Comment by consumer451
8 months ago
It is hilarious what does, and does not, get flagged on this website in 2025.
The other day on /active, there was a story about a French politician being banned from running for office, due to being convicted of outright fraud for the second time. Absolutely nothing to do with technology or business, nothing to do with the USA. Pure politics in a foreign country. Not flagged.
There was a story directly below which involved the USA, technology and business, but had an uncomfortable narrative for some users. Flagged.
As someone who still likes this site a lot, this just makes me laugh at this point. I don't know how else to react.
There's always a ton of randomness with these things. People tend to underestimate how that affects nearly every aspect of HN. That is, they misinterpret a random outcome as being meaningful and then attribute a meaning to it.
If you assume that rhyme or reason is involved, then of course the results seem bizarrely inconsistent and the only models that fit will be Rube Goldberg or Ptolemaic ones. Simply understand that randomness plays the largest role, and the mystery goes away. (But I know that's less internet fun.)
In terms of all these political stories getting flagged: it's a simple consequence of there being a huge influx of intense political stories while HN's capacity remains "30 slots on the frontpage" (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Thanks Dan, I never mean to point fingers at moderation here. I always assume it's users. Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
Oops, I hear you! Well, maybe the explanation is helpful to others who are worrying about the moderation side.
But of course there's no rhyme or reason to "users" either, since that's really just a statistical cloud (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
(Also, if anyone is weary of my inveterate self-linking: sorry, I am too. It's just somehow the only semi-efficient way I've found to give enough background information on various points of HN.)
> Not sure if that's the correct assumption, but it's one I stick with.
Now that dang has confirmed it's incorrect, maybe stop sticking with it.
Follow-up: I should add that in 2025, deleting stories with a tinge of US politics is highly detrimental to the HN user base’s understanding of what is happening in the business world.
Case in-point: a US-based family member employed at a FAANG just told me that his Canadian coworkers now reset their phones prior to entering the USA, then restore from backup. This is somewhat similar to what happens when they go to China.
This is terrible for business. This kind of information should not be ignored.
These stories aren't being deleted—there was quite a large thread (in fact maybe two large threads?) about precisely that, within the last couple weeks. I'll see if I can dig up the links, or maybe someone else remembers?
The problem isn't that the major stories are deleted; it's that even if a story spends hours on the front page, the set of users who actually see it still has measure zero [1]. Then inevitably a few of the rest assume that they didn't see it because it was sinisterly suppressed, whether by mods or user flags.
Where this ends up getting us is the 'nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded' theory of HN threads! [2] It's always been like this—it's baked into the fundamentals of how HN works (the limited frontpage space, the dynamics of the internet, the fact that most people don't use HN Search). It's just showing up more intensely these days because the times are more intense and we've been in a tsunami phase for a few months now.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422350 - March 2025 (198 comments)
I meant "deleted" from by being flagged, which is a deletion from the lurkers. And yes.. absolutely I have seen some of these stories get through the gauntlet.
I am really not complaining about moderation, just attempting to appeal to the users who I have assumed are doing the flagging, in general.
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I can assure you that it has not been the standard corporate advice when I had to regularly travel from Canada to US for business meetings on a regular basis 15 years ago while working at a big tech company. Nor do I recall anyone else who was traveling doing that on their own. If it is the standard procedure now, then yes, that is definitely a reason to be concerned.
So I've had this in mind for ages, but my coworkers have only just realized it and started implementing it. Thus for most people, it's *new*s.
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> What shouldn't be ignored? Some small subset of foreign workers decided to take security seriously?
That FAANG employed Canadians are suddenly taking these precautions when entering the USA, as standard practice, when coming to a meeting. Nobody can gaslight me into believing that this is a not a new thing.
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Because, naturally, people on here want to harm you. We can't say it out loud, but that's where the U.S. climate is right now. HN is not immune from it, and is likely more susceptible to it given the demographic. They flag to keep people from saying it.
Indeed, I'm sure there's a LOT of people, especially in the HN space are pro-fascist.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."
"Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”."
"Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible."
[flagged]
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I mean, there were Tesla earnings calls this year flagged, which would be front page news even a year ago. Tech earnings calls are almost never flagged otherwise.
I'm mostly convinced a lot of stuff is flagged and the mods work overtime to pick and choose what to unflag. On what metric? No clue, if I'm being honest.
This is a fair take from my POV. I am very happy not to be modding any forum these days.
edit: and to be clear, I was not originally critiquing the modding here.
Honestly looks like a fairly heavy handed bot. Is very close to the "if it has trans" decisions we know they did in the search for things to cancel.
Several users have stated in political threads that they spend the day flagging political stories. I don't think there's any reason to believe a bot is doing it.
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Welcome to the Internet.
Many forums (including this one) have bans on "politics" or topics that are "inflammatory". 95% of the time what constitutes either is simply "things I disagree with".
For US politics in particular, as much as the right-wing cries about being censored, social media in particular bends over backwards not to silence such views whereas anything critical of those right-wing positions gets flagged or downranked as being "political" (eg [1]).
Typically this process isn't direct. ML systems will find certain features in submissions that get them marked as "inflammatory" or "low quality" but only on one end of the spectrum. For sites such as HN, reddit and Tiktok, right-wing views have successfully weaponized user safety systems by brigading posts and flagging them. That might then go to a human to review and their own biases come into play.
As for France vs the US, I'm sorry but France is irrelevant. As we've seen in the last 2 weeks, what the US does impacts the entire world. All the big social media sites are American (barring Tiktok) so American politics impacts what can and can't be said on those platforms.
Twitter has become 4chan, a hotbed for neo-Nazis, racists and homephobes.
And which French politican are we talking about? Marine Le Pen? If so, the relevance is the rise of fascism in Europe between National Front in France, Reform in the UK, AfD in Germany and, of course, Hungary.
[1]: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/leaked-data-israeli-censorshi...
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It's the opposite, actually. This place has always been owned and operated by a musk crony. Musk only got his paws on reddit recently, and has barely had any success besides getting the admins to shut down r/cyberstuck.
Here on HN anti-musk/regime posts get deleted automatically, TERF and other bigoted posters are allowed to post through spam filters from freshly made accounts, and everything else that isn't clearly delineated as 'liberal media' but negative for the regime just gets flagged or deranked from listing.
"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Rules made in the late 2000s might not necessarily hold on HN in 2025.
HN has shifted into a lagging Reddit, and preemptively shutting down any discourse about the falling quality of discourse on HN is ludicrous and plain annoying.
HN has changed, and A LOT of Reddit does leak onto HN, and this absolutely deserves conversation.
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I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conspiracy theory territory, it could just be that people get tired of reading the same bullshit everyday.