[dang]

> You may say it's the snark/anger/frustration that got flagged, but I suspect it would not have been flagged if the topic were different.

HN has had plenty of threads about Go over the years. What's different here is that there was just a big Go flamewar yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31191700), from the same site. Having another big Go flamewar the next day is a really bad idea, because then on top of shallow ragey flameposts (boo) the thread will fill up with fluffy ragey metaposts (double boo). More explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31207126

"Shameful censorship" is one way to put it, but front page space is the scarcest resource that HN has (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and the amalgam of upvotes, flags, software weightings, and mod actions is what determines which stories end up / stay there vs. which stories fall off. This is the cycle of life on HN—it's always been that way and always will. One psychological effect is that everybody feels like their favorite topic is under-represented (or shamefully censored!) and in a way everybody is right.

I've often joked by adding "even Rust hackers feel that way" but maybe that's not the best line to use in this case :)

p.s. I feel like it's been a long time since HN had a passionate explosion about flagging and censorship (side note: ctrl+f misinformation...yup, that too) around a programming language. In a way it feels like a healthy sign. Like a family fight at Thanksgiving - at least it's about, say, a board game or something.

[lilyball]

This strikes me as very odd. The post yesterday is about a 2-year-old article. This post is about a brand new article, from the same author, written more or less as a response to all of the responses to the original article over the past 2 years.

If a flamewar is a problem, then that's what moderation is for, including potentially locking. I know you've posted comments on divisive articles before cautioning everyone about not wanting the comments to devolve into a flamewar, that would have been a great first step here.

But instead of doing that, you're saying that because of the old article popping up again yesterday and rehashing the same old flamewar, you've chosen to suppress the author's own response. I would think that the old article popping up yesterday makes this new post especially timely and even more important. It's not a rehash of the old flamewar, it's the author's own words with a well-written and fairly comprehensive response to the common criticisms, and it's highly relevant to the HN audience. And especially in the context of the discussion yesterday it seems a good idea to ensure visibility of the author's own response so anyone who saw yesterday's flamewar can see this. It took 2 years from the old post for the author to write this response, I'm pretty sure you don't have to worry about having a third post tomorrow.

[pvg]

The guiding logic here is 'it would be boring to have a discussion of X on the front page every day'. For many X, there's infinitely many things to say but the front page is finite and has a goal of not being boring. HN's been moderated like that for ages and it seems to work reasonably well.

[mumblemumble]

I don't think it's necessarily the HN moderation team's job to tell us what we should and should not find interesting. It's a crowdsourced news aggregation site and discussion forum, not a magazine with an editorial board.

The sheer number of upvotes on this article, despite the attempt at suppressing it, is a clear indication that, regarldess of what dang thinks, a lot of people in the HN community think that something that is most definitely not boring and worth reading has been said.

I'm inclined to agree? I personally do tend to agree that golang in and of itself is kind of a boring horse that's been beaten to death at this point. But this article was interesting, anyway, because it had an interesting and thoughtful perspective on what kinds of things matter when choosing a language ecosystem more generally. One that I, as a hobby language designer, was glad I read. Even the bits I don't think I agree with. Even some of the bits that seemed unnecessarily invective.

[pvg]

I don't think it's necessarily the HN moderation team's job to tell us what we should and should not find interesting. It's a crowdsourced news aggregation site and discussion forum, not a magazine with an editorial board.

That's fundamentally not how HN works, though. It's neither just crowdsourced nor just editorially curated. This thing ends up being a dupe fairly straightforwardly, it's not some weird edge case. Any big front page discussion naturally has a lot of people interested in keeping the discussion going.

[mumblemumble]

I don't see how one can say that this ends up being a straightforward dupe, unless you're just observing that it's criticism of Go by the same author and with a similarly provocative title.

I admittedly haven't read "Mr Golang's Wild Ride" since it first hit HN a couple years ago (and I don't really intend to, I have my doubts that it would be an edifying use of my time) but, based on what I remember of it, this new article is a much more nuanced and thoughtful position on the subject that definitely adds a different perspective to the conversation. It focuses on higher level questions about how one designs (or chooses) a software platform and ecosystem, where the original one was a fairly shallow fisk of language design issues. Wasn't it mostly drumming on syntax?

[pvg]

I think you're getting somewhat hung up on the content of the piece and the moderation in this case doesn't have much to do with it. Critique pieces of popular languages are themselves popular and get frequent and regular coverage on HN. This one had one significant discussion yesterday, last year and also the year it was published. That's a pretty good run and it will undoubtedly appear again, along with its update. But not on the front page for two days straight because almost nothing gets to sit on the front page for two days straight, that mostly being the point of a front page of daily links.

[gkfasdfasdf]

I learned a great deal from the article. Thankfully I discovered it from twitter. If flame wars are the issue, then the thread should be locked, rather than pulling it from the front page. Really disappointed in this move.

[mumblemumble]

> Having another big Go flamewar the next day...

I haven't read all the comments on this one yet - there are quite a lot of them already - but reading this makes me think that perhaps we don't see the same comment section. (Perhaps because I'm not tasked with moderation, so I don't have much reason to go look at the 2nd page.) They've mostly been very thoughtful and balanced. It strikes me as some of the highest quality discussion on the subject of Go that I've seen on this site in years. It's a shame it was flagged and then buried on the 2nd page. A pinned comment reminding us not to get our hackles up in response to the author's abrasive style seems like it would have been plenty sufficient. I fear that, in your haste to head off an anticipated flamewar, what you've actually done is suppressed a potentially healing example to the community that it really is possible to have a mature conversation about Go.

[dang]

I don't have the impression that interesting technical discussion about Go has been particularly scarce on HN over the years? But if you think that today's thread is different enough from yesterday's thread to be significantly higher-quality and not just generic (i.e. about something specifically interesting in the OP, rather than just another generic discussion of Go, even if it's a good generic discussion of Go), then I'd be willing to take another look - in that case the best thing would be to link to the subthreads that you think make the best case for it.

The and in the previous paragraph is important, though, because a core moderation principle is to de-emphasize generic discussion (and follow-up threads, and repetition generally) in favor of significant new information. Past explanations on all that, if anyone cares:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[mumblemumble]

If you'll excuse me for not taking the time to gather hyperlinks, I think just scrolling down would suffice. Basically any of the next-most-highly-ranked top-level comments seem like decent candidates to me.

[dang]

It's not clear to me that the discussion isn't still rather generic, but ok - if you or someone else wants to suggest an accurate, neutral, non-flamebaity title, we can give this thread a second chance.

[rmasters]

I appreciate the extra context. For what it's worth, I was not aware of the previous discussion and I just thought it was an interesting post. (I really don't have any feelings about golang one way or another.)

I can appreciate your point about having limited resources to moderate posts that have a track record of generating big flamewars. But I didn't get the impression from the comments (many being ad-hominem) that the post was flagged for that reason and my use of the word "shameful" was directed at those comments.

[pg_1234]

As someone coding in Go (and having doubts about the language) I find articles like this professionally valuable.

They don't have to be correct, they just need to provoke meaningful discourse, which for me means crowdsourcing the insights of hundreds of fellow devs.

[dang]

Yes. The problem here is that there was a big one of those just yesterday. HN does poorly with repetition, and throwing in the indignation aspect and the meta aspect (can you believe what an HN commenter said yesterday? the nerve!) guarantees that the thread will get high and go crazy. None of that is intentional, but it's a well-known failure mode, so the flags in this case were helpful. We've taken the [flagged] stigma off the title above, so as not to rub salt in any wounds.

The system has checks and balances to prevent such things from dominating discussion here. (Flags are part of that system; so are software bells and whistles; so are moderators). If we didn't have those, the front page would consist of nothing but sensational flamewars and endless towers of meta!

[fasterthanlime]

> We've taken the [flagged] stigma off the title above, so as not to rub salt in any wounds.

Sending it to page 2 when it's only 3 hours old and has more upvotes than almost everything on page 1 /and/ removing the [flagged] marker feels weirder to me than not doing anything, but eh.

[pvg]

The ranking aims for interestingneses, not points so it makes sense to rank down a discussion of the merits Go a day after the front page has had a long discussion of the merits of Go. Taking off the flagged helps with the 'why was this flagged' meta (a little late now but still) since fewer people assume there is something wrong with the post, other than it happening to be a dupe on HN.

[fasterthanlime]

There's nothing I can say about "this is not actually the same article" and "the two comment sections do not say the same thing at all" that hasn't already been said by many other HN users in response to this moderation thread, so, I'll leave it there, still disappointed.

[pvg]

I haven't read them all and it's not wrong that they aren't the same article or the same discussion but it's HN-wrong. It's definitely disappointing if you have a big J. Winnfieldean 'allow me to retort' lined up but it works that way for pretty decent, time-tested reasons which I think have also been explained in great detail in the various moderation parables and proverbs.

[altairprime]

Is there anything that can be done the next time the old 2020 post goes FP, to direct people to consider the 2022 followup as well? Or is that burden of “seriously, stop rehashing 2020 content instead of keeping up with the discussion” exclusively the author’s to bear?

Given the options I know of today for authors, if they’re still reading comments here, I’d recommend they replace the 2020 post with a redirect to the 2022 post, and include the 2020 post at the end of it fully intact. At least that would ensure the flamewars cycle on the complete conversation and not just half of it.

[hu3]

I agree. The signal to noise ratio of these "Rust vs Go" post comments is so bad they border being mostly a pile of anecdotes.

Also not meant to diminish the blogger but if you check their posts, it almost seems they feed on Go flamewar.

I could read every one of the 443 comments and still come out with zero knowledge gained because that's the kind of comment these posts incentivize.

Startups were built with less man-hours than what was collectively wasted on this thread.