Comment by dang

The accounts that flag these stories are almost always established accounts, so I'm not too worried about them being sockpuppets or paid influencers.

From everything we've seen, flags on political stories are a 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 a particular story they are flagging. In other words, users who care about the quality of the site, and users who care about a political struggle. (Edit: I mean users who are on one side of a political struggle and only flag stories that are on the opposite political side, in other words who use flags as a purely political weapon.)

This dynamic shows up on all the main political topics.

There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.

This, so far, seems sufficient to me. If we start to see indications that it's not sufficient, we'll take more action.

I know there are many users (actually a small-but-vocal minority of users) who complain that flags are being abused to suppress political stories. What these complaints seem never to take into account is that we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.

From the point of view of HN fulfilling its mandate (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...