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Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

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Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#41

Post by ebbv »

swombat wrote: post #28

Please post more about Snowden, PRISM, NSA, GCHQ, and all the rest. I will upvote every one of them. For those who think that "we all know essentially how this will end", think about what the world would look like if every major change had been met with this kind of pitiful attitude. Every revolution, every change for the better, has come out of people rejecting that sentiment. It's not too late to turn away from the…

You can disagree with his statement about PRISM, and that doesn't really have much to do with his original point.

He wasn't saying don't post thoughtful op-eds about PRISM (and if he was I think he'd get no support here at all), he's saying enough with the tabloid like articles about the people at the center of controversies, which have nothing to do with the larger issue.

Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#42

Post by DanBC »

gori wrote: post #20
shawabawa3 wrote: post #9

Agreed. At some point I flagged every snowden/NSA story on the front page (I believe it was 28 out of 30). I don't seem to be able to flag any more so I guess that was picked up as abuse, so unfortunately I can't flag any more of these stories. I wouldn't mind seeing stories on all of this, as long as they are only posted when something interesting has actually happened, as opposed to just because there hasn't been a…

Why not let the others here decide what they think is interesting instead of flagging posts? Things people like gets upvoted and rise to the top. You did abuse the system, because you used the flagging as a downvote button. This is not Reddit.

> Why not let the others here decide what they think is interesting

Weird that you cannot spot the contradiction here.

Why not let others here decide what they think shouldn't be here instead of upvoting crap posts? Other people are abusing the upvote button by voting for content that should not be here.

> This is not Reddit.

The quality over the past week has been lousy.

Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#43

Post by zeroDivisible »

One of fellow geeks had chosen to risk everything which he had - whether it was recklessness or courage is a different thing - and publish classified information, shedding some light on the topic of people being monitored by the government.

As much as you might be irritated by the amount of information related to him which is being published here, personally, I'm curious how the story will unfold. I presume that there are others who are curious and others who are irritated as well.

In most of the cases you are right - hn is not the place for gossip about famous people. The thing here is that we are not discussing what did Kardashian ate for dinner and why it's bad for her cellulite, but following a story of somebody who is not giving a shit and trying to if not defend, then at least shed some light on our privacy, as it's being taken from us.

Please don't get me wrong, but I'd strongly advise using some filtering tools (there are dozens) for hn in this specific case.

Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#44

Post by gori »

DanBC wrote: post #38
mehwoot wrote: post #13

This is a problem with Hacker News. Maybe because most people can't downvote (or I dunno some other reason), it has a big big problem with duplicate stories. When Steve Jobs died for example, 30/30 stories were "Steve Jobs has died" for quite some time. It is irritating, that's for sure.

People can flag submissions. I don't know if there's a karma threshold for flagging. People should be visiting new and flagging articles that don't belong here, and upvoting good articles. It's a bit worrying that "over flagging" could cause someone to lose their ability to flag articles - some users have reported that. Still, most of the Snowden articles are garbage and should be flagged.

Flagging != downvoting. We should upvote things we find interesting, and flag things that isn't appropriate at all.

Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#45

Post by clarky07 »

People keep suggesting that his flight itenerary and whereabouts aren't interesting. This is simply not true. This is extremely important and could have much larger implications. China and Russia are essentially spitting in the US governments face by allowing him to move in and out of their countries, and if that isn't interesting to you maybe you should spend more time on reddit or imgur.

Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#46

Post by pi18n »

ebbv wrote: post #41
swombat wrote: post #28

Please post more about Snowden, PRISM, NSA, GCHQ, and all the rest. I will upvote every one of them. For those who think that "we all know essentially how this will end", think about what the world would look like if every major change had been met with this kind of pitiful attitude. Every revolution, every change for the better, has come out of people rejecting that sentiment. It's not too late to turn away from the…

You can disagree with his statement about PRISM, and that doesn't really have much to do with his original point. He wasn't saying don't post thoughtful op-eds about PRISM (and if he was I think he'd get no support here at all), he's saying enough with the tabloid like articles about the people at the center of controversies, which have nothing to do with the larger issue.

Let's not restrict it to people relevant to controversies. Let's stop all the tabloid articles and blogspam.

Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#47

Post by ebbv »

gori wrote: post #34
ebbv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these stories themselves are at best tangentially related to the larger issue. Upvoting them or reading a story about Edward Snowden's favorite brand of chicken pot pie is not doing anything to fight for civil liberties, though it will give views to garbage web sites like Business Insider and its ilk.

Oh give up. "Edward Snowden's favorite brand of chicken pot pie" "Kim Dotcom braids his hair!" "Julian Assange orders Cherry Coke instead of regular!" "Elon Musk buys three rare white leopards!" Do you really like to argue by ridiculing others this much? There hasn't been a story even resembling anything like this, people have actually upvoted things they found interesting. More links means more people are writing ab…

It does not mean more people writing about the actual issues, it means more people writing about irrelevant details of these people's lives like Edward Snowden's girlfriend's blog. That's the point.

Nobody's saying don't post thoughtful opinion pieces or details about legislation or court cases or anything else actually having to do with the issues.

You can claim that most or all of the posts that have appeared on here are relevant, but they aren't all relevant. That's why this post that we're commenting on exists and has gotten upvoted; the quality of those posts has been abysmal.

And your response is not to argue the point but to basically tell us to shut up. Thanks for contributing.

Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#48

Post by marmot1101 »

I don't have a problem at all with the volume of stories, I just think that we need to honor Snowden's wishes. He explicitly asked that focus remain on the content of his leaks rather than about him personally. Let's talk about his leaks and how we are going to create a future without the need for them rather than about the man himself.

Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#49

Post by DanBC »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #39

This is a story of a hacker, a sysadmin, one of us, who made a choice that could very well cost him his life. He is now being pursued all over the globe by the world's largest super-power, which has yet to catch him. His story directly addresses the role of technology in anonymity and privacy, and the details of his story are full of lots of fun technical details. In addition, he's carrying notebooks that have even m…

> but as far as getting attention on HN? What else would you expect?

No-one is calling for zero Snowden articles.

What people are asking for is for a reduction in the flood of Snowden trivia.

"Snowden Does X" will be reported by the twelve different news sources, and each of these will be posted to HN. Some of these will have blogpost reactions, which also get posted. An hour later some politician will respond to "Snowden Does X", which will be reported by 12 different sources, and blogged about, and etc etc.

The submissions are tedious and very repetitive.

But, worse, so are the comments. It's pretty much "The NSA is bad, and what they did is bad"; "Snowden is a traitor" or "snowden isn't a traitor".

Some of it was mildly interesting but now there's very little new "deeply interesting" commentary.

Snowden stories are, now, a good example of "intensely but shallowly interesting".

Re: Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden?

#50

Post by ebbv »

warrenmiller wrote: post #35

"Can we please slow down the stories about ..." - If the community didn't want them they wouldn't surface. They clearly do.

Come on. We should never, ever make a post asking the community to reconsider what's been going on? That's ridiculous.
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