I turned off the flags on it yesterday, but that wasn't enough to make it go back onto the front page. Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.
Why did I not restore this particular thread to the front page? The short answer is repetition. There have been many other recent major discussions on this topic—not about this specific detail about a paper on category theory, of course, but that alone is not enough information to constitute a new topic that can support a substantive new conversation. In HN jargon this is called SNI (Significant New Information), and it was lacking here.
Here are two other recent posts that explain this in more depth:
That a paper on category theory got caught in the ongoing funding purge is absurd, of course, but it's not a different topic in the sense that there's a substantively new discussion to be had about it, relative to the other recent threads about the funding purge.
Internet discussion has the tendency, as the same divisive topic gets worked over and over, to become more repetitive, more snarky, more shallow. All that is what we're trying to avoid here. It also gets a lot more meta, meaning you get comments about other comments, other users, the site, the community, the process, the mods, etc., rather than about the actual topic. It is a sure sign of a deteriorating discussion when even the people who most want to have the discussion can't find anything new to say.
When the juice has all been squeezed out of the lemon, nothing but rind is left. Making up for a lack of new information with a surplus of indignation is the opposite of what we want on HN.
Threads like this are a variant of the old joke about a group of people who know all the jokes by heart so they can just mention them by number and everybody laughs—except in this case the response is not laughter but anger, the list is not of jokes but outrages, and what gets mentioned is not numbers but catchphrases and talking points.
That showed up in the current thread very clearly, so this is actually a good example for people who want to understand this aspect of how we moderate HN.
> Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.
I checked the first 10 or so pages of 30, until reaching the point where all posts were much older, and there were enough of a similar age with fewer points that it seemed unlikely that all of them had been up-weighted.
It spent half an hour on the front page and 90 minutes in the top 10 pages. You can call that 'hidden', but everything falls off the front page(s) after a while, so everything ends up 'hidden' that way.
The more important question is how much time on the front page(s) a story had, and whether it was too much time or too little. I think I've answered that in the GP comment and the other links there, but if not, let me know.
Why did I not restore this particular thread to the front page? The short answer is repetition. There have been many other recent major discussions on this topic—not about this specific detail about a paper on category theory, of course, but that alone is not enough information to constitute a new topic that can support a substantive new conversation. In HN jargon this is called SNI (Significant New Information), and it was lacking here.
Here are two other recent posts that explain this in more depth:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
That a paper on category theory got caught in the ongoing funding purge is absurd, of course, but it's not a different topic in the sense that there's a substantively new discussion to be had about it, relative to the other recent threads about the funding purge.
Internet discussion has the tendency, as the same divisive topic gets worked over and over, to become more repetitive, more snarky, more shallow. All that is what we're trying to avoid here. It also gets a lot more meta, meaning you get comments about other comments, other users, the site, the community, the process, the mods, etc., rather than about the actual topic. It is a sure sign of a deteriorating discussion when even the people who most want to have the discussion can't find anything new to say.
When the juice has all been squeezed out of the lemon, nothing but rind is left. Making up for a lack of new information with a surplus of indignation is the opposite of what we want on HN.
Threads like this are a variant of the old joke about a group of people who know all the jokes by heart so they can just mention them by number and everybody laughs—except in this case the response is not laughter but anger, the list is not of jokes but outrages, and what gets mentioned is not numbers but catchphrases and talking points.
That showed up in the current thread very clearly, so this is actually a good example for people who want to understand this aspect of how we moderate HN.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...