More generally, rating all comments and submissions on a scale is wrong for some topics. In some cases there's no right or wrong way to do it, only tradeoffs and context. The +/- voting system has simplistic appeal, but is also a bit archaic.
"women (and more generally, marginalised people) face hate for who they are."
That was one of the points of the trolls which is right: this woman is not a hacker. The way they go about it obviously is puerile, but the point still stands.
Based on that, having the sufficient amount of flaggings suggests that hackers do not find this interesting.
I see why it is important to highlight this, but don't see a reason why HN is the right place for it.
Not that I've spent a meaningful amount of time on any "chan", but based on my limited understanding just reducing HN and 4chan into "tech sites" is insufficient.
Again, the flaggings are the obvious signal of what interests people here. Why enforce arbitrary moderation on top?
How do you know?
Example: I flag, on every opportunity, posts related to US politics. It's not because I'm "hurt" or annoyed by US politics, it's because I have close to zero interest in them and don't want that to be a content category that takes up space in HN from the actual interesting stuff.
I bet many feel the same for posts about social issues like this, whether it's morally right or wrong.
But maybe i spent too much time in tech social media and I see those patterns regularly. Eg. Abuse woman online, if she starts talking about it, discredit her skills, and try to humiliate as much as possible, presenting it as a snowflake kind of attitude.
All of this is typical “nice guy” kind of shit.
I think you have misread the dynamics. To start, most people don't flag something just because it's not interesting. I don't - do you?
The piece describes coordinated harassment against the author, by software developers.
How many people does it take to flag something on HN? How many people are involved in that coordinated harassment. Can you therefore conclude that the flagging is not part of that broader coordinated harassment? I ... don't think so.
This coordinated harassment is part of a larger subculture of harassment against women in tech. As an example, 13 years ago Kathy Sierra withdrew from online life due to harassment. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Sierra#Harassment_and_wi... 'Scoble said "[W]henever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man."'.
As the piece points out, silence - and flagging is an attempt to silence - is one of many tactics used by harassers.
Given the context, you might therefore ask why "hackers do not find this interesting". Is it because a non-trivial number of hackers are sexist, and empathize with the harassment against women in tech, so flag in order to silence?
Or is it because hackers are tired of reading about how sexist the tech field is and want HN as their safe space? Or they feel powerless to change things so flagging is a way of sticking their head in the sand?
Or, really, you should rephrase the question entirely. Don't interpret flagging as a signal for interesting/not interesting, but see it as signal for "should not be on HN" - of which 'not interesting' is only a (small, IMO) part of it.
However, I don't think it changes my ultimate point. All the same, an (assumedly) big enough populace decided this was not on topic.
You make a number of good points, which I won't argue with, except this one:
> Given the context, you might therefore ask why "hackers do not find this interesting". Is it because a non-trivial number of hackers are sexist, and empathize with the harassment against women in tech, so flag in order to silence?
I you're forgetting a very significant populace of "I have a millions issues I could worry about at any given point and just cannot provide meaningful resources to worry about this specific one."
Flagging may prevent others who might have those resources from contributing, yes? So flagging is not a neutral personal expression but a public negative expression, yes?
I still believe the interesting question is why did a big enough population decided this was not on topic enough to flag it, rather than ignore it.
Especially on the web, which tends to be fast-paced system 1 / reptile-brain media for many. Scroll, click, skim read, back, (not interesting topic - flag), f5, repeat.