Ask HN: Why is news about the DNC fiasco being flagged? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is news about the DNC fiasco being flagged?

13 pointspersonjerry12 comments

It seems like every post about the DNC emails hack (and its relevance to Clinton vs Sanders) is being flagged on Hacker News. Perhaps I'm being too much of a conspiracy theorist, but is HN following a political agenda?

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It's off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

Email hacks, especially around Clinton, have historically been very on-topic, and like the faq says, anything intellectually interesting is on-topic.

I've see one of two of them, but they are from sites that have all the submissions [dead] by default. Do you have an example to make the discussion more concrete?

The problem with "anything intellectually interesting" is that it may include politics or not, it depends on the definition you are using, but I think it's off topic here. The interaction between politics and technology is in the borderline.

(Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12156778 Is this on topic? I stared at it like 30 seconds because I was no sure.)

This post in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12154841

I had to vouch for it before it got any interest at all.

I read the article. It looks like a discussion about corruption inside a political party. It has some side accusations to the Russians, but without any proofs. The discussion about the email server and hacking is very small. I think it's a political article.

A few weeks ago there were articles about the configuration of the server, and IIRC how the hacker could enter it. I think that were on-topic.

I also remember an article that correlates the number of emails in the official Clinton's email and in the unofficial. Most of the times the number is correlated, but they spot some strange non-correlations that signal a possible erasure of some emails. It was a little conspiracionist and I'm not sure the analysis was 100% right, but I think that were on-topic.

Hm, fair enough. Thanks for the analysis!

I'd flag that post. It belongs on CNN, not HN.

There's no need to assume a central conspiracy when the same thing is easily explained by just a few too many random people flagging the posts, for what's probably a wide variety of individual reasons.

That's fine, except I saw a similar article from WSJ and it had been already flagged (not sure where it is now) in 5 minutes, so I started to get suspicious. I might very well be wrong--I just wanted to know if anyone else found the same thing.

Utter bs. I've lost count of how many brexit, trump, and refugee related threads I've seen. I think HN has a similar agenda to twitter...

What's also strange is that despite this Ask HN being at 6 points in 1 hour, I couldn't find it anywhere in the first 5 pages of HN. That means it's behind posts like a 30 point, 7 hour post, and an 8 point, 2 hours Ask HN. This suggests, then, that HN is actively trying to stifle this DNC stuff, and I don't like that they are doing this without any communication.

Well, YCombinator/Sam Altman did hold a DNC fundraiser: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/04/22/obama-to-...

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