Ask HN: Does Hacker News pull posts about Greenland from the front page?

[subjektivation]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46669025

This post was on the front-page for about 1-2 hours before disappearing from it. It had gained about 300 points in that time which is way more than most posts on hacker news that stay on the front-page for 1-2 days. Even if you go to page 2 or 3, 4 or 5, this post cannot be found!

This seems strange. Does YCombinator have any interest in this?

[1659447091]

It can be found on the 'active' page

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

The link to that page plus others can be found in the 'Lists' link in the footer

https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

[red-iron-pine]

/active is really the only way to do HN.

there are occasionally gems in /new but there is a lot of signal-to-noise issues

[comfysocks]

It’s easy enough to avoid clicking on articles containing “Greenland”, “ICE”, etc. if you don’t want to talk about those things. Is it also necessary to make sure that none of your fellow nerds talk about those things either?

I consider tech workers to be “my tribe” and am curious to know what others think about what’s happening in the world around us.

[johncoltrane]

I like HN when it is leans toward "a place for everyone to talk about tech". Not so much when it derails into "a place for technologists to talk about anything".

[seper8]

You think tech is not going to be affected by this warmongering?

I think it's one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest, for US tech startups wanting to sell to customers outside of the US.

I don't consider myself very politically active, neither are my friends. But we are all looking to detach from the US and its companies. If you are a fledgling startup, in the coming weeks you might just lose out on many of your potential customers.

[subjektivation]

Exactly! Digital sovereignity is something we talk about a lot in Europe now since Trump is back and it's already causing german states to go full OpenSource and Microsoft-free. Chaos Computer Club called out the national "Digital Independence Day" this year, it's each month's first sunday (https://di.day).

It might not look like much but Trump is also making people realize over here how bad big-tech is for european values and how it's trying to undermine them for profit. This Greenland-thing is a step too much for Europe and seeing how close the techbros are to Trump, that is one thing where we can hurt them, take back our Data.

[johncoltrane]

It is certainly possible that the US tech sector will be affected by the latest US president's brain farts… but I couldn't care less. Not my country. Not my scene.

I'm here for ASCII characters rendering pipelines, scientific breakthroughs, experimental filesystems, random wikipedia links, monospaced fonts, etc., not for silly politics.

[geremiiah]

I like HN, when the contributors here are intellectually honest and of good character. I really don't like tech communities filled with amoral nerds.

[subjektivation]

Paul Graham ruled Hacker News is for "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" tho

[armchairhacker]

How does this gratify your intellectual curiosity?

[subjektivation]

I live in Europe and it's interesting to see intellectuals from the US and around the word that are primarily in the tech sector and known to have a broad knowledge of the world debate this topic. Since this could turn out to be the most destructive action of the century so far, considering world economy and maybe also the influence of big tech in europe, i think that is quite valid.

And moderators of big tech companies removing a political post from a front-page of an influential forum while it shows high interest, gratifies my intellectual curiosity even more!

[armchairhacker]

But what to debate? Almost everyone agrees this is stupid, but nobody can do anything.

It's a bit interesting to read the best steelmans, then read how even they're flawed. Apparently the US not only already has a military base on Greenland, but is allowed to build more; and Greenland's resources cost more to extract than they can be sold. It appears there really is no benefit except to anger, scare, and annoy people. What other knowledge or insight did you find?

[ben_w]

Surprisingly, there do still appear to be people (or at least one person) here on Hacker News who think America would win and that the EU would simply accept being invaded and do nothing. Like the EU would not decide "fight or die, we choose fight", nor replace the US with China in trade relationships.

This insight is… the interaction felt like reading a history book, or a novel with an obvious villain.

Feels unreal, like watching 9/11 unfold on TV felt a quarter century ago. Except I get to talk directly to the Other instead of watching translations of their words being quoted on bulletins.

[7bit]

I agree. But when moderation is lenient and everything is allowed, you can't randomly decide to pull the plug on specific topics within a genre that's allowed.

[tardibear]

I don't know whether these stories are pulled by HN moderators or flagged by lots of users but there is more than one motive for pulling/flagging stories.

One motive might be to avoid unproductive discussions - many of the comment threads on the Greenland story (which I voted up) were angry and very polarised.

[BoredPositron]

It's the russia in the 90s timeline. "I don't care about politics." if it's not aligned with the politics I like.

[nephihaha]

More like the American timeline i.e. "that's the other party I don't like." There is this continual suspicion that if you criticise one lot you must support the other, as if there are only two shows in town.

[armchairhacker]

What's there to discuss about this? Who will it convince that the 1000 other things Trump has said and done hasn't?

This isn't even more outrageous than other things Trump has said. It would be if he actually invades, but he won't...

[SilverElfin]

Weird that the story you linked disappeared, and I definitely would expect that post to stay around as you mentioned. I have noticed a lot of aggressive flagging of political stories, which is frustrating given that the political landscape right now is extremely volatile and has big implications for everyone and everything. All the typical tech stuff is less interesting at this time.

As for YCombinator - not sure about them specifically but lots of tech billionaires are for invading Greenland or at least coercing them. Joe Lonsdale (Palantir co founder) recently said in an interview that he views it as frontier land (rather than someone else’s sovereign state). Probably the rare earth minerals would help investors involved in chips or AI.

[N_Lens]

Proof that you don't need wisdom to be a billionaire - the rich would benefit much more from stable societies and stable global order, rather than willingly rolling the world into an era of chaos.

[7bit]

Covid and Trump pretty much showed that this is not true. Chaos helps the rich more than stability (what we had before)

[nephihaha]

Lockdown rather than Covid. Covid was supposedly around for six months (or more) before all that began.

[thinkingemote]

Points vs comments. If there's lots of points on a story but only a few comments, it won't stick around. Or maybe its the other way around? (see below)

There is an automated flame detection mechanism. Don't know how it works. probably some kind of count of downvoting of comments?

Users manually flag.

Most political stories are flame bait; the discussions are low quality.

Most politics is off topic, but if a story has been discussed and this one has for almost a year, posting more about the same story with little change won't add much to the conversation.

E.g. I commented about this story 10 (ten!) months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212206 and do not feel the need to share my thoughts each and every time the story comes up again, although I did 5 months ago. Maybe in 5 months time I will do so again but not every day!

Users do not want to see the same story permanently on show for discussion - they want novelty.

Users tend to not like: Emotions. Propaganda. Accusations of conspiracy. Less thoughtful and more thought terminating comments.

----

You can find better and more answers by the site moderator @dang on why things slip off the front page by using the search box at the bottom of the page.

[subjektivation]

Thank you! That cleared it up for me

[beardyw]

I get the impression that the front page algorithm likes upvotes but dislikes comments. Not sure if anyone knows?

[utopiah]

People there wondering too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670811

[throwawaysleep]

> Does YCombinator have any interest in this?

https://x.com/garrytan

[zqna]

Yes, the engineers should not be discussing the purpose of the tools they are making. That makes the process much more efficient