Comment by ramblerman
1 day ago
@dang why is this flagged?
Simonw is a long term member with a good track record, good faith posts.
And this post in particular is pretty incredible. The notion that Grok literally searches for "from: musk" to align itself with his viewpoints before answering.
That's the kind of nugget I'll go to the 3rd page for.
Users flagged it but we've turned off the flags and restored it to the front page.
Anything slightly negative about certain people is immediately flagged and buried here lately. How this works seriously needs a rewamp. So often I now read some interesting news, come here to find some thoughts on it, only to find it flagged and buried. It used to be that I got the news through HN, but now I can't trust to know what's going on by just being here.
> Anything slightly negative
The flagging isn't to hide "anything slightly negative" about particular people. We don't see any evidence of that from the users flagging these stories. Nobody believes that would work anyway; we're not influential enough to make a jot of difference to how global celebrities are seen [1]. It's that we're not a celebrity gossip/rage site. We're not the daily news, or the daily Silicon Valley weird news. We've never been that. If every crazy/weird story about Silicon Valley celebrities made the front page here there'd barely be space for anything else. As dang has said many times, we're trying for something different here.
[1] That's not to say we don't think we're influential. The best kind of influence we have is in surfacing interesting content that doesn't get covered elsewhere, which includes interesting new technology projects, but many other interesting topics too, and we just don't want that to be constantly drowned out by craziness happening elsewhere. Bad stuff happening elsewhere doesn't mean we should lose focus on building and learning about good things.
I initially skipped this one because the title is flamebait (flamebait or more flamebait or...). Anyway, may the force be with you.
Can you introduce a feature so anyone flagging or downvoting has to state their reason?
As currently there is no transparency.
This has been asked about a lot over the years and our position is that it would just generate endless more meta-discussion with people arguing about whether flags/downvotes were valid, fair, etc. We don’t want to encourage that.
What we do instead is pay attention to the sentiment (including public comments in threads) of the community, with particular emphasis on the users who make the most positive contributions to the site over the long term, and anyone else who is showing they want to use HN for its intended purpose. And we do a lot of explaining of our decisions and actions, and we read and respond to people’s questions in the threads and via email.
There are ways for us to be transparent without allowing the site to get bogged down in meta-arguments.