The sheer number of upvotes on this article, despite the attempt at suppressing it, is a clear indication that, regarldess of what dang thinks, a lot of people in the HN community think that something that is most definitely not boring and worth reading has been said.
I'm inclined to agree? I personally do tend to agree that golang in and of itself is kind of a boring horse that's been beaten to death at this point. But this article was interesting, anyway, because it had an interesting and thoughtful perspective on what kinds of things matter when choosing a language ecosystem more generally. One that I, as a hobby language designer, was glad I read. Even the bits I don't think I agree with. Even some of the bits that seemed unnecessarily invective.
That's fundamentally not how HN works, though. It's neither just crowdsourced nor just editorially curated. This thing ends up being a dupe fairly straightforwardly, it's not some weird edge case. Any big front page discussion naturally has a lot of people interested in keeping the discussion going.
I admittedly haven't read "Mr Golang's Wild Ride" since it first hit HN a couple years ago (and I don't really intend to, I have my doubts that it would be an edifying use of my time) but, based on what I remember of it, this new article is a much more nuanced and thoughtful position on the subject that definitely adds a different perspective to the conversation. It focuses on higher level questions about how one designs (or chooses) a software platform and ecosystem, where the original one was a fairly shallow fisk of language design issues. Wasn't it mostly drumming on syntax?
I'm not sure who you're quoting here but it's not me.
US political and COVID articles
These also get moderated quite a bit but it's a little different with ongoing hot topics - many more submissions, angles, etc. One person's take on Go, however interesting, is not an ongoing hot topic. Plus it's had a pretty good life on the site!
I'm not sure what "weirdly hung up on the content of the piece" is supposed to mean. Isn't the whole point of Hacker News to share and discuss interesting content? If it's not about digging into full, long-form content, then we might as well take this to Twitter.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "this one had significant discussion yesterday, last year, and also the year it was published." The article was posted on Friday, April 29, 2022 - today, to be precise.
A really simple but slightly different way to think of it is, if you write a piece and it gets good traction on HN (where you've also participated in the discussion, in this specific case), you don't usually get to put a megacomment reply on the front page the next day as well. There are exceptions, of course but 'things someone likes and dislikes about a popular programming language' are generally not the exceptional type of thing.
Perhaps you didn't personally get much out of the article. I did. I didn't love the invective aspects of it very much, either, but there were still some interesting take-aways and new things to say. Apparently enough so that 593 people so far thought it worthwhile to click the "upvote" button, which is really quite a staggering number when you consider that it had been banished from the front page. When you've got that many people seeing value in it - that's really quite a lot more than most of the rest of what's been on HN today - even if you don't personally see why, maybe it's enough for you to simply not see why, and leave it at that.
And that is what I am getting at. I can see the logic of the moderation just fine, but I think that the logic in question is wrong and perhaps even edging toward paternalistic or mean-spirited. And my interactions with dang on it elsewhere in the thread strike me as being mostly just defensive. Which doesn't really jive all that well with the stated purpose of elevating the quality of conversation on HN. I'm more impressed with what the broader community has done: largely looking past the flamebait, eschewing "shallow dismissals", and instead choosing to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says."
I don't follow. You weren't familiar with the rules of HN dupery and I've tried to explain them. That's not moving the goalposts. Followups are almost always dupes. Metaish follow-ups the very next day dupely so.
With all due credit to rmasters, "I suspect it would not have been flagged if the topic were different."
Please don't strawman me like that. If you're going to make "the rules of HN dupery" the place where you want to make your stand, then this seems like a peculiar response. These rules for HN dupery are not actually published anywhere outside of HN mod team comments when debates like this come up. By contrast, though, the published commenting guidelines clearly state "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Which, I realize that this whole tangent is then in contrast with the very next guideline in the list, which exhorts us to "Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." But, since HN lacks the meta-discussion channels that other comparable community sites have, these sorts of frustrations can't really do aything but boil over into public every so often, so I'm self-consciously allowing myself the conceit. In my defense, I've also been following and engaging in what I thought was some of the more interesting HN discussion I've seen in a minute. Including having my opinion on a programming language and its community go through some positive changes. So I do somewhat feel, then, that HN moderation deciding to flag the article and then bury it on the 2nd page because they think it's just a flamewar is tacitly an unfair accusation against which I must defend myself. And, frankly, the alternative defense that it's because it isn't interesting comes across as dismissive and condescending.
From the way you've written on this thread, it seems pretty clear that you're not the kind of message board nerd that makes 'dang's comments a daily read. That's fine! You have to be a pretty extreme nerd to do that, and there other, probably better things to spend those nerd points on. But you should take 'pvg's word for it on this stuff. He's not messing with you: he's trying to explain to you how the site works.