Why Did HN flag my submission on Democracy and change it's name? | Hacker News Reader

Why Did HN flag my submission on Democracy and change it's name?

3 pointsJyefet9 comments

I added the EIU 2016 Democracy Index with the title: US downgraded from 'full' to 'flawed democracy' and the title was changed to '2016 Democracy Index' before being flagged. See screenshots below: 1) Original post http://imgur.com/O22kb1P 2)Title Change: http://imgur.com/2IvB4Nv 3) Flagged: http://imgur.com/71daypA

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This is all routine. Please read the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You've broken them in several ways, first by editorializing a title and second by posting this question here instead of emailing us. As for the flags, that's the work of HN users, as I described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13492445.

HN Guidelines [1] has a policy to post the full title of a site without modification.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's the correct link but you've described the guideline inaccurately. What it says is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". Note the "unless".

it's because general political topics aren't considered a good fit by a lot of people and lots will reflexively flag them.

As an example of how despised political discussion are, a chrome extension I made to filter stories (mostly political) made it to the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13467611

I tried submitting a comprehensive article that did not have access restrictions and a title that did not need editorializing ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13491827 ) and it was marked "dupe", referring to your flagged topic. Mh.

1) political

2) editorializing the title

I guess it was editorializing the title. (Also, the provided link was not very informative since for the original white paper you would need to register.)

Because much like the US, HN is not a democracy...

On the contrary, this is democracy at work in one of its clearest forms.

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