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Comment by ciabattabread | Hacker News Reader

Why the hell was this post flagged?

Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but I suppose the sensationalism of the material, the high charge in the title, and the poor quality of the thread were factors. The thread also set off the HN flamewar detector.

I've turned off the flags for now and replaced the title with a less sensational subheading in the hope that that might support more substantive discussion, though it probably won't. (Edit: well maybe it is.)

I rarely visit HN anymore because of shit like this, but I decided to check back over here to see what everyone had to see. not surprised

I guess we have to wait for the arstechnica writeup so it can get posted and discussed.

A lot of hate in this anti-hate post.

Anything critical of the far-right tends to wind up flagged on HN. It's reflective of the overall industry.

It's amazing how anything that disagrees with far-left seems to get painted as far-right.

This guy literally worked with the FBI to bust skinheads.

What industry?

Because the mods at HN believe that shaming people for past actions doesn't promote "intellectual curiosity" or some equally inane non-reason.

Considering it was on the front page, now doesn't appear 4 pages deep just minutes later, a mod clearly nuked this.

"Clearly" is an interesting word to use for something that you've imagined.

The submission was "nuked" by user flags and the software known as the flamewar detector or overheated discussion detector.

I apologize for my assertion, however there is a decided lack of transparency around issues like this that definitely contributed to my thoughts on the topic.

Not sure how to balance transparency on HN's moderation with the fact trolls and bad faith actors will abuse it.

Well, we're always happy to answer specific questions and there's no question we aren't willing to answer. In that sense we're pretty transparent. It's true that there's no facility that publishes a log of everything that happens, but that's for reasons I've discussed many times (and could probably dig up links to if you care).

dang, does it ever make you feel sad that so many HN users will apparently defend Nazis, KKK members, and other white supremacists regardless of the circumstances or severity of their crimes? Like, do you ever kind of throw up your hands and wonder why you’re spending so much effort maintaining “civil discourse” as users cheerfully spout Stormfront forum talking points right in front of you?

This does not feel like a genuine question. But yes: many things make me feel sad about HN. It's a dismaying mess.

I'd be careful about jumping to conclusions. If you see an egregious comment that ought to be moderated and hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

"Civil" is not the guiding value here. We took that word out of the guidelines because, as I pointed out a year ago, its main effect was to make people think we have dumb ideas about civility. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19663839

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