Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

This might help answer some of your burning questions.

Even this doesn’t stress how heavily HN is moderated. You can see it occasionally when there is some news cycle and you look an HN and everything is “Rust is cool. How we raised a round for a product we don’t have (yet). Tips for thinking effectively while in the open office.” This basically tells you that dang decided enough is enough and cleaned up the front page.

> when there is some news cycle and [the front page does not reflect it]

Political news is discouraged by the site guidelines and quickly flagged by users without mods' intervention (source: I'm one of these users). If I want the latest Trump nonsense, I can go to MSNBC or Fox News or Colbert or whatever. I'd rather have more stuff on the front page which we can have a (mostly) constructive conversation about.

Some of us actually want to discuss politics with sane, smart people so I rarely flag thise stories (but I understand why you do.)

Agreed

I think this is a dicey area for discussion. Political discussions have always, and particularly so today, essentially consisted of ripping off bits of dogma and throwing at each other. While my family and I are generally on the same page, I avoid political discussions with them as well.

I am often inclined to flag political threads here if they get egregiously bad. It very often gets to be the opposite of interesting.

> Political discussions have always, and particularly so today, essentially consisted of ripping off bits of dogma and throwing at each other.

Despite that I have actually learned stuff here from people that I originally disagreed deeply with.

(Oh, and I am also fairly sure certain people have/could learned/learn something from me, but thats up to them to seize the opportunity. d:-)

> I am often inclined to flag political threads here if they get egregiously bad.

I wish they were better but often I wish people could stick to flagging bad behavior instead of the entire thread.

That said, I am not here to challenge moderator decisions. Even with showdead on this place is fantastic compared to certain places I find it easy to compare with.

> Despite that I have actually learned stuff here from people that I originally disagreed deeply with.

Agreed. The incidence rate of people who can intelligently argue a controversial position is much higher here than in the average population.

I use the hckrnews client which is better for seeing comments, and time of posting

woah, this is crazy! The flamewar detector (# comments > upvotes) is pretty funny

There was a large thread about that article 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437

and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 in 2019.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com