The Black Bar memorial mode should be invoked by community vote
Every time someone important to the community dies, there's talk of hoisting the black bar and questions about why or why not, the ultimate decision being left to the discretion of the administrators.
It makes more sense to let the HN community itself decide who it chooses to memorialize. Setting the threshold sufficiently high (e.g. 3/4 or 4/5) preserves the implicit intention that the bar not show up every time some schmuck we've heard about kicks the bucket while bypassing the criticism that memorialization is an arbitrary thing imposed by admins.
Whether the threshold value should be a ratio of for/against votes or for vs. total possible votes (counting abstentions against) is debatable.
(
10 comments
| 19 points
| on HN
)
And for the many people who will pass and not get the official acknowledgement? For anyone to whom being omitted is controversial, their life will have been rich enough that recognition via HN's status bar is likely of little concern to their legacy.
When you frame it like that it makes me think the black bar should be done away with altogether.
Instead, lets strongly discourage wasting time talking about the black bar, and just let the HN crew manage it.
Do we always have a daily vote in your profile?
Does a certain set of users have access to this (karma?)