Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

Expect this post, and any even obliquely critical of Musk or Trump, to be flagged into oblivion.

I've tried to not be cynical but it's bleedingly obvious that there are a group of Musk/Trump supporters here flagging these posts.

Various discussions claim that it's political (and thus "off topic") posts that are flooding HN but there has been very few appearing on the front page, even though they're sunk out of view these posts attract many upvotes and comments.

There are all sorts of off-topic and incidental posts on HN and that's always been the case. Now there is aggressive censorship of one type of post. Just skipping or hiding posts that you're not interested in is not enough apparently.

There is not much that can be done about it, dang has essentially shrugged, which is fine. But please lets not pretend its not happening and that it's not absolutely repugnant.

View on HN

From the Hacker News guidelines⁽¹⁾ (emphasis mine):

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

You should not be surprised when "mainstream" stories are flagged. Folks come to Hacker News for stuff they won't hear about on TV.

⁽¹⁾ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> there has been very few appearing on the front page,

there are like 3-5 of these a day

I think it depends on where you go.

These stories typically drop off /news pretty quickly, but /active has loads and loads of them. I also seem to see flagged ones, which is probably down to my settings.

hckrnews.com is a great interface to see which stories hit the front page and have dropped off.

On the first two pages of /active I see roughly one per day. Are the feeds different for different people? Or maybe the our definitions of "loads" are different in this case. It's true that if I were suddenly seeing so many posts about geckos I would find it a lot.

I guess that a lot of the active threads devolve into politics. Do you see flagged stories as that's a lot of them?

It's the flagged stories I'm talking about, one or two per day. Maybe twice a week one of them will be unflagged and stay up.

One way to interact with HN as a social media site, because it -is- a social media site, is to mostly use the site through it's search bar.

I've had a set of quick links to searches for topics I am interested in for quite a while, typically for the last 24H, sorted by time, usually comments. For instance, I have had a link to a search for "Musk in title" on my bar since the Twitter acquisition, which has made it a lot easier to see what actually gets flagged and what doesn't. Similarly, if you really want a pretty horrific set of opinions, a search for Hamas will reveal that there are plenty of vocal folks here okay with incinerating children.

On one hand, I understand that a lot of folks have a very specific idea about what they want to see on HN.

On the other hand, I'm mostly here because I want to get the opinions of "centrist" capitalists, VC folks, and aspiring tech folks about a wide range of cultural issues. I don't usually want to have those kinds of folks (who I believe are often exhibiting some kind of sociopathy) in my other social media feeds or, god forbid, meat-space life.

Anyhow, it's entirely possible to bend the site to ones' usage (it is a "hacking" space after all). There is much more on the site than what happens on the front page and it's much more useful to log in and see the flagged/dead content.

Thats a good way to approach it, essentially customise your view of HN.

The front page is pretty ordinary most of the time because of uninteresting items, or interesting items have fallen off.

Of course the problem with flagging is it distorts what people see, or can see, since it essentially hides the topic (or at least burys it).

You're complaining about "no politics" rules consistently. Why do you think we need them?

No I'm not, I'm saying this particular subject should not be treated differently.

I only reference politics because it's other people's focus, or excuse for censoring.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com