If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link.

I had been considering story flagging to be used for abuses like blatant spam or flaming, but not merely to express one's personal judgement of whether something is on-topic ("anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"). Obviously, different people's intellectual curiosities are satisfied by different things, and I had thought that story upvoting was the means to express that judgement.

So if you flag, but they disagree....

If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.

Of course, HN doesn't have downvoting for stories (unless that's a feature I have yet to unlock), while reddit has downvoting as well as reporting (with options for spam, vote manipulation, personal information, sexualizing minors, breaking reddit, and other). I had been operating under the assumption that HN flagging was analogous to reddit reporting, but it would appear that HN flagging is intended to be more analogous to reddit downvoting.

http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette

> ... volatile mixture of rubbernecking and outrage ... That doesn't even make sense. Gender issues and schadenfreude, I at least understand what you mean. There might be a rush to judgement here.

My worry here is that subverting established process is all well and good... until someone gets raped. So I'll be watching to see if Uber's background check process failed. If so why?

I don't see why, do you think taxi drivers don't rape their customers? Just last month a taxi driver raped, robbed and threw two people over a cliff[1].

This story shows that Uber hires dangerous people, but not that they're any worse than taxis.

I dislike Uber businesses practices, and I don't use the service, but this particular story is just tabloid content.

[1] http://m.ibnlive.com/news/taxi-driver-rapes-delhibased-woman...

People like you should be banned from banning HN stories.

So to that extent I'd say Uber has a lot of work to do in its signup process. But beyond that, it still feels like an incident that doesn't justify a post on HN. I wonder what the process is like for regular taxi companies in India and if it's much different. Did you guys remember the Polish woman who was raped earlier this year in a non-uber Indian taxi?

------ original post below -------

As horrible as this is, it's a non-story for me. That's not to say the rape isn't horrible. But we need relevance, we can't just report any horrible fact. About 17k children die each day, it doesn't make sense to fill HN with that daily unless there is some direct relevance. If we didn't have a 'relevance filter', I nor anyone else would visit this particular community anymore.

Now what's the relevance here? Uber? And...?

Imagine an employee from Microsoft raped someone (pretty much 100% guaranteed one of them did in the past decades). Should that be a story we talk about on HN, just because it's bad and because it's a tech company and no other reason? Of course not. So why should it be a story that a non-employee freelance driver rapes someone in a country of over 1 billion people?

Look if this story had a sociological context about gender relations in India that was interesting for HN, sure. I'd love to read about that. My girlfriend was just in India this summer for social work and we chat about this every now and then. If it was a story about gender-violent policies at Uber, sure, that'd be interesting. If this was a story about how Uber attracts disproportionately higher rates of criminal drivers, sure. But there's none of that.

So I don't see the relevance, and without any kind of trend, evidence of bad policies or whatever, it's just a single incident. Shit happens, and without context this is a story that smears a company. I'm no fan of Uber, but there's a lot better things to focus on IF this was an incident.

Anyway I'd be happy to hear otherwise, I could totally be missing something.

This is somewhat iffy logic. If Microsoft's purported USP was "our OS is way safer than the alternatives" (this is, partly, how Uber positions itself in India[1], which is smart, given the horrible "rape in moving vehicles/by taxi drivers etc" history in India) and then it turned out that Windows was much easier for cybercriminals to hack into and steal your credit cards (than say OSX, which made no such claim) that would be worth discussing on a site about OS es.

Or maybe not. Hence the question.

[1] Uber Delhi used to have this in their marketing copy (emphasis mine) "Uber is New Delhi's best way to request a safe, reliable, affordable ride"

If this had happened in the USA (" a country of 300 million people") everybody would rightly be looking into how Uber operates and what to fix. But hey some third world country half a world away and it is just people being unreasonable.

And this "numbers" logic is fallacious. Why is the police shooting of an African American causing such ripples in a "country of 300 million people" with millions of police/citizen encounters. Surely the proportion ending in unarmed citizens being shot for no good reason are really really low? Then why all the hoopla? Why are people so outraged?

Yeesh. Some people.

Blah, stop putting words in my mouth. I'm from such a 'third world country', and my gf just returned from her work in India. Let's also ignore the multiple times someone was charged with rape over there in the US (I don't live there, you know). I'm certainly not saying nobody cares because it's India. I'm saying it appears like a single case related to uber in a country of 1 billion (where rape happens every hour) after millions of rides.

> Then why all the hoopla? Why are people so outraged?

Because it's SYSTEMIC, that's my point. It literally, not kidding, literally happens every single day and enough is enough, and it is a consequence partially of some identifiable issues in the police system that they're responsible to fix (and haven't been doing for decades). That's why such a story is interesting. Why is it not interesting if a white person is shot by the police? Because arguably it's not systemic, it's not based on a certain culture, on certain policies. For example if you go to a police station to train them on cultural sensitivity often the first question is 'what do you think if you see am 18yo black kid in a nice car?'. They'll virtually all say 'drug dealer'. And the white kid? They'll virtually all say 'rich daddy'. And they're brutally honest in this. That's literally racial discrimination, as a citizen is seen and treated differently SOLELY based on the color of their skin and such racial profiling it's pervasive in American (police) culture. It's a small example of how systemic the problem is.

But here I DON'T see that as of yet. It looks like a genuine incident that Uber couldn't have done much against. If they screened the driver, he probably wouldn't have been filtered out unless he was going around telling everyone of his rapist tendencies. There's no gender-violent culture or policies we can specifically identify at Uber that should be rooted out but isn't, contrary to howwe can EASILY identify race-biased culture and policies in the American police system that should be rooted out but isn't.

I'm all for extra screening of taxi drivers by the way and think Uber should be doing this and doing it better. No argument from me there. And while I've never used Uber, unlikely I ever will, didn't flag this story, don't like uber, I don't think it's fair to bring this story as if Uber took some huge missteps and caused this rape. It appears to me like an incident.

Obviously a single incident in itself doesn't mean anything but if there is significant percentage of incidents it would indicate that the vetting needs to be changed.

It reminds me of the airbnb story about an apartment getting trashed that got a lot of attention here a couple of years back. It ended up spurring airbnb to launch a range of changes to make the service safer for users. If we had buried that then the changes may never have happened.

I think you realized partway into this how vile a corner you were painting yourself into with your "it only affected a single person" line of reasoning. But to follow your logic, which assumes that rape and the leaking of personal info are of the same magnitude of error, Uber's error would only be worth non-censorship if "tens of millions" of women were raped.

Whether or not this was truly due to a flaw in Uber's screening process or an unavoidable crime is certainly a valid question. All the more reason not to censor it.

Now you are backtracking by saying "This thread hasn't been removed, has it?", welcoming discussion, and you "don't feel strongly this should have been flagged".

Glad you changed your position. It's the right one.

I'm STILL saying it doesn't feel like this incident justifies a HN post. Why? Because it's an incident. And you ignore my points on that and just seem to want to win the point that this 'shouldn't have been flagged', while I've never flagged a thread in my life. You're arguing against someone else here, not me.

Feel free to go back and read my post and see if you disagree and think there's something systemic going on. (it's an interesting question. Look for example at the police brutality topic in the US, it's generally not interesting to most to hear about a white person getting shot, and a story like that without any interesting angle doesn't have a place on HN, because it tends to be an incident rather than when it happens against minorities, e.g. black minorities, as that is usually systemic, which is interesting and is justified imo. That's kind of how I look at this story, and I still feel it's an incident.)

Doesn't mean I'll flag it though, again please don't bring that up again. Tell that to someone who actually flagged this thing.

EDIT: gender issues and 'controversial company' discussions on HN happen all the time. Maybe they shouldn't, and maybe that is a good focus to have. As long as such a policy is consistently enforced.