Why is the NYT article concerning Trump's taxes being continually flagged? | Hacker News Reader

Why is the NYT article concerning Trump's taxes being continually flagged?

68 pointsmNovak56 comments

Just trying to understand if this a legitimate violation of HN policy, or if HN is being trolled?

The HN rules are as follows:

> 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.

Given that it is being covered by basically every news channel out there it seems pretty clearly off-topic.

I would think the apparent leak of the president's tax info qualifies as "interesting new phenomenon" -- this has been anticipated for years, and de facto does not happen every day.

This is a landmark article revealing information that people have been calling on for years to be released in a hotly contested presidential race. We are literally watching history be created and we should have the ability to discuss it.

No. it is not interesting or new, it is way off-topic and falls under politics.

Irrelevant according to the HN guidelines.

It is both interesting and new.

Articles on politics that affect the tech industry might be relevant but this has nothing to do with that. There are other forums for this kind of thing.

114 points, not flagged - "As Joe Rogan’s platform grows, so does the media and liberal backlash" (Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24561534)

264 points, not flagged - "You're Not Allowed to Film: The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland (Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24390909)

Funny how stories about right-wing corruption and mal-governance get instantly flagged to oblivion, while culture-war stories that favor right-wing and right-libertarian agendas stay up.

These examples are hints that at least some of the flagging is politically motivated and not simply about relevance to hackers.

This took me 10 seconds:

393, not flagged- "Trump offered to pardon Assange if he provided source for DNC emails – lawyer"

259, not flagged- "Trump’s WeChat curbs halted by judge on free speech concerns"

81, not flagged- "Peter Thiel Met with the Racist Fringe as He Went All in on Trump"

270, not flagged- "Judge temporarily blocks U.S. ban on TikTok downloads from U.S. app stores"

All stories negative to the right wing and that's just the first four I found by searching for the word Trump.

You have a perception bias which doesn't reflect reality.

At least three of those four have an undeniable technological/VC subject matter, clearly relevant to HN (WeChat, Peter Thiel, and TikTok)

I'd have to read them all to be certain, but 2 stories on OP's side and the 4 stories you presented aren't convincing for either argument, 10 seconds of research or not.

The parent comment argued that the tax evasion post was flagged because it's not directly relevant to the tech industry.

In response, I found examples that are also not directly relevant to the tech industry, but are recent, popular and unflagged on HN.

Since each of your examples is directly relevant to the tech industry, they are not evidence of political neutrality in flagging posts.

To counter my argument that flagging is biased to support right-wing politics, a better response would list HN posts that are (a) not directly relevant to the tech industry, (b) critical of right-wing or right-libertarian politics, (c) 100+ points, (d) posted recently, and (e) not flagged.

I would be happy to be proven wrong!

One of the key takeaways of this story is the relationship between business-ownership and income tax. This is of interest to the audience here because many are directly involved in small business start-ups. The fact that this discussion is also flagged is also absurd.

Are we not here to discuss things anymore?

Because a discussion of such an article is going to be almost pure politics, and almost certain to degenerate into a flamewar. That's not a good/worthwhile/useful discussion. (There's other places to do that; we don't need to do it on HN.)

The fact that HN is set up to prevent flamewars and IMHO has been able to hold calm and reasoned discussion on politics in the past is all the more reason we should be talking about it here.

"A man's got to know his limitations."

I respect HN's ability to have decent discussions. It's better than anywhere else I know of online. But I'm pretty sure that this one would degenerate, quickly and irreparably.

Yep.

Or, more accurately, there's nothing to be discussed but the superficial.

I understand the sentiment, but I wonder if ideally the appropriate action would be to moderate/flag the discussion itself, not the existence of the article.

It seems unfortunate to ghost the article simply in anticipation of a poor discussion. Other contentious topics have been discussed on HN, and I for one would appreciate an objective HN-style discussion of the information presented

There's only so many hours in the day for the moderators to read posts. Also, allowing political posts would attract those with a political axe to grind instead of hackers, making the problem worse. Please don't ask others to do what you wouldn't be willing to do yourself.

The article seems to be allowed now and basically every comment has negative votes. Doesn't matter which side of the fence it's on, everyone is nuking everyone else.

probably because people hope this can be the one site that can remain focused on things other than politics (except when the politics at hand directly affect technology or the work of hackers)

That may be a common hope, but I suspect that's not the primary motivation for the aggressive flagging activity.

Your suspicions may deceive you.

You don't have to introduce trolling to explain why some articles are flagged. Depending on the source, the submission may be automatically flagged. Since the source you're referring to is the New York Times and is not known to be one of those automatically flagged, I'd assume the flagging is the result of community effort.

Without me having RTFM... Looks like two are buried? Did both have mismatched titles? If so that's probably the most innocuous possible reason. Becoming [dead] is automatic based on number of flags, right?

That said, we know ~30 percent of US voters believe the 45th presidental administration is doing a _good_ job. I'm guessing it's a similar percentage of HN users (plus or minus a few percent).

I'd similarly guess that same 30 percent would reflexively flag any evidence which doesn't agree with their worldviews. Then I'd further guess the HN flagging and burying system relies on actors acting in good faith in aggregate. If 30 percent of HN users reflexively act one way or another ignoring newsworthyness and noteworthyness, I imagine that messes up the tuning of the abuse system.

There should be an Internet Forum Law where any sufficiently large forum just becomes about current events and politics. There are already endless places on the internet to talk about those things, I'm glad I share this place with users trying to resist it.

Previous discussion (flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610708

aaand it's being downvoted already.

I might add the link anyway: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...

Because politics is not allowed on HN.

EDIT: So politics and off-topic content is allowed? I'm not sure if down voters have read the HN guidelines.

The HN guidelines do not say that "politics is not allowed" (indeed, HN tried a rule like that as an experiment a while back and it went quite badly), so it's a bit more complicated. (and other people already have made good arguments why the wording that's actually in the rules would apply here, long before your comment)

regardless, politics incites flamewars on HN degrading the conversation, perhaps they should revisit this rule.

it shouldn't be allowed

@dang - Appreciate if you could make executive decision on whether this article will be shown or not, and moderate the flagging accordingly

Some people flag things that they think make them uncomfortable on partisan grounds on the basis that it is "political". It's not as prevalent as some people say it is but there is a subset of HN commenters who are very much in the "I'm alright jack"-camp of tacit trump supporters.

I can understand people who don't want political discussion but, I have two thoughts in response to that:

1. If you think is going to go down the drain, flag it after it happens not preemptively. HN is moderated, if it's that bad it'll get nuked.

2. When you have a president who is refusing to commit to leaving office if he loses the election, even after incident up incident of corruption who cares about the latest UI framework (I would say something JS-framework related but that's like shooting a fish in a barrel)

Billionaire president pays $750 in tax is almost guaranteed to be mentioned in every history of Trump - even poetically I think it transcends day to day politics enough to not be flagged.

> HN is moderated, if it's that bad it'll get nuked.

Political arguments attract users who are primarily interested in having political arguments (and who vastly outnumber us). That way lies Eternal September.

> When you have [politics] who cares about the latest UI framework

They have many explicitly political venues where this would be on topic. Why should it be impossible to maintain one venue in which it isn’t?

> Why should it be impossible to maintain one venue in which it isn’t?

I'm not saying it's an invalid viewpoint it just strikes me of the way that the producers/creative leads of the Call of Duty games call them "apolitical".

If the flagging was more consistent I probably wouldn't have a problem with it but it seems that you're less likely to get downvoted/flagged with something contrarian.

Yeah, without any “you’re doing it wrong” feedback I don’t know how a community could agree to moderate in an even-handed way. I’m guessing people might have a “not this again” snap judgment about a mainstream story or ragebait they were already tired of seeing everywhere else.

Come on guys, now we're flagging the discussion of flagging?

I specifically did not link the article in vain hope of avoiding this.

What you're doing here is explicitly against the guidelines.

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.

I've emailed dang before, and he's uniformly polite, and shockingly prompt across an unreal amount of the week. I think he might be a robot.

> I think he might be a robot.

I have the opposite impression - that he's human, and I mean that in a good way, as someone able to empathise and show discretion. He's an extremely good moderator and I can't see a robot being able to do that job well for a long time. (The other moderator is also very good but I have to admit I can't recall their name.)

I keep some of his comments in bookmarks, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15151627

I meant it as a compliment! I was thinking more Culture, less Commander Data, if that makes sense.

Tongue thoroughly in cheek, in any case.

I interpreted this post as a question for the general HN community, not the moderators specifically.

To be clear, this post is not a request of the HN staff (regarding the below @dang post, point taken). Meta-discussion within the community I would think is appropriate; if not, then I apologize.

You can't be surprised when such a topic goes against the community guidelines[0]; doesn't mean you can't try, just don't be shocked at the most likely outcome.

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

Yep. So again we post articles that are already covered by most TV and online news such that it doesn't need to be covered here since that would be breaking the HN guidelines so unsurprised about the outcome.

But there are a small selection of articles that are around politics but are not covered by most online news sites (slatestarcodex), software freedom, etc. But this however 'does' break the HN guidelines.

It's pretty ridiculous, especially for a website that pushes free speech so much as its guiding principles. The information is clearly "of interest to a hacker" by just how many people are upvoting the articles and how relevant it is to the US election in literally weeks.

It stinks that people can just flag away facts that make them uncomfortable like this. It's kind of abuse of the flagging system IMO.

> especially for a website that pushes free speech so much as its guiding principles

Where does HN do that?!

Political news is all over the internet,some people like to have spaces to get away from it.

Click the "vouch" button if you don't agree with the flag.

How much karma is required for that? I don't see the option

That's probably part of the problem. Anybody can just sit around flagging content with a low karma threshold and much fewer people are allowed to vouch back. It's the exact opposite of the downvote threshold on here which is designed to keep people from just killing off opinions they disagree with.

You get vouch and flag permissions at the same karma level.

On this page, I see an option to flag, but not one to vouch. I've never seen an option to vouch.

Ah, the vouch button replaces the flag button when there are enough flags to kill the post (it's then [flagged][dead]), you have to have "showdead" enabled in your preferences to see those of course

Thanks!

Okay, that seems to make it worse then. Because I can see that this post is flagged, but since it's not dead, I cannot help balance out the flagging. Only after it's completely dead can anyone try to resurrect it? Seems... unbalanced. But hey, overall the site works better than most, so okay.

30 I believe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24134548

weird, I'm well above that threshold but didn't notice the option. Not usually in the business of of flagging/vouching

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