Don't take it personally. Reddit has a culture of flaming. The same thing would have happened no matter who submitted it. They're just like that there.
But if someone wrote it this way, without all the additional nastiness, would it have gotten so many votes? Which I suppose probably explains a lot of the nastiness. It's a way to get attention.
This is exactly what the startup community needs. I am surprised no one has done it before, actually.
I know several rich post-startup people who would probably be angel investors if the process were more standardized. I bet the number of potential angel investors is 10 times larger than the number who jump through all the hoops to actually do it. With that much more early stage investment to feed on, there could be 10 times as many startups.
He did have more than an idea, though. He had a huge audience. And that is why digg didn't follow the usual path of startups that begin as this cartoon.
I don't think the audience was that huge (he was about to be laid off, presumably because the ratings sucked). He did have enough of an audience to get critical mass. Beyond that, there was a lot of luck (and SEO).
Hackers are interested in more than just hacking. This is an interesting new phenomenon. The fact that the title has some words you'd see in a reddit title doesn't automatically make a story politicized flamebait.
If you think something is offtopic, flag it. It gets boring when people use the comment threads to complain about stuff they think is offtopic, just like it's boring when people complain about being downmodded.
This might qualify as hacking, for a very loose interpretation of the word: the defendants have stumbled across an input that the legal system is not prepared to handle. By neither cooperating with the system nor refusing representation, they maintained the case in an appealable state, which made the legal system move too slowly to make a judgment.
IANAL, but I'm surprised this worked. I assume a significant factor is the degree of rigor needed for death penalty cases.
I upvoted you but I don't think pg agrees with that flag philosophy. I think the goal of that feature is spam only.
The rule I use: If an article isn't interesting to me (user guidelines), then I don't upvote it or write a comment on it since both actions increase the attention other users would pay to it. Soon enough it will either pass out of sight or it will be interesting to other users. Even then, it will soon fade to the background archive.
For a flag: If it looks like spam - useless product link - and the user has no karma built up, I flag. Otherwise, I leave it alone.
If I knew what was and wasn't off-topic, I would. in this case there was something that smelled faintly of hacking the justice system, so I didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that this was inappropriate. But OTOH, it did seem irrelevant to hacking computers and starting businesses.
That's why I asked the question instead of simply ignoring it. HN is an evolving site, and many things that would have seem very out of place six months ago are on the front page today.
I'm not interested in retarding progress, I'm just trying to understand where we are going so I can play well with others.
Except I substitute "me" for "one's". If it gratifies my intellectual curiosity then maybe it will other users' as well. That said, I think it's personally important to use votes as community feedback for my future posts.
If anything, I worry about a community that becomes too homogeneous because interestingness involves variability. All I can do here is submit links. Whether it's interesting to the community is up to the community to decide (expressed in votes and comments). For instance, I'm often provoked by David Brooks (NY Times columnist). But he doesn't ever really talk about computers or business. Initially, I was skeptical about posting one of his columns. But it was received well and so I posted more.
This article was borderline for me. But what's the worst that can happen? It doesn't get votes? So I'd rather shade toward posting than not while still keeping the guidelines firmly in mind. I've often been surprised that the community appreciates some links that don't "belong" on a superficial analysis. Similarly, I've enjoyed science, law, art, and even political articles linked here (the last in small doses). I think that's a good thing. A uniform community is a boring one.
Talk about intellectually dishonest.