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Comment by mateus1 | Hacker News Reader

Topics mentioning DOGE and Musk are being quickly flagged here in HN, so I don’t think there is much hope for discourse here.

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Its completely obvious that a bot army is gaming the system. Posts are flagged within minutes of posting

I am in the habit of flagging anything related to American politics. It never leads anywhere and seems orthogonal to HN.

Yea, I got tired of people attempting to make comments like this and wrote a script to quickly analyze past comment history to see if they were truly being honest.

You have consistently and reliably posted your political views here. Please don't try to pretend that you hate the political discourse now that people are critical of your guy.

First not my guy. I'm not left enough to vote for Trump. Second I can both flag and comment as I did here.

> I'm not left enough to vote for Trump

What can this sentence possibly even mean. Trump is left to you?

There's this growing sentiment among some Republicans that Trump isn't conservative enough and that Democrats, a centrist party relative to most developed nations, are left wing lunatics/socialists/communists.

My mind is blown

You should learn more about the political landscape. It will clear up a lot of these questions. And I mean that sincerely. If you see everything as left or right it’s quite confusing.

Yes that's correct. He's been in office four years prior so we know his record.

I feel like you could put posters through a sentiment analysis and maybe use that to write a browser plugin to annotate posters on hn.

Ok, but do you want American politics discussion on HN or not? Why the purity test?

I am a regular on HN and I disagree. So, do we cancel each other out?

That's not a bad thing. That's probably how it is suppose to work.

I hope that we were beyond first-past-the-post voting. I would like to see a ranked-choice or star voting to determine whether something should be flagged.

I would also appreciate using tools like this AI system[1] to identify and limit hate-filled posts. It's only accurate about 90% of the time, but that's an acceptable loss for me, even if my speech gets filtered.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-versus-online-hate-speech

"Political" is not a binary true or false. There are plenty of on-topic articles here that merely have "political overlap" as dang[1] puts it, and they should not be flagged. To be fair, this article seems to be more towards the "purely political" side of the spectrum and was probably correctly flagged.

I think this rule is generally followed by HN's users, but for whatever reason, anything that touches "Elon" or "DOGE" always gets insta-buried, whether or not it's tech-related, whether or not it's interesting, whether or not it's worth discussing.

I don't think it's automated bots, but there is most certainly an online Elon Defense Brigade of real users out there trying to bury anything negative about the guy. I don't know what would make someone devote so much time to defending the honor of a billionaire. It's almost religious.

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

That's not obvious at all.

People refresh all day here and often on the new post and new and comment feeds specifically, and many earnest users who take pride in maintaining a certain character to the site are quick to flag anything that's likely to devolve into noise and vitriol, like most political topics.

It can be frustrating to have them do that when you really wish you could to commiserate, explore, or debate the community on these topics, but bots aren't at play. Many people just don't see this as the right place to have these discussions and work to keep it that way.

While almost all of are political in some way, and most of us are tracking all these same events, we don't all want talk about it here.

I really wish people, widely, would stop blaming bots. I am sure there are plenty of bots doing lots of things, but by immediately attributing this behavior to bots I think we detach ourselves from a fundamental fact: there are a lot of US citizens that are so far drowning in propaganda that they actually manufacture reason for much of this insanity without much provocation or incentive beyond it being done by their tribe.

I don't think flagging automatically kills posts, no?

It's still here, and anyone who finds HN posts by rss or other means will see the headline, url & have access to this discussion (although it might be closed to replies by then)

The reason they are flagged is precisely because there isn’t much hope for discourse, not the other way around. Also, I think per the guidelines, these types of discussions are also not welcome:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

The guidelines also say the following, so I’ll just stop here:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Given your comment history, trying to call out others on this rule is interesting. But we all can improve, I guess!

I am not calling anyone out - just pointing out this rule exists. I am pretty confused about this rule for what it’s worth. I feel like a lot of content I see on HN is political or ideological at a basic level - like articles about Trump or Ukraine or DOGE or whatever, which are everywhere since January. So if the discussion is “allowed” (like not flagged), I am not sure how to contribute to those discussions without being political or ideological myself. Maybe the rule exists because these discussions can easily become unhealthy - like aggressive comments, downvotes, etc.

Its a guideline, not a rule.

Fair enough. Thanks for the thoughtful response.

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