[flagged]
The current article, I would say, easily clears the bar for interestingness on HN, despite its culture war aspect. Interestingness is the thing we care about here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
(Also, the submitter did a fine job of rewriting the title to be less baity, as the site guidelines request: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Thanks GavCo!)
It's true that https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=telegraph.co.uk contains a lot of ideological battle articles that probably fall below the 'interesting' line. For that reason, that domain has a penalty on it—a medium-weight penalty that we put on every site in this category, regardless of which ideology they support.
However, it does look like there have been other good articles from this domain. For example:
Elephants born without tusks in ‘evolutionary response’ to poachers (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33862385 - Dec 2022 (128 comments)
So I'd say this domain is a good example of the kind that we'd penalize but not ban, and try to turn off the penalty when the occasionally genuinely interesting article does show up.
What about flagging? When does a comment flagged by a user get unflagged, if that happens?
There is tons of information about basically everything we do embedded in my moderation comments but one has to use HN Search to find it (that's why I link to HN search so often). One of these years I might try to wrangle a bunch of those into a bunch of essay-style commentaries, if only because they would be easier to link to and would lighten the load of always having to explain the same things.
We're transparent in the sense of always trying to answer questions, though.
Comments by users can get manually unflagged by mods but I don't think there's a software way to do that. Flagkilled posts, though, can get unkilled by user vouches (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.
Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
I don't know what HN's internal database is, but it seems like it could be a simple query or set of queries to determine if [flagged] is being used by a group of people as a way of censoring comments they don't agree with. After all, they're not required to justify their flag.
Some simple statistics would answer this question. For instance, in "sometimes turn flags off" what percentage of the time does that happen?
We turn flags off a small percentage of the time. I don't know how small because although we log the flagging history, we don't keep it in a form that's easy to compute.
That led me to https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=HuShifang and posts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31074363. I mean wow.
You're right about raging and soapboxes of course. Unfortunately, angry repetition is in far greater supply than excellent comments sharing rare information. But this is an internet problem and indeed a human problem in general. We try to moderate in favor of the good posts as best we can. It's not clear how to do it much better.
(Attacking the person): This fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone's argument or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument. The fallacious attack can also be direct to membership in a group or institution.
https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definition...
It's true that the provenance of an article sometimes leads to complaints, but I don't think we should let that be the high-order bit or train for it (in the way that repeated moderation decisions slowly train the community). This is one of those cases where knowing what you're optimizing for shows which side of a tradeoff to opt for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
(* when it's publicly available - that's an implicit bit)
Censorship sucks generally. Stop flame baiting.
But the Roald Dahl Story Company said “it’s not unusual to review the language” during a new print run and any changes were “small and carefully considered”.
So, Roald Dahl's family and the company they still control are perfectly happy with this. Why aren't we?
If you look at the actual changes, the careful consideration resulted in aesthetic atrocities, reverting the punchy use of language that makes Dahl's work so wonderful and entertaining.
People are outraged because the actions are outrageous. I reject the notion that I shouldn't be upset.
Or the plot of Esio Trot which is a guy tricking his downstairs neighbor into falling in love with him by swapping out her pet every few weeks with a larger one?
Or the whole plot of George’s Marvelous Medicine which is a boy who mixes up a potion with everything he can find in his house, and feeds it to his nasty grandmother?
He’s got a whole lot of crazy stuff, and I can only speak of things I’ve read to my kids recently.
> Unsurprisingly given The Witches’ subject matter, many of the edits are to do with depictions of women. “Chambermaid” becomes “cleaner”. “Great flock of ladies” becomes “great group of ladies”. “You must be mad, woman!” becomes “You must be out of your mind!” “The old hag” becomes “the old crow”
There is some removing of fat as insult. There is that too. But pretty much all changes in above paragraph sound better then old ones.
I'm guessing you've never met an English person then. Your grammar suggests this to be the case.
This is the first time I heard of this kind of language 'update'. That's not normal.
Shakespeare is genuinely hard to read and understand but we don't just change random phrases and words to match modern sensibilities. Even modern English translation will keep the original for reference.
>As presented it is just designed to generate outrage,
Because it is outrageous.
> So, Roald Dahl's family and the company they still control are perfectly happy with this. Why aren't we?
If I'm reading a book by Dahl I want to read it as he intended. If you read the article you'll see how idiotic the changes are and how they literally change the meaning of the passages when considered "problematic".
They can write their own books if they want.
What is this supposed to mean?