[stephth]

Different from what? What do you mean?

I'm super confused. A couple hours ago the two top stories were about mark pilgrim having done what looked like an info suicide. I came back here to check on that and the stories are nowhere to be seen on the first two pages of HN. What happened?

[Luyt]

Mark is fine.

See update on http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2011/10/04/searching-for-m...

Previous HN threads:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3073798

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3073842

[stephth]

Both stories have more than 200 votes and are only a few hours old. Mark Pilgrim doing an info suicide is newsworthy and obviously a lot of people care about it, so can someone explain how and why those stories have been kicked out of the first HN pages?

[andrewljohnson]

I imagine they got flagged to death by reasonable people, or a moderator star-chambered them.

Either way, good riddance. Mark didn't want them there, obviously, and neither did anyone except rubbernecking thrill-chasers.

It was ridiculous to think the guy was in trouble or to send the freaking police to his house. The man has friends, family, and co-workers, and the people who surfaced this story didn't so much care if he was alright (because they weren't his friends) so much as they wanted a few seconds of internet fame for being the first to notice the data wipe.

The story should have been posted as "Lookie, lookie - Mark Pilgrim disappeared from the internet!" That would have been fine.

Instead, it was the morbid internet at its worst.

[thaumaturgy]

Not defending anyone's actions here one way or another, but, being a sort-of-internet-celebrity and suddenly removing everything associated with yourself without a comment or explanation is bound to attract some attention.

[chc]

Normal people in good mental and physical health don't generally "disappear from the Internet" in that way. Such a drastic measure warrants some concern. If he didn't want people to be concerned, he could have done it in a less drastic way.

[stephth]

Mark didn't want them there, obviously, and neither did anyone except rubbernecking thrill-chasers.

Or people interested on the subject of mark pirlgrim's work going 401, or the subject of info suicide. There seems to be some kind of censorship goin on, and whether or not there's a legitimate reason for it, HN readers deserve an explanation.

[scorpion032]

Mark pulled down his twitter account, his blog, diveintopython and diveintopython3.

All of these is his own content developed in his own time, and he has every right to pull it down, if he so deems fit, whatever reasons for that. And he has.

Yet, diveintohtml5 lives on. The reason for it is that, it was something he wrote in his employers time who are at least part owners of it.

I hold high respect for Mark and for his wishes to pull down anything his. I am just recognizing the qualitative difference between diveintohtml5 and other projects that he pulled.

[stephth]

So ... why exactly were the HN stories buried?

[scorpion032]

Although, I didn't do it, I can reason why. If Mark pulled all his content (and even nominated his own Wikipedia article for deletion citing he is not notable) because he wanted some privacy, letting all those articles on the HN frontpage would do the exact opposite to provide him more attention that he is avoiding.

[stephth]

letting all those articles on the HN frontpage would do the exact opposite to provide him more attention that he is avoiding.

So you're saying those stories were removed because Mark Pilgrim wished they were? Is that how things actually work in HN?

[scorpion032]

benevolent censorship?

[skrebbel]

Looks like someone at HN stopped an attention whore from attention whoring too much. Censorship, yes, but nice censorship.

[j_col]

I'm sorry, but no censorship is nice in a site that is supposed to be about content getting up-voted/down-voted by a community.

[jrockway]

There's no downvoting, though. Hence, moderators sometimes remove articles that are popular but don't belong here. Just because something is popular among HN readers doesn't mean it needs to be on HN, and the mods balance out the natural Way Of The Universe in that case.

I'm not sure I necessarily agree with this, but am just stating how things work here. There is no reason to expect that you aren't being censored; ultimately this site is for advertising YC, not for being an impartial news filter.

[j_col]

You right of course, I was mistakenly thinking of comments getting down-voted, but articles cannot.

> There is no reason to expect that you aren't being censored; ultimately this site is for advertising YC, not for being an impartial news filter.

Yeah, it's important to keep sight of that, and frankly in that case it makes me wonder why I should continue to come back here?

[stephth]

Yeah, it's important to keep sight of that, and frankly in that case it makes me wonder why I should continue to come back here?

Same here. That's why I'm so interested in what happened backstage with these stories. I've contacted the mail link on the Guidelines section for some light but haven't received a reply yet.

[acavailhez]

Is Pilgrim the attention whore ? Can you elaborate on why it was a good move to censor the stories ? I'm really confused by this story.

Also, jonathantneal, why is your name showing up green ?

[Luyt]

Names of new users are green. 'jonathantneal' registered 3 hours ago (it's now 09:08 CEST).