hmyr0

Thank you, I am very much familiar with the site guidelines.

GitHub's Trending page has previously featured many similar projects, open letters and other non-software repositories, so I don't see how this is relevant here.

I understand that not all readers are interested in or even affected by GitHub's acquisition; however, a large number of them are. For this reason, a downvote button would be significantly more effective and democratic than giving two or three users the ability to completely hide a popular submission they do not agree with.

I do believe that dang and the Hacker News moderators have developed a good sense of how to keep the community healthy. Unfortunately, the most reliable way of accomplishing this is to eliminate any and all controversy that could lead to debates and arguments. This, however, is not indicative of a good community, it simply places users in a filter bubble by only showing them content that no two other users have ever disagreed with.

Despite eliminating nearly all arguments and controversy, this nonlinear voting mechanism is dangerous to the community and society as a whole, even if it gives the impression of a healthy community. Removing controversial submissions just as quickly as spam, child pornography and incitement to violence as can be expected from oppressive regimes is not an indicator of a healthy community, but rather that of a community that only gets to see what everyone agrees with.

Many people who have spent much more time on Hacker News than I have agree that there is room for improvement (see, for example, the analysis from last year that I linked to above). Unfortunately, simply hiding all controversial submissions saves the moderators time, and it seems that they are currently not interested in investing additional time into creating a truly healthy community, one that is capable of remaining healthy despite openly holding and expressing different opinions, and thus the current form of moderation is likely going to remain as it is now.

In that case, maybe it would be beneficial to add that functionality and to encourage users to downvote instead of flagging. Currently, spam, malware and warez are treated the same as submissions some people consider uninteresting, and while that does eliminate many controversial topics that could've led to debates, it also removes an entire class of content that many people do find relevant and interesting.

I have no doubt that dang knows what he is talking about, and arguably flagging on Hacker News is very effective at combating spam. However, no system is perfect, and neither is Hacker News[1]. I believe that the majority of HN users is mature enough to have sensible discussions even about controversial issues, and that showing submissions that most people like won't lead to an unhealthy community, even if a small number of people do not find the submission interesting.

[1]: https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html

It didn't. I witnessed the repository (previously #1) suddenly disappear, despite it still gaining stars significantly faster than the other trending repositories. Another repository, 'deno', had been on Trending for a significantly longer time, so it's unlikely that the anti-Microsoft repository was automatically removed to make room for other repositories.

Thanks for your reply. I'm relatively new to HN, so please excuse my ignorance if I'm misunderstanding how the site works, but it seems like currently there is significant feature overlap between downvoting and flagging, and in addition downvoting requires karma. This seems to incentivize flagging of submissions even if they are not "spam or off-topic" as described in the site guidelines.

I don't believe this was some kind of Microsoft-coordinated operation to censor criticism on HN, but I am surprised by how a few flags can silence such a popular submission.

I also do not consider the submission an "indignation post" or a "fanatic and paranoid dramatization" as it was referred to in a comment. I shared the link with the intent to make people aware of the removal of the repository from Trending, no more than that. I believe that GitHub is well within its rights to remove content from Trending, and I did not at any point complain or attempt to incite a flame war against Microsoft. My intention was simply to make people aware to allow them to make their own decisions about whether or not to continue using GitHub.

Regarding "over-promotion" of the story, I posted the original link shortly after I noticed the repository disappearing from Trending. I don't think anyone else posted it before, but if they did, I likely didn't see it because it was also flagged.

Given that the first submission had over 70 points after a few minutes, I don't think this is the case. I do think that people are interested in this story, otherwise it would not have become so popular.

Some people did not think the submission was interesting or insightful, and that's OK. But the right way to express that is by downvoting, not by flagging.

I haven't tried it, but it seems to me that this only works if the PDFs are stored on the site and viewed online, so essentially just regular analytics with an embedded document viewer.

Relevant reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17256425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245018 https://www.reddit.com/r/hnresistance/comments/8pbbue

Thank for for posting this. I posted a similar link which gained 70+ upvotes within minutes before being deleted with no explanation.

I'm guessing the reason the repository is so popular is that people are worried about what Microsoft might do after acquiring GitHub. Things like... censoring content they disapprove of, for example.

Unfortunately. GitHub used to be so strongly against censorship that they preferred financing a week of expensive DDoS mitigation over removing a repository. Two years ago, maintainers of open-source projects wrote open letters to GitHub, and GitHub listened. Sadly the company has changed a lot since then.

I agree that editing other people's comments isn't the best thing to do, but the README clearly states that those types of comments weren't welcome.

In addition, serious opinions like issue #60 weren't edited, only issues like #77, which literally said:

"Dear Beef, Beef. Thanks, Beef" -- https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT/issues/7...

EDIT: ... and IMO calling an obvious troll a "troll" isn't defamatory. What GitHub is doing is clearly censorship, nothing short of it.