Why are all the submissions about Bill/Melinda Gates being killed?
It looks like about half of the submissions on /newest are about Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing. All of the submissions are flagged/dead. Why is this? I'm not looking to discuss the substance of the articles in this post — just trying to understand how the divorce of one of the biggest names in tech is not allowed on HN.
By contrast, there are many non-flagged/dead articles about Jeff Bezos' divorce.
For the obvious reason: the community is divided on whether it's on topic, so some users keep submitting the stories and other users keep flagging them.
I don't know that there's much here that's intellectually interesting. This is probably one of those moments where HN can distinguish itself by not paying attention to a story.
Regarding priors, the argument "$X1 got attention so why shouldn't $X2" doesn't work on HN, because there's a power-law dropoff in interestingness along any predictable sequence. So if Jeff and MacKenzie got a lot of attention, that's actually a reason why Bill and Melinda wouldn't.
I'm not really sure that was the case to begin with though—these threads look pretty uninteresting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18868713, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18865291
I'm starting to wonder what's actually going on here. So many posts about the same subject from almost every mainstream source imaginable. But they're all getting flagged and killed. I understand why all of those submissions are getting this treatment, but why are so many accounts still trying to post this news? Do they not see the new queue? Are they bots?
People who are flagging it probably consider the articles insufficiently deep for HN. Most of the significant details won't be known for a while. Not to say the initial articles on the Bezos' divorce were deep.
It is probably considered gossip to discuss such matters, though I often see "person X has quit Y" to which I would say is of similar newsworthiness.
Bill Gates is the most influential computer man alive. One wonders if he’ll go back to programming now he is single.
I was very confused reading this title - I thought Bill and Melinda Gates had been killed, or there was some spam campaign about them being killed..
This is very relevant. Many of us work in tech, are married, and know of this couple., just for starters.
It's so very sad every time there is controversial topics, out come the bot armies and flag/down vote them into oblivion. How can HN have such strong. encroaching censorship?
There doesn't even seem to be many people disagreeing that this is very much on topic.
Bill Gates famously listed pros and cons of getting married on a white board so the process of getting divorced is probably just as intellectual. They are still going to work together on their foundation work so they appear to be avoiding a messy emotional split. It may just be a tax strategy who knows.
Maybe because Bill started microsoft almost 20 years before they got married. So Melinda may have signed a prenup, and might not get as large a split as mckenzie even if she didn’t.
I don’t see a reason for the flagging. It is ‘news’.
Simple: it's just celebrity gossip and last I checked this wasn't People magazine.
Just because it's about Gates doesn't mean it's interesting or relevant for this site.
Because its celebrity news and people really shouldn't care at all
Have to admit my own knee-jerk reaction was to flag the article.
BUT when I got to the bottom of it (possibly the reason for divorce is to evade the new Biden's tax) - it is actually quite interesting.
Anything negative about gates gets automatically downvoted here. Some PR botnet maybe?