I would encourage any who disagree to consider truly why this reporting upsets them.
> Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
"This is ... complete fiction." is a claim that the story was fabricated. I think it's worth examining who would be doing that fabrication and what they would have to gain, especially considering who is making the counter-claim and what they would have to gain from that.
Are you familiar with Christopher Hitchens? That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Until the author provides evidence of their claims, there's nothing required to dismiss them.
Sure. Russia and geopolitical destabilization
> who is making the counter-claim and what they would have to gain from that
This part doesn't make sense to me - the accused party naturally is the one making the "counter-claim", and naturally they will make "counter assertions" without evidence - how do you disprove an unfalsifiable claim?
I overall don't think your comments really align. "The US has done bad things in the past" doesn't mean "all accusations of bad things pointed at the US should be treated with credibility and have to be disproved with an ironclad case by the US to not garner further suspicion"
HN is not in a position to determine the success of breaking news and this story fits the mold of things that are usually flagged. Let other credible media sources start picking up on the story if it turns out to amount to anything. Before then, let this one die just as the others like it do on HN.
Care to comment?
Wasn't the U.S. being behind the bombing a leading alternative hypothesis when the news broke?
Some of that interest, rather predictably, is negative.
So this is not necessarily what is interesting to everyone.
You can of course argue that I've made a wrong call in this case, but the point I'm making here is different: you need moderators who make judgment calls, including to override flags sometimes. And of course no one is ever going to get the calls 100% right; we have failure modes too.
It's a matter of striking a balance: holding space for what the community finds interesting* while allowing for a certain amount of idiosyncracy and unpredictability, but not too much. Without that, things would be more humdrum and therefore less interesting. There are tradeoffs along every conceivable axis with this thing.
* (note: community is not the same as commenters because most readers don't comment)
Your comment suggests an assumption that without moderation, the ranking system would indicate "what is interesting to everyone". That assumption isn't just wrong, it's super wrong. Here are some past comments about that, if anyone cares: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... The short version is that without moderation, the site would be dominated by the same few hot stories repeated ad nauseum, plus an endless supply of riler-uppers. This is no way to optimize for what is interesting to everyone. As I said elsewhere in a reply to you, there are tradeoffs along every axis of this thing.
The number of attempts to either shame or coerce him into doing things the way you think should be done, versus what he thinks is appropriate -- seems childish to me.
> The assertion that someone made up a story is the logical conclusion to the assertion that there is no evidence to back up their claims.
It is a logical conclusion. One might still arrive at a different logical conclusion.
Far more heat than light being generated though, though. Which is predictable with this kind of story, raising emotion is part of the desired outcome of posting it (1). "interest" in baseless speculation and conspiratorial thinking is not a good thing.
Standards are slipping, that this story is protected.
1) https://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/more+heat+than...
Even extending to the international community (which is generally a reflection of American politics, much to the chagrin of Europeans who are unwilling to admit it), there is mixed levels of enthusiasm for getting to the truth. The countries are all anti-Russia, and so the pipeline sabotage is generally seen as a "good thing" except by the countries with direct profit motive for it. However, those countries aren't about to publicly accuse US intelligence of carrying out the operation, because their relationship with US intelligence is too important to lose, especially given all the weapons and intelligence they provide.
Do you have stats on what percent of regular HN readers have ever commented on any story? Or are stats more like, for every 100 readers of a story, 1 will comment on that story? To put another way: if I read 100 stories and comment on 1, would I be counted as lurking 99 times and posting 1?
Basically, I'm curious if engagement is lopsided toward lurking because some users never comment, or because most users never comment on every story they read.
I think it was something like 1% of total readers and 5% of logged-in readers but I'd have to check again to be sure.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/seymour-hersh-...
It just seemed inexplicable to me at the time because of Biden's prior remarks. In that light I can't see how anyone wouldn't immediately assume the US didn't do it-- the US hadn't even denied it at the time!
Maybe you're not familiar with the practice of journalism where anonymous sources are routine, and have successfully uncovered a great deal of misconduct by governments. Reserve skepticism of course, but dismissal of a routine practice with a proven track record is not justified.
However, given all of the information known at the time, there's little evidence to suggest that anyone aside from them was responsible for the assertions without evidence, which again leads to the same logical conclusion.
Right, and these claims are being made by an award winning journalist with a proven track record who has a source. That deserves more credence than just "anyone" making any claim. Not enough to accept it as truth, but far more than claims that can be outright dismissed as you initially claimed.