So this is literally a website dedicated to defending the character of a major figure in the open-source world, and it gets flagged.
This is HN - people should be able to make their own judgement on the content of the site and discuss it here.
This is HN - people should be able to make their own judgement on the content of the site and discuss it here.
Since then, there have been over 100 follow-up submissions. (Not a typo! Over 100 submissions in just two weeks.) I've posted a list of the larger threads below. If you click through those links, you'll see that most have been flagged. They were flagged by users, not moderators.
From a moderation point of view, the issue isn't Stallman—the issue is repetition. Curiosity withers under repetition (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) and flamewar burns it to a crisp.
Stallman is on topic for HN, obviously. But endless flamewar is off topic, and the latter trumps the former. In a situation like this, we usually wait for Significant New Information (SNI) to show up. Has there been SNI since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224? I haven't seen it.
I wouldn't mind turning off flags on another large discussion about this, since the last one was 2 weeks ago and there is obviously an appetite for it (among some HN users) in addition to aversion to it (among others). Aversion has been having its way lately, so we could give appetite a chance. However, it would require an article that is capable of supporting a more substantive discussion. In particular, it would have to be something other than a "yay RMS" or a "boo RMS".
There's another issue too: if we turn off the flags on a Yay or a Boo, people will accuse us of being Yayers or Booers, and generally we prefer not to release the hounds of hell on ourselves. People accuse us of that anyway; imagine what they'd do with a big fat juicy data point.
Edit: if there is any question I haven't answered, please let me know - but please read this comment and its cousins (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26714003 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713701) first, to make sure that it's truly unanswered.
In Support of Richard Stallman - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26707498 - April 2021 (58 comments)
Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26681014 - April 2021 (25 comments)
Richard Stallman Removed from the GCC Steering Committee - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26670379 - April 2021 (97 comments)
The FSF unionised because of RMS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26649968 - March 2021 (43 comments)
Richard Stallman FSF support/remove letter signature counts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646423 - March 2021 (41 comments)
Libreboot – Defend Richard Stallman - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646048 - March 2021 (235 comments)
Red Hat Withdraws from the Free Software Foundation After Stallman’s Return - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26626512 - March 2021 (26 comments)
Stallman's return denounced by the EFF, Tor, Mozilla, and the creator of Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624951 - March 2021 (54 comments)
Not the First Time We Tried (FSF, GNU, RMS, etc.) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26611519 - March 2021 (70 comments)
“The Tor Project is joining calls for Richard M. Stallman to be removed [...]" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26610061 - March 2021 (35 comments)
Remove RMS from the GCC Steering Committee - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598066 - March 2021 (59 comments)
Red Hat Pulls Free Software Foundation Funding over Richard Stallman's Return - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26596378 - March 2021 (104 comments)
Red Hat statement about RMS’s return to the Free Software Foundation board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585378 - March 2021 (78 comments)
Stallman isn't great, but not the devil - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26579225 - March 2021 (63 comments)
Statement on Re-Election of Richard Stallman to Free Software Foundation Board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26575214 - March 2021 (28 comments)
Return of Stallman sparks outrage among open-source and free software leaders - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26574186 - March 2021 (19 comments)
Mozilla, Tor Join Calls to Oust Richard Stallman from Free Software Foundation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26573717 - March 2021 (220 comments)
An open letter in support of RMS being reinstated by the FSF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26568144 - March 2021 (106 comments)
The X.Org Foundation is joining calls for RMS to be removed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26565579 - March 2021 (11 comments)
RMS Support Letter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26565107 - March 2021 (47 comments)
About the RMS Cancellation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26562247 - March 2021 (27 comments)
Free software advocates seek removal of Richard Stallman and entire FSF board - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26562138 - March 2021 (13 comments)
OSI Response to RMS’s Reappointment to the Board of the Free Software Foundation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26559049 - March 2021 (11 comments)
rms-open-letter.github.io - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26558348 - March 2021 (139 comments)
Richard Stallman back at Free Software Foundation, says he won’t quit again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544440 - March 2021 (26 comments)
Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535224 - March 2021 (855 comments)
That's why the flaggings happen here, too.
It just feels.. eh.
When there's a major ongoing topic, one important test is whether there's SNI (Significant New Information) in a submission—or just a follow-up that's continuing the same discussion. If there's no SNI, chances are high that the discussion will be a repeat, and when the topic is highly polarized, you'll get a repeat of the same flamewar. That's what we really don't want here, so we downweight such follow-ups.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
These principles are well-established on HN and have nothing specifically to do with Stallman, let alone whatever opinions the mods have or don't have. You'll see the same patterns about any major ongoing topic that's highly divisive. Assange stories, for example, are pretty much an exact parallel.
Your comment suggests you may feel like there's a bias in which opinions are being "allowed" - that's not the case. See my explanation above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636. It's all too easy to feel like the local authorities are biased against your view, but that perception is in the eye of the beholder—i.e. it's rooted in cognitive biases, such as the one where people notice the cases they dislike and overlook the others (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
Some example topics being US/China geopolitics or the story about "men clamming up" around women.
Fruitful discussion can be made in both of these but it very often is not.
> Do you think that some topics are more trouble than they are worth?
This is too generic a question to answer meaningfully. Probably, but it's more a question of whether a given submission is intellectually interesting and capable of supporting a substantive discussion.
> Some example topics being US/China geopolitics or the story about "men clamming up" around women.
You're conflating two different categories there. One (US/China geopolitics) is one of the most common flamewar topics that gets posted to HN, with discussions getting asymptotically worse, past the point where it's not clear that the forum can handle it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652363
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26643703
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26630159
The other was a specific article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26612918) on a specific topic that really hasn't had much attention. I spent the better part of a day moderating the latter. I don't know if that answers your question or not but from my perspective it's the same principles being applied in all cases.
One important thing to realize is that we're trying to optimize HN for just one thing, which is curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... A lot of moderation calls that might seem weird or inconsistent make a lot of sense once you understand the chain of derivation from that rule.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713701 and my other posts in this thread for plenty of explanation.
There are many past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN.
If anyone still has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is, and if you know a better way for HN to relate to political topics while fulfilling its mandate of curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), I'd really like to know what it is. Just please familiarize yourself with the past material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.