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Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten a reply or read a reply in some cases though it's usually done silently.

Some cases are due to a topic being overly-popular and having too many front-page submissions and the most obvious ones. Some are from flagging. A lot of the other ones seem to be purely based on what dang (and other mods?) like and don't like. Possibly there's also pressure from YC or VCs, maybe not - I have no idea there.

There's also much more up/down weighing than is captured here, some of it more minor. Overall, it's something of a myth that the front-page is mainly based on what the community is interested in - that's at most a secondary factor given the heavy curation and its effect over time.

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I find it concerning that Greenwald's most recent article was flagged.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26486997

Flagged with 8 comments. Either a duplicate or dang has some explaining to do.

Flagging is done by users, not moderators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836

Frankly, I would flag basically anything by Glenn Greenwald. Even putting aside my personal feelings about him, it's basically guaranteed to result in a carbon copy of the same political flame wars we've all seen 1000 times. Sometimes the issue is just that people are bored of the same discussion over and over again.

Why wouldn't you just hide it or ignore it?

Because I think having the same (mostly tribal) political discussion ad nauseum harms the community.

More optimistically, it allows the community to blow off steam in threads you don't read

Steam is not a good analogy. A better analogy is fire. Steam blows off, fire spreads.

If people had cancelled Greenwald this way years ago perhaps nobody would have learned of Snowden's disclosures.

Who knows what we will never learn because people want to avoid certain type of discussions

You don't think other people should be able to have a discussion that doesn't personally interest you?

That's not the issue. Not everyone is interested in Plan 9 but that doesn't mean they're flagging https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26554539.

The issue is that different community members have differing views about what's on topic here and/or what breaks the site guidelines. That's inevitable and natural.

HN has really started turning against Greenwald recently. It's possible many people flagged it as soon as they saw it was his article.

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