Ask HN: How did the Erlang articles disappear on HN yesterday?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=778319

by socratees • 17 years ago

6 11 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Were we censored or did we flag the articles by ourselves, or did the admin remove all the Erlang entries from appearing on the front page? How did we get rid of the Erlang articles? I'm just curious about it.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

I guess enough people flagged it to take it away.

There is a lower limit where stuff will get auto killed if enough people flagged it.

What bothers me most about these silly flooding tactics is that you've potentially burned a lot of good content about Erlang from ever appearing on HN.

Erlang is a neat concept, and I think that those that flooded the 'new' page with Erlang stuff have done more damage than good.

What you could have simply done is to flag the articles you thought had no place on HN instead of trying to monopolize the discussion by flooding.

daleharvey2• 17 years ago

I think its pretty certain the articles were manually removed, they all went at the same time along with every new submission almost immediately.

I dont disagree with having them deaded though, although my site was one of the ones that someone submitted, and I actually think it was submitted because it was useful.

socratees• 17 years ago

That's what I noticed. At almost the same time, all erlang links were gone. Did the admins remove it?

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

Imagine a series of counters as attributes to the articles submitted. If enough people decide 'enough Erlang, let's flag that stuff down' then you can imagine a flurry of activity by a limited number of users (say 10 or 15 or so) that would remove all the articles within a minute or so, which is when the last person to be able to do so clicks 'flag' for the relevant articles.

Don't attribute to 'divine' intervention what you could easily achieve with the tools at hand.

Ask HN: How did the Erlang articles disappear on HN yesterday?

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