Re:The dark side of HackerNews: negativity at best, suppress...
by chc on Friday February 01, 2013 @04:32PM
(#5153623)
> Does Hacker News suppress other topics or just gender bias?
Hacker News does not suppress this topic. But this topic has been very well covered, so the bar for what constitutes a novel contribution is fairly high.
There are also a lot of "Your rights online" stories on Hacker News. A lot of these get flagged into oblivion as well. This isn't because we don't care about our rights, but that the topic is sufficiently well-covered that it takes an exceptional story to actually bring something new to the conversation instead of just flaring up old arguments.
It isn't that we don't think the topic your blog post is important. It is. But just because a topic is important doesn't mean every article on that topic will be widely upvoted. In general, it's actually harder to rank with an "important" topic because you have a lot of competition and there is only so much space for stories.
So, please don't take it personally or interpret this as people suppressing the topic. It's just Hacker News trying to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. We don't have very good organizational tools here, so we kind of have to resort to blunt weapons that can look overly harsh when you're on the receiving end.
Hacker News does not suppress this topic. But this topic has been very well covered, so the bar for what constitutes a novel contribution is fairly high.
There are also a lot of "Your rights online" stories on Hacker News. A lot of these get flagged into oblivion as well. This isn't because we don't care about our rights, but that the topic is sufficiently well-covered that it takes an exceptional story to actually bring something new to the conversation instead of just flaring up old arguments.
It isn't that we don't think the topic your blog post is important. It is. But just because a topic is important doesn't mean every article on that topic will be widely upvoted. In general, it's actually harder to rank with an "important" topic because you have a lot of competition and there is only so much space for stories.
So, please don't take it personally or interpret this as people suppressing the topic. It's just Hacker News trying to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. We don't have very good organizational tools here, so we kind of have to resort to blunt weapons that can look overly harsh when you're on the receiving end.