Comment by tptacek
8 months ago
It's for discussing on-topic topics of interest to the community, where on-topic specifically excludes "most stories about politics", which is a very easy to bar to clear when the stories you're flagging are literally duplicative of stories with hundreds or thousands of comments on them already.
Because they are long-running discussions, it’s not repetitive. When we allow Rust or JS threads to keep popping up, it’s because we evolve with the topic over time and continuously discuss it.
What the HN shadow mod team is doing is killing the possibility of a long-running, evolving discourse on important topics.
Rust and JS threads are on topic for the site, most current events stuff is not.
is killing the possibility of a long-running, evolving discourse on important topics.
These topics have been the most discussed topics on HN the last couple of months by a massive margin. The quality of 'discourse' has been abysmal so we know empirically the 'evolution' theory/hope is misplaced.
> These topics have been the most discussed topics on HN the last couple of months by a massive margin.
Have any of these topics managed to not be censored via flagging? From my perspective, I have very much wanted to talk about these things on HN and despite checking multiple times a day I have never been able to engage in an ongoing discussion (by which I mean the post wasn't removed from the front page due to flagging, effectively limiting the visibility it would otherwise get from organic upvotes).
You're entitled to dislike these topics and to flag them. And I'm entitled to think you're actively making HN worse with your gatekeeping. The problem with flagging is it gives more weight to a smaller group. I don't know the weighing exactly, but I'd guess flagging is 10-100x more effective than regular voting. So in theory just 1-10% of people have the ability to censor topics they don't like. Kinda seems like the antithesis of what's "interesting" to me. And yes, I absolutely 100% would prefer contentious "go fuck yourself" arguments on politics than not being allowed to discuss it in good faith at all.
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[flagged]
Dude there was a post about George Foreman's obituary the other day...
Like c'mon.
I'm pretty sure that your pretentiousness just invited a shitstorm of people who are going to flag your posts from now on.
Yeah everyone gets self righteous about being on topic when it's something they don't like, meanwhile hacker news is filled with cheap self promotion and pop culture news that people use as a writing prompt to have a competition for who can claim it impacted them the most.
Feels like the flaggers aren't the ones being self-righteous here. We're just flagging and getting on with our day. One of them took the time to explain what they were doing for you, and, well, (looks around).
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