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Comment by jdgoesmarching | Hacker News Reader

Why is this flagged? This seems like a pretty damn important tech story.

I wonder if the flagging/flame war detector is too aggressive for stories like this that blend the worlds of tech and politics. From my bystander PoV, it seems like the majority of interesting news stories like this one get flagged and killed despite a somewhat normal discussion in the comments. I know people want to pretend that politics don't belong on their tech/startup forum, but that's just ignoring the reality of how intertwined the two are at this point.

Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case it seems unlikely to have any chance at a thoughtful conversation. It has the Ultimate Troll Ingredient but little actual information.

You have the ability to unflag stories. This is critically important. Please do the right thing here.

Many stories that (correctly) get flagged on HN are critically important, far more important than anything which does appear on the front page. There's a simple reason for this: if importance were the high-order bit, then HN would be a current affairs site.

In fact its mandate is something quite different, as everyone here should know—see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and (for endless elaboration on the point) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

The problem is that there's no counter-action to a group of dedicated users who want to kill a story killing a story.

Moderator review is a counter-action, especially when we turn off the flags on a story. The problem is that we don't (and can't) do that often enough to satisfy everyone.

seconded

yes

We both know he won't do the right thing...

Yup, every time something important gets gang-flagged he leaves it flagged even though he can unflag. There's zero transparency and a heavy bias in moderation here. I stopped contributing here and moved to lobste.rs

In a way, Danf is just following the will of the people. If the people want to gag reflect to "Musk" and "government" and hide the story, what are we to do?

We both know he won't

We just have to face the facts that this is a tech site thst aggressively rejects politics, no matter how dire. It's the same Apathy that won Trump the election. A problem starred by technocrats won't necessarily have wannabe technocrats solve it anyway. Better off organizing on Reddit.

If you want to get around flagging, vote it up anyway. I check top daily/weekly news and lagged news shows up (I'm pretty sure I have showdead on Btw).

How many users? Is it the same group of users flagging every political post? You seem to agree with their take openly, are you flagging these as well?

I agree with the "take" that this article isn't going to get discussed substantively and thoughtfully on HN. You needn't look far to see why—the current thread demonstrates it.

The commenters insisting that this is the wrong call don't seem to have fully taken in the intended purpose of this site, because they're actually making a case in favor of the flags, not against them.

Btw, it's not true that every political post gets flagged. HN's approach to that question has been stable for a long time, even though there can be strong disagreement about specific calls. If you or anyone wants to read about what the approach is, there are lots of links at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... In particular, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 are good places to start.

Indeed many of the top comments are about how this thread will inevitably be flagged but continuing on to give substantive commentary. Is this not a sign that the system is not producing the desired results? That good contributors see a good topic and give up on it isn’t a sign that the topic is inherently not worth discussing.

This is the culture HN is building not one magically produced by the topics themselves, and I think the fact the that the only moderator on the site agrees that all political discussion is not worth having contributes to the quality of political discussion on the site.

I think you do a great job overall dang, but I think politics is inherently in an area that highlights the downsides of having a single moderator at the helm. I get wanting to avoid policing political thought but does shutting it all down produce the best community? Does allowing power users to disable commentary on certain topics create the community you are trying to build?

We're far from "shutting it all down"; that's what those links in my GP comment are about. It's a question of which stories/threads have the best chance at supporting a thoughtful discussion.

Not disagreeing, but it shouldn't be flagged.

It was flagged, then un-flagged, now flagged again.

Because you have two parties of HN users that happily flag, which is enough. Those who are Trump supporters and those who just don't want any politics / the discussions surrounding it on HN. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Doesn't seem to be a duplicate, so dang might unflag it and remove the filter if he sees the thread.

You can always email dang about Flags you think are unjust. He's pretty responsive and fair. Just checkout the contact page linked at the bottom

Everything Musk related gets flagged in seconds.

Welcome to absolute free speech.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com