Comment by LexiMax
13 hours ago
My account is primordial and I took long vacations from HN for precisely the reason he stated.
This site has always had a bad faith flagging/downvoting issue; the bots might make it worse, but the culture was always there.
> This site has always had a bad faith flagging/downvoting issue
The real tragedy is that this is fixable -- look at which accounts regularly flag inappropriately and shadow-ignore their flags going forward.
Why not just make the upvote, downvote, and flag lists public?
That'd also be a good idea, but transparency without action doesn't seem like it would fix the non-active front page problem.
Downvoting is an issue sometimes yes but I understand that.
Flagging on the other hand to me on a post as such and other attempts genuinely sadden me because I was only able to discover this flagged post because people wrote about this article in the post I built which has also promptly got flagged.
I don't even know how else to say but I saw two people here in such discussions either worry about their wives or sons in laws and my heart goes out to them. Hackernews is a vast place but its still niche compared to tech giants, we are a community mostly built around each other and curiosity. Curiosity goes to dumpster fire if events like these happen and B) they are flagged by the same community we all think to be a part of.
I have been a vocal supporter of hackernews usually. Because I like the website but I am genuinely seeing it crack and you really never know what can get flagged because I genuinely didn't expect such posts to be flagged because of how valuable they are. I can't fathom why Hackernews might do this, When I had posted the comment it wasn't intended to be political but rather just a massive news development which impacts technological and actual people and geopolitics and I wanted people to discuss it in here on Hackernews for as so, give insights and have discussions.
Perhaps I am feeling hurt and that's because I am because "et tu brute hackernews?"
I then discovered that news.ycombinator.com/active (from one of the comments here, thank you c42) which can still show flagged posts.
I didn't know about the /active and I have been in this community for quite a long time and I didn't know that /active could show flagged posts so I am probably gonna create a tell HN about it
Sharing my sympathies to anyone who is troubled & personally impacted over this recent development. I hope humanity unites together and works for a more affordable & better future for the average person. Peace and hugs.
Edit: looks like someone already posted about news.ycombinator.com/active 5 days ago and so my attempt of post redirected to them but its all good
Found https://brutalist.report/source/hn this from the comment of razingeden which shows both normal and also flagged posts https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46559792&goto=item%3Fi...
>Flagging on the other hand to me on a post as such and other attempts genuinely sadden me because I was only able to discover this flagged post because people wrote about this article in the post I built which has also promptly got flagged.
I find that annoying myself. However, at the suggestion of another user, I began looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/active instead of the front page.
The "active" page (as its name implies) includes the most active discussions regardless of whether or not they've been flagged.
I find it to be a much better place to find stuff to discuss.
On top of these methods, I will often surface content and discussion by looking at:
- the search page for the last 24H, with a list of both "title" keywords and "comment" keywords, based on how many results are appearing
- the comment histories of folks I have enjoyed.
I do this by modifying the query string in the URL field.
I am quite glad that these modes of finding content on the site take a little effort- I already have a 180min time out and it's not the healthiest way to try and find my news. This is, fortunately, the only social media site I am actively writing responses on, other than some message boards.
And I don't try to book mark my way through those keywords- I just have a set of stuff I find in comment threads I find interesting memorized and look for those threads ("measles", "salvador", "venazuela", "flock").
But I find it a lot easier to find general news and conversations I am curious about using that method.
I agree with the bad faith downvoting existing, there’s always been a trend on here of certain people thinking it’s tech related and good when it makes them money and political and bad if it loses them money along with several other biases, but the the pattern of new accounts boosting each other and then throwing their narratives around has super charged ever since LLMs became widespread.
I am increasingly losing any desire for anonymous speech due to how much of my time ends up getting wasted talking to GPUs someone configured to throw more noise into the discourse