Comment by ANewFormation
6 days ago
I imagine if you polled all HN users vastly more would sympathise with this essay than not. But the YC flag (and voting) system still seems relatively straightforward, and consequently enables small groups of activists to have quite a significant capability to censor (or promote) topics/comments.
This is one reason I think community notes style algorithms is where we'll probably see pretty much all community voting/moderation head over time. It's just objectively better since it basically fixes this 'glitch' in straightforward systems.
HN also has vouching, so a small minority of flaggers shouldn't be able to censor a topic that a large number of HNers want to read about.
I think this got flagged initially because PG doesn't have anything to say about 'wokeness' that we have not heard many times before. He doesn't like it (big surprise) for exactly the reasons that you'd expect someone like him not to like it.
Vouching relies on visibilty while flagging dramatically reduces visibility.
And after the article was unflagged, it became one of the most upvoted topics.