Are there any structural or systematic changes that should be made to how the site works right now, so that remedies such as this do not need to be hand performed one-offs?
I don't know if there's anything to admit from their public stance on this kind of stuff, and I'm certainly not wanting this account to receive retaliation for whatever I post regarding this - they've mentioned that they do get swarms of downvoting groups on particular topics and have taken steps to un-flag things that fall victim to it. I'm not sure what that mechanism is, or if they've seen it, or maybe it's auto-flagging off certain keywords - giving massive benefit of the doubt as possible. Regardless though I've seen this trend on similar news, I think a lot of my favorites contain flagged submissions that are highly relevant for a site like this.
Particularly the argument "these types of posts don't warrant good discussion and turn into flame wars" or generate too many comments per up-votes, a signal for bad thread quality - this has really none of that. If this remains flagged after a time it is a statement.
If this story is true, this is potentially the biggest breach of all time. It's tremendously relevant and that's why I'm annoyed.
The admins/mods turned off the flags on this story as soon as we found out about it, restoring it to HN's front page.
Are there any structural or systematic changes that should be made to how the site works right now, so that remedies such as this do not need to be hand performed one-offs?
Maybe? I'm wary of technical solutions to non-technical problems. The base problem here seems non-technical to me—it's the combination of:
1. there's a tsunami of intense (and important) political stories right now
2. HN has 30 slots on its frontpage
3. HN is not a current affairs site
In other words, the fundamentals themselves are twisted in a knot. I don't see how one gets around that.
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I don't know if there's anything to admit from their public stance on this kind of stuff, and I'm certainly not wanting this account to receive retaliation for whatever I post regarding this - they've mentioned that they do get swarms of downvoting groups on particular topics and have taken steps to un-flag things that fall victim to it. I'm not sure what that mechanism is, or if they've seen it, or maybe it's auto-flagging off certain keywords - giving massive benefit of the doubt as possible. Regardless though I've seen this trend on similar news, I think a lot of my favorites contain flagged submissions that are highly relevant for a site like this.
Particularly the argument "these types of posts don't warrant good discussion and turn into flame wars" or generate too many comments per up-votes, a signal for bad thread quality - this has really none of that. If this remains flagged after a time it is a statement.
If this story is true, this is potentially the biggest breach of all time. It's tremendously relevant and that's why I'm annoyed.
seems like it was unflagged. This story is horrifying, thank you.
Who, exactly, is being censored?