<story><title>Ask HN: Why are all the submissions about Bill/Melinda Gates being killed?</title><text>It looks like about half of the submissions on &amp;#x2F;newest are about Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing. All of the submissions are flagged&amp;#x2F;dead. Why is this? I&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;By contrast, there are many non-flagged&amp;#x2F;dead articles about Jeff Bezos&amp;#x27; divorce.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dang</author><text>For the obvious reason: the community is divided on whether it&amp;#x27;s on topic, so some users keep submitting the stories and other users keep flagging them.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know that there&amp;#x27;s much here that&amp;#x27;s intellectually interesting. This is probably one of those moments where HN can distinguish itself by &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; paying attention to a story.&lt;p&gt;Regarding priors, the argument &amp;quot;$X1 got attention so why shouldn&amp;#x27;t $X2&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t work on HN, because there&amp;#x27;s a power-law dropoff in interestingness along any predictable sequence. So if Jeff and MacKenzie got a lot of attention, that&amp;#x27;s actually a reason why Bill and Melinda wouldn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not really sure that was the case to begin with though—these threads look pretty uninteresting: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=18868713&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=18868713&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=18865291&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=18865291&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why are all the submissions about Bill/Melinda Gates being killed?</title><text>It looks like about half of the submissions on &amp;#x2F;newest are about Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing. All of the submissions are flagged&amp;#x2F;dead. Why is this? I&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;By contrast, there are many non-flagged&amp;#x2F;dead articles about Jeff Bezos&amp;#x27; divorce.</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>BitwiseFool</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m starting to wonder what&amp;#x27;s actually going on here. So many posts about the same subject from almost every mainstream source imaginable. But they&amp;#x27;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?</text></comment>