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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?

#51

Post by gori »

DanBC wrote: post #42
gori wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, English is not my first language.

We do not have a downvote button. Major news is allowed here.

This is an active story that a lot of people is interested in, and this means that a lot of posts about it is upvoted.

Shouldn't the flag button only be about things that are not allowed? Not as a way to remove things you find not interesting?

The issue here is that the upvoting is democratic. One person flagging posts based on his opinions (and as you can see in this thread, your opinions are not the same as others, imagine that!) and them getting completely removed because of it is not democratic.

If you don't like things, don't upvote them. They get upvoted because others like them. How can this be so hard to understand?

Your opinion of the quality of the posts here is not what should decide what posts others read!

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

#52

Post by joezydeco »

rednukleus wrote: post #4

> But we all know essentially how this will end: Prism isn't going away and Edward Snowden's fate is grim. That's a very defeatist attitude. I'm sure that there are better arguments for upvoting or not upvoting these articles than saying "this story is not worth paying attention to because we are completely helpless, let's go back to talking about app store metrics".

Agree. Maybe his fate won't be as "grim" if the world continues to pay attention and understand what is happening to him.

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

#53

Post by Mustafabei »

As a community, instead of solely upvoting news about snowden (which I believe we occasionally should), I think we need to write to attack the core of the problem: We (the HN community) obviously agree on how whistleblowers need to be treated and how any government authority should keep off of our privacy. Easy champs. Solely upvoting news is not fighting. Dare and write to your congressman. Give me a little bit of the old HN where it was not 80% about one man and which used to be awesome.

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

#54

Post by Kylekramer »

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…

I agree with the sentiment, minus Snowden. We should be talking about this issue. Snowden is at this point immaterial to the larger issues unless he leaks more details. Discussing himself distracts from his purposes. His movements and people's opinions about his movements (which dominated HN this weekend) are of no consequence to PRISM and the NSA.

The honest truth is we are no closer to discovering the truth about what the government does than we were on day one of the leak while entertaining ourselves with platitudes about how "America is now a place where people seek asylum from" and Bourne movie fantasies.

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

#56

Post by levosmetalo »

You can install "Selectivity for HN" Greasemonkey script to hide those stories. It reduced my front page to just about ~10 relevant posts.

It might help to flag those posts too, but if you try it they will most likely just remove flag privilege for you, since this Snowden thing seems to be a new fetish here on HN, similar to the time Steve Jobs died when you couldn't read anything else.

Btw, from the HN guide: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

These Snowden/NSA/PRISM articles are pretty much the definition of off-topic, and it seems that we can't fight them out of front page, since we can't downvote posts, and flagging them will just lead to removal of flag privilege.

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

#57

Post by gori »

ebbv wrote: post #47
gori wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

No, my point is that people are upvoting articles they find interesting, which might not be the same things that I find interesting, and I'm ok with this.

I find the personal stuff in a story like this quite interesting, btw.

Of course there's a lot of duplicates and posts with similar information in them, but is that such a big issue? I think people who are flagging posts because they think it's sort of the same as another article is basically abusing the system.

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

#58

Post by levosmetalo »

yuvadam wrote: post #6

Do you honestly believe we've understood this surveillance complex enough that we can keep on with our lives? Why accept that "PRISM [won't go] away" or that "Snowden's fate is grim"? Honestly? Is this cause not worth fighting for anymore?

So go out and fight. Upvoting these kind of smap on HN could hardly be called "fighting".

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

#59

Post by yuvadam »

threeseed wrote: post #29
yuvadam wrote: post #6

Do you honestly believe we've understood this surveillance complex enough that we can keep on with our lives? Why accept that "PRISM [won't go] away" or that "Snowden's fate is grim"? Honestly? Is this cause not worth fighting for anymore?

The problem is that Snowden has become the story. It's no longer about PRISM or the legitimate surveillance and privacy concerns it's about him.

It's up to us - the people - to make the story about illegal surveillance and privacy concerns. The media sure as hell won't address those issues for us.
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