topic..