I think preventing those is impossible, because (a) human nature loves outrage, and (b) we don't have a truth machine. But it would be good to find ways to mitigate it. For example, it's useful to be able to put "[fixed]" or "[resolved]" in titles while the original thread is still active. "[refuted]" would be too provocative though.
Building software to let the community make the call might be a good idea. Currently the moderators have to do it and that's risky enough that we end up being pretty conservative.
People with industry knowledge in that thread, certainly like the writer of this new, much more verbose post, were very aware of how FUDy the original outrage article was
Sure, you can prevent it, just hire journalist to vet every story.
It's not cheap, and we're not paying for HN -- so yeah, we get what we pay for :)
And even when you hire journalist, they are then skewed towards allowing click-bait and false outrage articles, because that drives user engagement.
And it's hard to find a to finance journalism without revenue being linked to user engagement (whether ads or subscription).
It's kind of sad, because low credibility news stories is why many corporations are careful about how they communicate; indeed the advice the PR department can give you is often to not reply -- because replying keeps to story alive longer, even if it is all false nonsense outrage over nothing.
</rant>
I have no solutions, it's hard to change incentives for journalism in a capitalist system, and while "independent" state-sponsored media (NPR/BBC) may be complement, we probably don't want to rely state-sponsored media :)
It's not much, but we can take comfort in the fact that this is not a new problem: click-bait is as old as newspapers; I'd even dare to wager we can find cave paintings exaggerating the size of the game that was hunted.
Some people would get pretty upset even with that. Maybe if it were a community assessment it would be ok, but I don't think mods could get away with it.
$850 for a domain is quite outrageous. Directing that outrage to the right places is a challenge in discipline. Working on frameworks to help people dissect something logically when they discover something outrageous would probably be the most helpful.
There were a number of skeptical commenters that raised various issues at the time. I definitely came away from reading that comment thread skeptical that the issue had happened exactly as described. We eventually had https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CydeWeys come in a confirm that the domain had always been premium.
I'd say that HN did a pretty good job of pushing back on the outrage machine and correcting the misinformation. We even get a follow up article clarifying things.
What we can do better is to continue to downvote and constructively respond to comments that jump the gun and use the current topic to push outrage over broader unrelated issues. As we train and remind each other to read more carefully and critically, the quality of HN comments will match that effort.
Edit: If I had a personal hot take, it would be that twitter threads in general seem to prompt this type of outrage bandwagon behavior more than other mediums and perhaps should face ranking penalties for appearing on the front page. (But I'm biased here because I simply hate reading them.)
I posted one of the earliest comments saying forum.dev is obviously a premium domain. IIRC I was immediately downvoted to -1. To be clear I don’t care about losing some karma, I have enough to burn on 2000 -4’s. The point is if you try to pour cold water on an outage without hijacking a top thread, you’re likely going to sit at the bottom of the thread for a long time.
I wonder if the ratio of misplaced outrage threads to useful ones makes the idea itself something to be done away with entirely. There's seemingly little space between curiosity and full blown outrage, an no natural mechanism for the community to more deeply and openly investigate and report on these issues before taking an over sized and possibly wildly unjustified stance on it.
Prevent posts about any topic within a certain period of time (a week or so). The truth will hopefully have come out before that period and people can address that in the comments or by flagging the post.
A Firefox extension that replaces the word Google with Microsoft would get everyone to calmly explain Hanlon's razor to each other and say that whatever's wrong is acceptable because they were worse in the past.
