Ask HN: Why Musk’s Twitter news is not on front page?

13 points by ginger2016 3 years ago | 19 comments

I came to read the commentary about Musk’s offering to complete the acquisition of Twitter, instead we have Donald Knuth on the front page. I love computer science, but I am yearning to read your thoughts on Musk’s change of mind.

slater 3 years ago |

Musk exclamation #9819891821981, after the previous 9,819,891,821,980 exclamations were just his usual self-serving, self-aggrandizing hype/troll comments, do not a good front page post make.

ginger2016 3 years ago | |

I agree Musk is self-serving. However, this time the acquisition will go through, Techmeme is leading with Musk. I believe it is an important news story, and folks here will have a lot of things to say about it.

allears 3 years ago | | |

It's Musk fatigue. We're all sick and tired of his constant waffling and gameplaying. Just because he now says he'll buy Twitter doesn't actually mean anything, he could easily reverse himself again. Frankly, he's more than a little tiresome.

gregjor 3 years ago | | |

Important how exactly? Maybe to Twitter shareholders or Musk fanboys. But I don't see how the Twitter buyout qualifies as highly-important technical news. Whatever happens I doubt it will change the hacker landscape.

topspin 3 years ago |

The story is being redundantly posted every few minutes for the past two hours.

detaro 3 years ago | |

It's always interesting with that. IF everyone who submitted a dupe instead went and upvoted the original, it almost always would end up on the front page. B

jfoster 3 years ago |

I was also wondering this. I don't care too much about one instance, but it makes me wonder what other major tech news HN is failing to select for. It's relevant & a very significant story, so I think of it as a failure of HN's system/community if it doesn't rank appropriately.

r721 3 years ago | |

I think this is one of those cases when different people flag different threads, and as a result there is no winning front page thread (some small amount of flags has a negative effect on ranking).

jfoster 3 years ago | | |

You're probably correct about that, but it still makes me wonder what other stories might not be making it due to similar circumstances.

gregjor 3 years ago | |

How is it relevant as a technical story? It's more about money and ego. Mergers and acquisitions in the tech industry matter to some degree to those of us working in the field, but just because it involves Elon Musk doesn't make it headline news. I can't think of anything tech-related that will change if Musk buys Twitter, or doesn't, nor do I care how much he pays for it, or how he gets the money, or what changes he says he'll make. I don't use Twitter and I don't think of it as a tech platform.

jfoster 3 years ago | | |

Subtract Elon Musk from the story. Would Twitter becoming a private company any other way be a front-page worthy story?

At $54.2 billion, it's even newsworthy just through the sheer size of the transaction. I'm not sure, but might it be the highest valued company to ever go from public to private?

r721 3 years ago |

Here is the biggest thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082535

As for why it's on second page right now - I think it was submitted after this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33082482 , and some people flagged it as duplicate (and this has silent effect on ranking).

takoid 3 years ago |

From the HN Guidelines [1]:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, 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.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

detaro 3 years ago |

.... a submission doesn't have to be on the front page for you to be able to read the comments on it.

badinsie 3 years ago |

i think he just wants to be done with it. he's just gonna take the hit and remove the 80% of accounts that are owned by bot farms / CIA propagandists etc etc and they just dont want to draw anymore attention to it

incomingpain 3 years ago |

Nobody cares?

bombcar 3 years ago |

Nobody submitted it, or the submissions didn't get enough votes.

I think people are burned out on Musk and Twitter, and waiting for him to announce that he's buying Cloudflare.