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I Quit Hacker News

(mattmaroon.com)
261 points cwan | 7 comments | 23 Nov 10 17:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.982s | source | bottom
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pg ◴[23 Nov 10 18:50 UTC] No.1934880[source]▶
The TSA stories are certainly fluff in the sense of being easy to upvote, even if the underlying principles are important. Ironically, so are posts saying that one is tired of TSA stories.

I do believe the TSA stories represent a danger. If there's a road from hacking to politics, it's probably civil liberties. So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty applied. Or more precisly, they've been autotagged as being political, which entails a penalty.

There are no TSA stories on the frontpage at this moment. In fact, the frontpage is a pretty normal HN frontpage now.

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1. px ◴[23 Nov 10 19:05 UTC] No.1934937[source]▶
Just curious: Was this submission penalized, too? I noticed it dropped on the front page from #1 to about #25 almost instantly at around 1:50 EST.
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2. pg ◴[23 Nov 10 19:07 UTC] No.1934950[source]▶
Yes; posts complaining about excessive posts about topic x are effectively posts about topic x, in their effect on the content of the site.
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3. paraschopra ◴[23 Nov 10 19:21 UTC] No.1935009[source]▶
Wow, just curious about the implementation. Do you use some sort of heuristics in determining political posts or excessively complaining posts?
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4. lwhi ◴[23 Nov 10 21:41 UTC] No.1935486{3}[source]▶
I'd imagine the heuristics mechanism was biologically evolved ... ;)
5. revorad ◴[24 Nov 10 02:43 UTC] No.1936295[source]▶
However, you also have to take into account that Matt didn't quit just based on the quality of the articles posted, but also the decreasing quality of discussion.

This comment thread is a perfect example of fanboy pile-on voting against a well-reasoned but unpopular point of view : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1888239.

Don't you think turning off HN (literally) for a few hours every now and then will help? Sure, it won't be convenient and some people will complain but it's still worth a shot. It will at least improve the world's productivity by a few % points. The next Google might be born.

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6. pg ◴[24 Nov 10 07:03 UTC] No.1936730{3}[source]▶
I've often thought about that, actually. I think I proposed the idea once in a comment thread. But most users seemed to be against it.
7. pg ◴[24 Nov 10 07:05 UTC] No.1936734{3}[source]▶
The main one is number of flags. When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list that admins see. They decide either to kill it, mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing.