Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed • Hacker News Board

Re: Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed

#21

Post by bradgessler » Thu, Aug 20, 2009, 9:44 PM UTC

zedshaw wrote: post #9

Oh man, that's funny. So you purge articles about a programming language, about a legendary hacker, and about me off of "hacker news". Yet, every other day you've got those crap posts from the Mixergy guy, random posts about idiotic sexist dating theories, a billion VC posts, and everything from techcrunch. Apparently, "normal" at HN means "douche". Keep on rockin' in the free world brother, Zed

Nice! The classic Zed Shaw You're a douche™ argument. I wasn't expecting that. Well played.

Re: Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed

#22

Post by johnbender » Thu, Aug 20, 2009, 10:14 PM UTC

Clearly people have other thoughts

Re: Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed

#23

Post by right_ya_know » Thu, Aug 20, 2009, 10:55 PM UTC

education is better than irritation, if HN is incapable of providing productive news and information, by flooding it's face with only Erlang, then HN and all of you, need to go away, and find something more useful to do with your time.

Re: Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed

#24

Post by jeremymcanally » Thu, Aug 20, 2009, 11:01 PM UTC

zedshaw wrote: post #9

Oh man, that's funny. So you purge articles about a programming language, about a legendary hacker, and about me off of "hacker news". Yet, every other day you've got those crap posts from the Mixergy guy, random posts about idiotic sexist dating theories, a billion VC posts, and everything from techcrunch. Apparently, "normal" at HN means "douche". Keep on rockin' in the free world brother, Zed

I think there are two audiences on this site constantly at war with one another: the neckbeard hackers and the douchebag startup CEO's (not that all hackers are total dorks and not that all CEO's are douches...but you get what I'm saying). These together probably make up about 40%-50% of the Hacker News audience. The other pieces of the whole are probably perfectly normal people who just like a good mix of news and code.

The neckbeards hate stuff like Mixergy or TC because they're not into the whole startup scene. The CEO's hate things like _why because they don't understand why he would spend more than 10 minutes a day doing something that doesn't make money (these guys poop while they're promoting synergy). As a result, when something like this happens and gets a lot of stories/attention, the neckbeards take the chance to submit that super 1337 Haskell tutorial they found 2 weeks ago which is subsequently voted up by the CEO's who just want this hobo, non-TechCrunched trash off the front page.

Then again, I have no data on this. Waffles.

Re: Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed

#25

Post by lil_cain » Thu, Aug 20, 2009, 11:04 PM UTC

Obviously, people can't talk about what they want here. Only those articles which you deem kosher.

Seriously. Get a life.

Re: Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed

#26

Post by jerryjvl » Thu, Aug 20, 2009, 11:10 PM UTC

As I write this there are 10 articles out of 30 on the front page that do not have the word Erlang in it ... call me crazy, but any community that feels the need to promote their language to this extent is kind of an instant turn-off for me.

Re: Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed

#27

Post by hvs » Thu, Aug 20, 2009, 11:37 PM UTC

jerryjvl wrote: post #26

As I write this there are 10 articles out of 30 on the front page that do not have the word Erlang in it ... call me crazy, but any community that feels the need to promote their language to this extent is kind of an instant turn-off for me.

It's not about promoting Erlang, it's about getting all of the _why articles off the home page. Whether you agree with it or not, it has nothing to do with Erlang.

Re: Purge Complete: No more Erlang, _why, or Zed

#28

Post by hvs » Thu, Aug 20, 2009, 11:43 PM UTC

pmclanahan wrote: post #13

I haven't followed this site for very long, but is purging articles about which people are obviously interested a common practice? If so, for me, this site's value just went to zero.

No, as far as I can tell this was the second time in recent history that this happened. The first was to scare away a flood of new users that threatened to radically change the generally congenial culture here on HN. The _why articles were getting a bit excessive, but I'm not sure it raised to the level of an attempted purge.