[krapp]

That's not how it works. If upvotes alone mattered, HN would quickly degenerate into Reddit. The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.

Death notices of famous artists are the definition of off-topic: "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." If normies care about it, good hackers by definition probably don't.

I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.

[PurpleRamen]

> If upvotes alone mattered

I did not say upvotes alone matter, but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms.

> The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.

If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.

> "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities,[..]If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

I guess the notable point here is "most" and "probably". The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes. Which is why there are also regularly political and sometime seven sports entries (once or twice a year).

Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.

[krapp]

>but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms

They shouldn't be, and they aren't. The mods make the final decision and they will work against the consensus when they disagree with it. This is a very aggressively curated community.

>If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.

Maybe the majority of frontpage entries should be removed. Maybe the "HN is turning into Reddit" people are finally correct. But that is literally what the guidelines say. On topic - "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Off topic - everything else, with the minor exception of "some new and interesting phenomenon" to gratify that intellectual curiosity.

I'm sorry but there is nothing new or interesting about the death of celebrities, and nothing about it to gratify intellectual curiosity. Their lives, maybe, but if someone wasn't worth discussing on Hacker News in life, they shouldn't be worth discussing post mortem.

>The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes.

The final decision, in that case, is entirely up to the moderators. Threads with plenty of upvotes get flagged and stay flagged all the time.

>Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.

Maybe. But if there are grey areas, this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't see why far more substantive stories so often get flagged for "politics" or being "non-technical" even when they involve a pile of dead bodies, or why we police humor and emotion like signs of cancer, but we get to wallow in the nostalgia of every dead celebrity that comes along.

[toomuchtodo]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614633

> Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity is on topic for HN! - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That doesn't mean it has to gratify your curiosity or mine - no single article can do that for everyone. But it's clear that that's what makes the article on topic.

> One other aspect: the best HN submissions are the ones that are most uncorrelated with anything else that's gotten attention recently - or, as I used to put it, can't be predicted from any existing sequence

There is a "hide" link for threads not of interest, I strongly encourage it's use to optimize your forum participation experience; if this forum is not to your liking, there are others potentially more suited to what you desire.

> I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.

Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.

[krapp]

>Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.

I'm well aware, but I still do it on principle.

[toomuchtodo]

With time and experience comes wisdom. I wish you wisdom.

[avazhi]

> Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity

And no matter your view on the subject, a pop singer dying is not a topic that is capable of gratifying intellectual curiosity. It's about as banal as things get.

[xnorswap]

I do think HN should have an obit: category and filter them out the main page.

It's one thing to have obits for people who wouldn't be covered by regular news, but "75 year old celebrity dies" is not any kind of new phenomenon.

It generates a decent amount of upvotes and discussion based on name recognition and nostalgia, but every thread is essentially the same, "Oh, that's sad, I liked their work, <personal anecdote of how they were touched by it>.".

[toomuchtodo]

Meta: More often than I should have, I have emailed HN and asked "Why can you not extend/build/etc" this? And, as expected, we'd get into a great email discussion about why that would provide a meaningful improvement over the existing experience. This is a forum of builders, makers, and hackers, to their unspoken point. The primitives provided are "good enough," Hacker News is feature complete. To build this on top of HN in a browser extension or mobile app is trivial, and so, I'd say "If you want this, build it and share with us."

Ask HN: Any good replacements for "Refined Hacker News?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845676 is an opportunity, for example. Show HN awaits for whatever you build.

[krapp]

Luckily HN provides an API, half baked and awkward as it is.

[budsniffer952]

Nobody forced you to click on the article or jump into the comment section, did they?

[mcmcmc]

It took the place of another more relevant story that could’ve been on the front page