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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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