Probably related "[flagged] Ask HN: Is Hacker News Being Manipulated?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42925174 (it's not, long standing users flag and IMHO hackernews users go to other forums for US politics)
if y'all find joy in any of this, i envy you, as my mental health is shot.
I don't think people are able to have a constructive conversation about him now. Non-constructive conversations are all over the internet. Your "free speech" is your cacophony that drowns out what I want to hear.
And actually I don't "flag anything about Elon Musk" but I sure think about it if it's not about rocketry or electric cars.
I did make a long decision long ago I was never going to make an auto-flagger or an auto-upvoter.
Also the "flag" is not a ban hammer. One person flagging something has no effect, it takes some N number of flags, not very big, to make a difference.
1. Most politics is off topic for HN. Sometimes stories are either relevant enough or important enough that they "should" be discussed on HN anyway. (No real great guidelines for which is which that I have seen.)
2. The second time a story is posted (even if it's a different source article), it's much more flag-worthy. We don't need to discuss it 17 times. (Repeat posts are fine, after, say, a year. Not after 12 hours, though.)
3. Politics threads have a higher-than-average chance of turning into flame wars, and a lower-than-average ratio of good comments. They still beat political discussions almost anywhere else, though, and should not be automatically flagged just because they're hypothetically likely to cause a flame war.
4. Misleading headlines and flamebait articles are much more likely to be flagged, and to deserve it.
5. It's not (mostly) coordinated. A bunch of us just don't want the 30 items on the front page to consist of 10 articles about Musk, 7 about DOGE, 5 about Trump, and 8 about what was "normal HN stuff" until about 2 weeks ago.
6. Flagged stories show as "flagged" up to a point, then "dead" if they are flagged more than that. Users can "vouch" for dead threads (but not for flagged ones). Do it too often and you lose your "vouch" privileges, though.
7. Dang un-flags some stories that are flagged that he thinks are important, even if the subject is political, and even if the larger story (Trump/DOGE) has already been discussed several times recently. That surprised me.