Where I live, people often put books in boxes out on the sidewalk as giveaways. They're worth nothing, but I love browsing through them if I have time, and sometimes I find something that does interest me. Books I want to throw away I never throw away, I put them out for others to take. I bet most of them just perish in the rain, but it's fine, it's better than throwing them in the trash right away.
It's something people do for people. It's not "in the public domain" for companies to gobble up with machines.
> There's no law against scraping
There's no law against incurring as heavy and pernicious social and material costs to commercial scrapers as is physically possible within legal bounds, either. So what's the problem?
When we leave them "untouched" they disappear rapidly due to community flags and automatic flamewar penalties. The only way for us to give them exposure is "touch" them – to override the flags and flamewar penalties (i.e., push the threads back up onto the front page), then spend hours poring through the comments to try to minimise the effects of the most inflammatory ones. Still, we do it often, but only when the story has "significant new information" which is always the test of whether a story belongs on HN.
As a comment: you keep coming at us with these accusations but don't seem to ever mention a specific news story that you think should have had a prominent discussion here but didn't.
Allowing people to have their view of the front page unaffected by flags would be trivial. But some who don't want too discuss this don't want other people to discuss it, either, they precisely don't want people to have discussions unimpeded by sophistry, in their absence.
Calling that out isn't "tribalism", and you boiling it down to that, and other generalities, as if it's people being "mad" that other people have a different flavor of ice cream, while there's by now been (at least) FIVE people doing Hitler salutes during speeches means you're not up to speed or not treating this as seriously as you probably think you do.
> The identities of the men who dragged a woman out of a legislative town hall in the Coeur d’Alene High School auditorium on Saturday remain a mystery, with event organizers claiming no knowledge of who arranged the security detail or which company was used.
^ that's how you get that. Everybody is just "doing their part", looking the other way.
That's also how you get people posting endless walls of text about the topic they insist should not be discussed on HN, or doing mental gymnastics every single time the Nazi salute is mentioned, ignoring once again what dozens of people have told them in reply to it the first of the dozens of times they did that.
Does a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity have a right to exist on the internet? Your argument implies that it does not. I think it does. HN isn't trying to be all things—it's trying to be one thing. You can't play a game if you keep importing rules from other games. You certainly can't play, I don't know, checkers, if you let people treat the checkerboard like a rugby pitch.
HN has been through many rings of political fire over the years. At such moments, a vocal subset of users always demands that we suspend HN's rules and submit it to the flames. Current events are much too important not to! they argue. Well, current events are always more important than everything else on HN's frontpage. That has never not been the case.
We haven't done that, for the simple reason that it would destroy HN for its intended purpose.
I think time has shown that we made the right call on those occasions and that the community is grateful we did. Once one has been through a few of these swings, the pattern becomes so recognizable that it's hard to interpret it as anything but a normal side effect of macro fluctuations.
I may be wrong, of course, but if civilization really is coming to an end, HN won't matter anyway, so the risk calculation isn't particularly complicated.
If you really believe that this time is different and civilization is being destroyed, shouldn't you be doing something more impactful than spending so much time on an internet entertainment site, breaking its rules and arguing with the janitor? It seems to me that the amount of energy some people invest in this trivial activity is incongruent with the urgency of their rhetoric.
As a thought excersize I've been going through your comments @dang to see what the state of moderation currently looks like.
From what I can tell it is a very difficult job right now and I do not envy that.
I read through this last reply and it did make me smirk because I think your reply was quite pointed and apt.
I do wonder though if you internally down weight the effect HN has on the overall tech sphere.
It seems like it is sort of the "online salon" of the tech and I think people have come to see HN as a source of ... guidance(?) in a world of such poor online discourse.
I think the last few years have definitely shown the power that online sites have to not only effect discourse but to sway elections and much more.
I'm not saying that is currently happening with HN but I do think it's worth reflecting where HN sits in the world and whether it has the proper tools to not succumb to the world of online bots / trolls.
Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't but it appears to a large number of people (who may hold more influcial positions in tech than might realize) that it does matter.
> By the last week of January 2024, the protests had become the biggest in Germany since the protests against the Iraq War in 2003. Soon after, according to some researchers, they had become the biggest in the history of post-war Germany.
You mean during the war of aggression when many Americans pretended to be Canadians when on vacation abroad, be it out of shame or fear of reprisal?
And mind you, that was without any Hitler salutes or calling astronauts "retards", that was "just" war under the pretense of being very concerned and wanting to avoid "a smoking gun in form of a mushroom cloud". We knew that was bullshit, but at least there was this pretense, that kinda softened and muddled things a bit. This time, it's also war, but it's in Europe. And there isn't even any tribute paid to decency even in the form of bald lies and hypocrisy, there is just a deranged snarl.
Oh, we're already looking at the likelihood of Trump arming Russia and joining the war on the side of Putin. But for some people, although probably a minority, that just increases the resolve. They simply will never be part of something like this: https://bsky.app/profile/doctoroxford.bsky.social/post/3liqw...
It's something people do for people. It's not "in the public domain" for companies to gobble up with machines.
> There's no law against scraping
There's no law against incurring as heavy and pernicious social and material costs to commercial scrapers as is physically possible within legal bounds, either. So what's the problem?
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