[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.

[b3morales]

I really don't see how "two critical articles about a particular programming language on consecutive days are flamebait and detrimental to the site" can be squared with the handling of US political and COVID articles over the last two-three years. Programming content should be the bread and butter of the site, and popular language critique is par for the course on any hacker-themed board. And tomorrow we'll have moved on to something else, unlike the other topics I mentioned.

[mumblemumble]

No, I'm more saying that the treatment of this article, and dang's explanation for it, seems to suggest a weirdly arbitrary and paternalistic mindset on the subject.

I'm not sure what "weirdly hung up on the content of the piece" is supposed to mean. Isn't the whole point of Hacker News to share and discuss interesting content? If it's not about digging into full, long-form content, then we might as well take this to Twitter.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "this one had significant discussion yesterday, last year, and also the year it was published." The article was posted on Friday, April 29, 2022 - today, to be precise.