Comment by dang
16 hours ago
I think they were all flagged to varying degrees. That's partly why I asked for clarification - there are so many things your question might mean that I wasn't sure which one to answer!
16 hours ago
I think they were all flagged to varying degrees. That's partly why I asked for clarification - there are so many things your question might mean that I wasn't sure which one to answer!
It’s a holiday, so I’ll just pose this as a rhetorical question to you and let the matter rest:
What’s your level of confidence that these threads aren’t getting flagged as part of a coordinated effort? Be that a lone MAGA nutter running 20 sock puppets through resnet proxies, or a paid covert influence campaign?
If there were theoretically a common cluster of accounts all repeatedly flagging political posts unfavorable to the Trump admin within a few minutes of each other, do you currently have the tooling in place to see that happen?
I certainly don’t speak for everyone on HN, but I think the allegations of censorship here have more to do with the specter of bad actors abusing the flag system to limit the reach of certain posts, rather than you or anyone else affiliated with Big Ycombinator (TM) putting your thumb directly on the scale.
The accounts that flag these things are almost always legitimate, established accounts, so I'm not that worried about them being sockpuppets or a paid influence campaign.
From everything I've seen, the flags on political stories are a kind of coalition between (1) users who don't want to see (most) political stories on HN, and (2) users who don't like the politics of the particular story they are flagging. In other words, users who care about the quality of the site (as they understand it), and users who care about a political struggle.
[editing - bear with me...]