Unless you consider this post either spam or off topic (and I personally don't believe it falls into either category), then flagging the post is not in keeping with my understanding of the site guidelines.
Just don't upvote it.
The timing is a coincidence.
The post is not explicitly flagged but nowhere to be seen in HN first pages. Take that as a hint.
It's been almost 24 hours since it was posted, a majority of posts are buried by then. The post seems to have followed a fairly normal lifecycle.
I am not a huge fan of the tone of the OP either, but it does have substantive content and discusses genuine issues (though it probably is not the best way to trigger discussion of those issues), some of which have bitten people at my workplace (dealing with bugs in two different very popular products written in Go, the kind of bugs that are simply not possible in other languages) in just the last week.
It would be interesting to see the response to a less inflammatory article discussing the same issues — I have noticed in general that criticism of Go is often badly received around here regardless of its tone.
No. Here's a post with much less upvotes, much less comments still on page 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31205139
There are many other examples if you care to compare.
Meanwhile this post is nowhere to be seen because most conversation here is not up to HN standards.
Flagging is detrimental to post ranking. And rightfully so.
> Flagging is detrimental to post ranking. And rightfully so.
As I understand it, flagging is to get moderator attention to posts that don't follow the HN guidelines. It's not the general way to punish posts that upset you, that's called downvoting. Treating flags as a "stronger downvote" basically makes the very concept of flagging worthless.
There are multiple posts older than this one that are listed within the first 9 pages, some of them 2 days older even. While this one isn't.
Take a guess why :)
The flag was removed by moderators, but by then the algorithm already did its thing.
> Take that as a hint.
As a hint that sometimes you should do you research before making claims? Agreed.
> I read the content as lacking maturity, emotionally loaded
The article is perfectly fine, but what I gather from the reactions of Go fans is that they are lacking in maturity and become too emotional if their toy is criticized.
Something the author explicitly mentioned in his article. You should read it.
Clearly, the people flagging it care, whether because they disagree with your assessment of it providing legitimate criticism and unique points in both cases, or because they think some other quality it has outweighs that in assessing it against the bar for belonging on HN.
> Some call it "inflammatory" but it has scientific and critical value nonetheless.
Value is subjective and people clearly disagree with you on this point.
"Users [flag] post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN."
The fact that a small subset of the Go community is triggered by this post and can't behave in a civil manner isn't a reason to flag it.
That it isn't the most inflammatory commentary (even if one agrees with that, which is, of course, subjective) in the tech community doesn't mean that people assess that it “gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” The latter, not the former, is the criteria for being on-topic at HN.
Naturally, people will disagree with what is within and outside of this boundary, and use flags or not accordingly.
Honestly I just hope @dang nukes this thread from orbit, and maybe it'll be posted again and get a cooler reaction from everybody.
Eh, unless there's evidence a submission is genuinely shitposting--i.e. trolling the community by being intentionally divisive while not actually believing what they're saying--or is outright offensive, I really don't agree.
Writing provocative critiques, like this, has been a standard in the tech world for as long as I can remember. If the rule is "don't post anything that runs the risk of upsetting someone", we'd have to ban half the leaders in the community, including Linus Torvalds.
So the worse the (Go) community behaves, the more careful authors have to be?
HN is a powder keg of emotions about programming languages, and fasterthanlime's posts tend to be... shall we say, "sparky"