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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it's a pattern for sure. Lotta folks seem to not want other people to talk about this kind of thing. Same goes for most other Trump administration articles.

I get not wanting to read it, but that's not what flagging is for IMO...

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Visit /active: https://news.ycombinator.com/active

You'll see every single article criticizing DOGE has been flagged by users, in order to try to bury it.

Im surprised my comment is still up!

I guess the HN crowd are too able to understand what's happening. There's too much specific criticism here. Who is blocking these discussions? Where else can we go? Every day the discussions here are blocked. YCombinator has taken a side and it is a worrying one.

There are a very large number of discussion venues online that do not tend to penalize controversial political issues. Many of them have strong political biases (but, then again, so does HN.)

I'm aware that there are other discussion forums but the demographic here has a very specific technical knowledge which is hugely relevant to current events. I want to see these things discussed by people with that knowledge. Other forums have different userbases. That's why it's distressing to see YCombinator take such a clear side in this, or at least not seem to care about the clear abuse of the flagging system.

I agree. If the articles were "Major government IT system crashes and loses data" or "NASA victim of cyber-attack" or "United States Digital Service product roadmap," then the articles would be on-topic and unflagged. But, as soon as the words Elon or DOGE enter the picture, they're insta-flagged. Yes, these topics tend to get heated but that doesn't make them off-topic or irrelevant to a tech news site, or justify user flagging.

Bizarre that startup news isn't a place we can talk about the US government turning into a startup.

Well, I agreed with the parent's comment until I clicked on your link. I'm not american, but I understand how important these topics are for you. However, /active is completely filled with US government news and politics. I would not access HN if that was the homepage, honestly.

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