Every '… is down' posts.

They do seem a bit pointless, especially when the problem will be self-evident, and verifiable with one Google search. They get even more pointless when they get spammed, because nobody checks the feed before posting.<p>It's also fairly off-topic. It's categorically not news, nor is it startup promotion. I don't get the logic either. just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should. I could post what I had for lunch as a thread, but I won't, I understand context. I'm getting fairly angsty about it now, or at least sounding angsty. But it doesn't bother me a lot, I just move on to the next item. I still think it should be kept to a minimum though, after all if we don't keep some semblance of order then HN will just waste away with low quality items and people will move on. Although that might not be a bad thing if a better replacement pops up.

I think "x is down" posts are relativley meaningless anyway. For many (especially the larger) services with multiple components,spread over many servers and data centers, what does it really mean to be down? If I can't sign in is it down? If nobody on the west coast of Canada can get in, is it down? If you can read, but not post is it down - if the front end is up but the database is not, is it down?<p>It's pretty rare that 'gmail is down'... much more likely that x% of gmail users are having issues. Let's save the 'x is down' post for when it really is 'down'.

I see it as useful sometimes if I didn't hear about it from some other means. Maybe they also serve as a discussion point for people to have a bitch about the downtime?

These are services that a lot of HN users use. Also, the discussion and cause of the down time could lead to good advice for members.

Postmortems are interesting. The "is down" posts are not.