> Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be?

I’ve personally been visiting new and flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts I see (i started doing this after getting sick of all the Twitter/mastodon posts hitting the front page).

I don’t want the front page to be all Twitter all the time, and most of the posts boil down to speculation and gossip and the ones that don’t, usually don’t offer anything meaningfully new and interesting.

I suspect there are plenty of others like me.

Well, that is a misfortune for the rest of us who find it relevant.

The front page doesn’t need 5 posts from random people talking about how they’re moving to mastodon and boy isn’t toot such a weird name for tweets.

Likewise it doesn’t need continued speculation about what Elon really meant when he posted ‘blah blah blah’.

Substantive things will get through (this one did).

Yay Elon/Boo Elon drama won’t.

If you really need it, feel free to browse new yourself and vouch.

> The front page doesn’t need 5 posts from random people talking about how they’re moving to mastodon and boy isn’t toot such a weird name for tweets.

Nope, it doesn't.

> Substantive things will get through (this one did).

Are you only flagging the non-substantive things? Because that's not what you imply above ("flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts").

I flag almost everything I see, but I am just one vote.

If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter.

And it’s not like I have an army of bot accounts continually refreshing and flagging.

I’m just using my one vote to signify I’m not interested in hearing about Twitter drama.

HN downranks posts that get both a lot of flags AND a lot of votes so

>If it’s substantive it will have enough in the other direction that it doesn’t matter.

Is just flat out wrong.

Thanks for the correction.

It still achieves my objective of less Twitter drama on the front page.

imron has it right on this point, because upvotes and flags are in a sort of tug-of-war. Minimal flags can't defeat maximal upvotes.

Speculation and gossip are annoying, but the actual things that are happening (and there are a lot of them) are worth keeping.

Agree. And substantive things (like this piece of news) make it through.

In principle, sure, but this submission and all the others I've seen is clearly in the "speculation and gossip" bucket. The only non-speculative information here, that Twitter offices are closed tomorrow, is moderately interesting at best and we can see upthread that nobody's really interested in talking about it except to feed tangential speculation.

I'm with you. I've seen some fairly low quality discussions on HN, many of which fixate on Musk. The Twitter situation is magnifying it to stupefying dimensions.

Are the goings on at Twitter relevant to "the industry"? Sure. But, the inability to have serious discussion about it speaks poorly of the those that populate that industry.

Somewhere between the 10,000th iteration of "see how billionaires are evil?", "see how Musk is a genius?", "see how Musk behaves badly?", and "Look at what's Musk accomplished?" nothing new is said. Anything novel or serious that does manage to pop-up gets drowned out in the sea of noise.

I join you in downvoting all of these. There are good discussions on HN, but these discussions are them.

You're right, and the people complaining are also right because the story does deserve oxygen—just not all the oxygen.

It's our job to balance this so that it gets some oxygen but not all the oxygen. The system tends not to be able to do this without human intervention—either the flags win (in which case the story gets smothered) or the upvotes win (in which case HN becomes Twittermusk News with a side dish of SBFTX). Human intervention is needed to keep the teeter-totter from tottering too far either way.

We're super open to user feedback about it. If you (or anyone) want to influence the balance, you should make your case to [email protected]. That's the only reliable message queue.

Thanks for all the work you (and other mods) do to keep things balanced.

I think for the most part it's been working well.

It would surely be the flame war algorithm. Throwing some numbers out there, would this be too exaggerated? There have been 30 stories this past fortnight here with over 700 comments, mostly repeating the same love/hate musk battleground playing out across every other website. I think it’s a very interesting topic that’s unfolding but if dang wants to limit the frenzy from consuming here as well I certainly understand.

It’s interesting, but if the discussion isn’t interesting it doesn’t work here and is better culled.

The comment threads in them are a train wreck.

Which would be apropos for the train wreck under discussion.

Hard disagree. I think the best discussions can be had with chaotic circumstances, because they provide a new surface for thought. A very small percentage of the comments in these threads are appropriate for HN [1]. These comment sections look like they're straight from reddit.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

they are heavily moderating it. I only saw a couple of front page stories last week, and these events have been headline news internationally.

i hope the reason is because of the risk of flamewars, rather than YC leadership's desire to protect the reputation of someone who is hagified in SV circles and currently crashing and burning very publicly.

I agree with you all that some of these Twitter/Musk deserve HN threads (though many don't). That said, it's a feature-not-a-bug that stories making "headline news internationally" don't automatically show up on HN.

Paul Graham and some of the YC partners have been surprisingly defensive of Musk's actions.

It's been massively disappointing to watch since Musk's behaviour has been abhorrent and has resulted in a lot of unnecessary hurt and despair for innocent employees. The same employees who may end up running future startups.

Lol one of his tweets aged well, https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961?s=20&t=...

Huh? You have no evidence either way yet.

Well we know that after an ultimatum, enough employees quit that Musk is now asking some of them to come back. The number of employees leaving is also so high, that they're shutting down access to offices. There's also been reports of features like 2FA not working anymore after the first round of layoffs.

Not exactly the results I'd expect from someone who really knows how to run a company.

If one of Musk's middle managers had messed up this badly, Musk would have fired them already. But Elon deserves the continued benefit of the doubt for some reason.

All that you've mentioned may or may not matter eventually but it's not any sort of evidence of how Twitter did. The only things that matter are revenue, expenses, and growth. This tweet was made two days ago and nothing has happened since to provide any sort of evidence of how these actually important factors will unfold. To say that this tweet has "aged badly" is just nonsense.

> The only things that matter are revenue, expenses, and growth.

So... not the general operability of the service?

Sheesh. First of all, we already know that because people have already died due to Tesla software not working right.

And second of all, he thinks Twitter can’t lead to deaths? Let’s say the Iranian government was given unfettered access to DMs and metadata for all Iranian citizens with an account. Not hard to imagine scenarios that end in death.

At first I thought paulg must have posted that weeks ago, but no, it's from yesterday. I wouldn't expect such a vote of confidence on Musk after all the data points we've received since he took over the company.

I'm not even sure what paulg's point is. Are people actually claiming they'd do a better job than Musk, or are they simply commenting on the missteps and bizarre behavior. You don't need to have run a successful tech company to know that spending your time as a CEO antagonizing your employees on social media, and then threatening your remaining employees with an ultimatum is not a good idea.

What's really weird is that he even pushes Musk's conspiracy theory that leftist activist groups are the reason advertisers are jumping off: https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1593297818420236288

"This Tweet is unavailable" - what did it (roughly) say?

> It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.

Then the next tweet says

> In both those companies, people die if the software doesn't work right. Do you really think he's not up to managing a social network?

Thanks!

I was able to view it in Incognito. Why- I don't know, it's been happening with many linked tweets lately as well.

It's remarkable that someone who's never run Twitter thinks he knows how to run Twitter better than the people who run Twitter.

It was a nice r/agedlikemilk candidate but they now have a no Musk rule (https://www.reddit.com/r/agedlikemilk/comments/yqclex/rule_1...)

when you spend your whole life acting like a genius because you made a bunch of money, then a richer guy shows how incorrect that is, you are going to squirm.

There were already dozens of Russian oligarchs with net worth exceeding PG's. I don't think anyone is conflating wealth with genius or wisdom.

Half this comment section is people going "Nonono elon couldn't be dumb, there must be some angle to this". It's the american way to call a rich person smart and a smart person a threat.

> Paul Graham and some of the YC partners have been surprisingly defensive of Musk's actions.

Thing is, I agree that Twitter needed to be shaken up. But, Musk has made the wrong choices every step of the way. It's like he's giving a masterclass on how to be a terrible leader. It's amazing the miscalculations Musk has made. First, his longest tenure, most experience employees likely just got a huge payday on their stock/options - so of course they will peace out. Second, his antics are driving up the price of hiring new employees. Third, Musk still had a lot of goodwill before taking ownership that he's now squandered. I could go on...

The only thing I can think is he looked hard at the financials and the debt load he saddled the company with and panicked.

A lot are getting caught in the flamewar algorithm and/or being flagged by users. Moderation basically goes by these principles:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...