A big driver of cassettes then was the write ability, unlike 8 tracks. You could borrow your friend's new vinyl album, pop in a new cassette tape on your hi-fi, and record a copy of the album to the tape. Of course the Walkman then made listening to your new album fully portable.

No one used 8-track for the quality. It was portable, and it would play continuously (it looped), great for sitting with your honey in a secluded area. And the physical quality of 8-tracks weren’t great. Based on the number of 8-track cartridges I saw on the side of the road while out running, the tape would apparently come loose from the cartridge and render it unusable.

By 1980, 8-tracks were relics being displaced by cassette.

They did. However vinyl was considered better than 8 track. Cassette was a lot more portable than 8 track, and so where portability mattered it won. Elsewhere vinyl was considered better than 8 track and so it won (a few years latter CDs came and won).

Those who really cared about sound quality had reel to reel tape, but that was very rare. Almost no albums were ever released on reel to reel. You typically bought the vinyl and copied it to your own reels thus ensuring there were no scratches.

>but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms

They shouldn't be, and they aren't. The mods make the final decision and they will work against the consensus when they disagree with it. This is a very aggressively curated community.

>If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.

Maybe the majority of frontpage entries should be removed. Maybe the "HN is turning into Reddit" people are finally correct. But that is literally what the guidelines say. On topic - "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Off topic - everything else, with the minor exception of "some new and interesting phenomenon" to gratify that intellectual curiosity.

I'm sorry but there is nothing new or interesting about the death of celebrities, and nothing about it to gratify intellectual curiosity. Their lives, maybe, but if someone wasn't worth discussing on Hacker News in life, they shouldn't be worth discussing post mortem.

>The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes.

The final decision, in that case, is entirely up to the moderators. Threads with plenty of upvotes get flagged and stay flagged all the time.

>Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.

Maybe. But if there are grey areas, this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't see why far more substantive stories so often get flagged for "politics" or being "non-technical" even when they involve a pile of dead bodies, or why we police humor and emotion like signs of cancer, but we get to wallow in the nostalgia of every dead celebrity that comes along.

Nobody forced you to click on the article or jump into the comment section, did they?

Meta: More often than I should have, I have emailed HN and asked "Why can you not extend/build/etc" this? And, as expected, we'd get into a great email discussion about why that would provide a meaningful improvement over the existing experience. This is a forum of builders, makers, and hackers, to their unspoken point. The primitives provided are "good enough," Hacker News is feature complete. To build this on top of HN in a browser extension or mobile app is trivial, and so, I'd say "If you want this, build it and share with us."

Ask HN: Any good replacements for "Refined Hacker News?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845676 is an opportunity, for example. Show HN awaits for whatever you build.

> Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity

And no matter your view on the subject, a pop singer dying is not a topic that is capable of gratifying intellectual curiosity. It's about as banal as things get.

>Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.

I'm well aware, but I still do it on principle.

You seem to be new here, welcome to Hacker News.

Everyone is in charge of what you should find interesting and everyone will make it your problem.