Don't take this personally, but can people please stop mentioning "Betteridge's Law"?
Somebody mentions it every single time a headline ends in a question mark, and it's not witty, clever, or funny any more. It's just annoying at this point. That style of headline isn't going away, and at this point everybody knows about "Betteridge's Law".
For those of us without flag powers, mentioning the adage is the most we can do about titles like these on HN. Of course I could just stop reading the HN front page, but that seems a rather null solution.
I've got flag powers, but I've basically given up. People have decided to upvote things that aren't relevant to this site, and by the time I see them, it's too late.
And reading the 'new' feed is even more discouraging. I can't deal with the constant flood of garbage that obviously wasn't interesting or relevant, just to find a few tiny morsels.
Don't give up! Flag, and comment (briefly) about why. It's been my experience that lots of storied that I believed were long past flaggable (80-90 upvotes) have been killed sometime after I flagged them.
Even if your flag doesn't kill the story, the conversation about why you flagged it will be valuable --- at the very least, more valuable than the off-topic story.
Well, you've got me there. I flag frequently, like maybe 5-10 a day on average but sometimes 20+. Maybe there's another karma threshold or something I don't know about.
Somebody mentions it every single time a headline ends in a question mark, and it's not witty, clever, or funny any more. It's just annoying at this point. That style of headline isn't going away, and at this point everybody knows about "Betteridge's Law".