> You both asked for and complained about being given a reason why the article is a dupe. Which is it?
Dang posted the links to the previous stories, didn't mark the post as a dupe or say anything about it being a dupe. Because it's not. Then two hours later it silently got deleted.
It is marked as dupe, and not deleted, we can still see it. Why does it matter if there was a time delay between the two things you saw? What does that have to do with anything?
Are we? So I’m really curious, what are you expecting, and why? Do you think moderators should not be able to influence the rankings of posts? You believe all posts, regardless of content, should be allowed? Even if they’re duplicate, even if they’re offensive and only start flame-wars, even if they’re lying or contain graphic or illegal content?
To me, that doesn’t seem like an entirely reasonable thing to expect given that 1) the site guidelines explicitly say that posts will be influenced, and it gives explicit reasons why, 2) there are no large high quality forums anywhere that have high quality discussion without moderators deleting low-quality posts and comments, and 3) site mods on a private forum can always do whatever they want, it’s their site.
It’s often worth taking a minute to re-read the site guidelines and FAQ. I do it every few months.
Like I said above, I want and expect some posts to be influenced by moderators, it’s one of the reasons I visit HN. I’m glad that duplicates are pushed down, just like I’m glad that off-topic comments and excessive hyperbole get pushed down by moderators.
Dan is a human being, doing the never-ending job of keeping this tree pruned enough to allow high quality discussion, while in reality still allowing a whole lot of silly argument and unexceptional articles and blog posts. He’s only pruning stuff that really truly goes over the line, a line defined by site rules and applied more or less consistently. @counttheforks has said a bunch of mean stuff, has clearly made wrong assumptions about Dan (the claim about being banned from commenting immediately above being one of those), and they called Dan a liar in another thread. Even when mods see people being crappy all day every day, I’m sure that still doesn’t feel great. To Dan’s credit, he didn’t remove any of those comments.
Dang posted the links to the previous stories, didn't mark the post as a dupe or say anything about it being a dupe. Because it's not. Then two hours later it silently got deleted.