HackerNews is not a general news or general link aggregator. It is niche:
> 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: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
consumer451 · 6h ago
I heard that PG was talking about possibly allowing us to vouch [flagged] posts, prior to them being [dead]. We really need this now. The world has changed since the original thinking on that feature.
These days, it appears that a certain group of people, who are not reflected in the body of comments just click flag en-masse when it's not going their way.
anigbrowl · 5h ago
We already have this. I don't remember what the karma threshold for it is though, HN isn't very transparent about that to discourage gaming the karma score. I have vouched for many posts, going back at least 2-3 years.
consumer451 · 4h ago
I had a recent comment exchange about this, and I learned the facts:
I have the karma points required for all that, however, I only see a vouch button when the post has gone from [flagged] to [dead]. So, I can only vouch for a dead post.
There is no way for users to "fight back" against a flagged post. I assume that it was the "fight" part that made them make that decision back in the day, which I understand.
But, things have really changed in social media/forums since then, and this a social media/forum website.
> 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: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
These days, it appears that a certain group of people, who are not reflected in the body of comments just click flag en-masse when it's not going their way.
I have the karma points required for all that, however, I only see a vouch button when the post has gone from [flagged] to [dead]. So, I can only vouch for a dead post.
There is no way for users to "fight back" against a flagged post. I assume that it was the "fight" part that made them make that decision back in the day, which I understand.
But, things have really changed in social media/forums since then, and this a social media/forum website.