Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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> all discussion of the ICJ's decision - truly momentous - were completely removed

HN had an enormous thread about the ICJ decision:

ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39143043 - Jan 2024 (1397 comments)

The question here isn't whether the topic has been suppressed; it's how much of it HN can handle. We're willing to turn off flags from time to time, but HN is not designed for frequent repetition, especially of flamewar topics—it's designed for the opposite. That makes the question of how to handle a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) a tricky one. HN has a reasonably well-defined approach to this, which has been stable for many years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I addressed the big ICJ thread below. The suppressed threads were posted much earlier, and showed clear signs of being flagged as soon as they were visible.

Which is the point - a small crowd of partisans can flag third rail topics here, no matter how much interest or how much positive discussion is happening.

I remember, in particular, the time all the posts about a lead torturer from Abu Ghraib were suppressed. Although she destroyed Congressional evidence, she was promoted to a top position at at a top tech hirer. We should be able to talk about things like that.

Your response then was the same as now; to deflect responsibility to 'users'. I don't buy it. The same happened with Annie Altman's claims about her brother. The same has happened with quite a few Zionism related threads, recently and historically. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37953737, which clearly is squarely in our domain.

There is room for improvement here. A minority of strongly biased participants, on any issue, shouldn't be able to completely disappear whole sides of the story, as has been happening.

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