[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.

[pvg]

two critical articles about a particular programming language on consecutive days are flamebait and detrimental to the site

I'm not sure who you're quoting here but it's not me.

US political and COVID articles

These also get moderated quite a bit but it's a little different with ongoing hot topics - many more submissions, angles, etc. One person's take on Go, however interesting, is not an ongoing hot topic. Plus it's had a pretty good life on the site!

[b3morales]

It was meant as a summary of what you and dang seem to be saying, rather than a direct quotation; I probably shouldn't have used quote marks in this context. Apologies for the confusion.

[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.

[pvg]

What I mean is that you can figure out the logic of this kind of moderation without litigating the quality of the pieces submitted. As to the 'significant discussion' bit, it's basically the same article - the first article has had multiple big discussions on HN. The second article is a response to the most recent such discussion, from yesterday. It's also framed, in some ways, as a direct response to people who said mean things about the author on HN. This is a true and righteous use of blogging but makes for a poor HN post.

A really simple but slightly different way to think of it is, if you write a piece and it gets good traction on HN (where you've also participated in the discussion, in this specific case), you don't usually get to put a megacomment reply on the front page the next day as well. There are exceptions, of course but 'things someone likes and dislikes about a popular programming language' are generally not the exceptional type of thing.

[mumblemumble]

But at this point, we're no longer debating whether TFA is "a dupe fairly straightforwardly"; you've now moved the goalpost quite far from where we started.

Perhaps you didn't personally get much out of the article. I did. I didn't love the invective aspects of it very much, either, but there were still some interesting take-aways and new things to say. Apparently enough so that 593 people so far thought it worthwhile to click the "upvote" button, which is really quite a staggering number when you consider that it had been banished from the front page. When you've got that many people seeing value in it - that's really quite a lot more than most of the rest of what's been on HN today - even if you don't personally see why, maybe it's enough for you to simply not see why, and leave it at that.

And that is what I am getting at. I can see the logic of the moderation just fine, but I think that the logic in question is wrong and perhaps even edging toward paternalistic or mean-spirited. And my interactions with dang on it elsewhere in the thread strike me as being mostly just defensive. Which doesn't really jive all that well with the stated purpose of elevating the quality of conversation on HN. I'm more impressed with what the broader community has done: largely looking past the flamebait, eschewing "shallow dismissals", and instead choosing to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says."