Comment by muddi900
9 days ago
It is clear that people flagging these posts have a ulterior agenda. While the other posts have plausible deniability cover for being "political", this is as relevant to hacker news as anything.
9 days ago
It is clear that people flagging these posts have a ulterior agenda. While the other posts have plausible deniability cover for being "political", this is as relevant to hacker news as anything.
I believe that Dang does make an attempt to unflag some of these kinds of topics, but there's also the issue that the discussions can become highly politicised too which is not the stated purpose of HN.
Yup I have emailed dang a few times regarding wrongly flagged submissions and he has always unflagged them.
Indeed, higher category theory is a veritable minefield of political rabbit holes.
And who could possibly trust HN denizens, those notoriously toxic and tech-ignorant people, to sensibly discuss such things as a tech oligarch delivering Nazi salutes at an inauguration [0, 1]. Or the same man (wealthiest known on Earth) being given physical access to the US treasury [2]. Or warnings from five former treasury secretaries in the NYT about the danger this poses to Democracy [3], the EFF bringing lawsuits over this (unflagged after many hours)[4], or the ability to even discuss all the false flags which we have been riddled with for the last month [5, 6].
This last month has been a real eye opener. Even Paul Graham and Garry Tan have been cheerleading for DOGE, and it's fucking disturbing that we're not allowed to discuss it on any active thread.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781604
> it's fucking disturbing that we're not allowed to discuss it on any active thread
This is the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. You're talking about the most-discussed topic on HN, by far, of the past several weeks.
If you, or anyone, want to know what's happening with these threads and flags, how we moderate this, and what the principles are, there are a bunch of links here which should answer all your questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050893. If you familiarize yourself with that material and still have a question that I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Btw, you can't evaluate this with a random sample of links on a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic). You need to look at the threads that have had significant frontpage time and discussion. Obviously there have been many more submissions than that—that is the case with any MOT. If most of these didn't get flagged and/or downweighted, then HN's frontpage would consist of little else.
I realize that some users feel so passionately right now that they would welcome that, but I don't believe that the bulk of the community wants this (far from it), and in any case we couldn't let HN be completely taken over by any MOT without ruining it for its intended purpose.
9 replies →
Tip, use https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Flagged posts show up there (like this one), so tech bros trying to censor all M*sk and D0GE stuff will not be able to completely silence it.
This forum is mostly tech bros.
The vast majority does not think this is off-topic. Even the ones that support Papa Elon and Daddy Trump.
There is a double standard here. Political posts against conservatives have been accepted here for years with little pushback. Anything against liberal causes is immediately flagged. It's time to accept that political posts are political even if it happens to be favorable to your preferred political agenda.
Musk is an Idiot at best and Russian asset at worst. But if I see highly upvoted comment complaining or conspiracy theorizing about flagging, after Dang has been tirelessly and countless times explaining how things work, I flag the thread out of principle.
That's great that you are calling "Describing things as they happened" as conspiracy theories.
Also you like to make it harder for the person you are calling tireless