[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."

[pvg]

you've now moved the goalpost quite far from where we started

I don't follow. You weren't familiar with the rules of HN dupery and I've tried to explain them. That's not moving the goalposts. Followups are almost always dupes. Metaish follow-ups the very next day dupely so.

[mumblemumble]

A rule and its implementation are two separate matters.

With all due credit to rmasters, "I suspect it would not have been flagged if the topic were different."

[pvg]

Well, yeah, that's your suspicion but it is not an argument, it's just a suspicion that something nefarious is going on. I don't think you've really responded to any of the explanations of why HN works this way. That doesn't mean the way HN works is right but you have to bring something more to it than aspersions if you want to argue for change.

[mumblemumble]

"nefarious"? "nothing more to it than aspersions"?

Please don't strawman me like that. If you're going to make "the rules of HN dupery" the place where you want to make your stand, then this seems like a peculiar response. These rules for HN dupery are not actually published anywhere outside of HN mod team comments when debates like this come up. By contrast, though, the published commenting guidelines clearly state "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Which, I realize that this whole tangent is then in contrast with the very next guideline in the list, which exhorts us to "Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." But, since HN lacks the meta-discussion channels that other comparable community sites have, these sorts of frustrations can't really do aything but boil over into public every so often, so I'm self-consciously allowing myself the conceit. In my defense, I've also been following and engaging in what I thought was some of the more interesting HN discussion I've seen in a minute. Including having my opinion on a programming language and its community go through some positive changes. So I do somewhat feel, then, that HN moderation deciding to flag the article and then bury it on the 2nd page because they think it's just a flamewar is tacitly an unfair accusation against which I must defend myself. And, frankly, the alternative defense that it's because it isn't interesting comes across as dismissive and condescending.