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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The "smaller group" here is anyone with over 500 karma. You're going to have to find some other place to have "contentious go-fuck-yourself arguments" --- about literally anything --- because they are anathema to curious conversation, which is the overriding goal of this site. That goal isn't changing just because we're all activated about politics right now, just like it wasn't in 2017.

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We just fundamentally disagree. From my perspective you are the antithesis of curious conversation by censoring topics you don't want to discuss. I don't want to read the latest update on some dumb framework but I don't flag the post.

Also getting 500 karma on HN isn't hard.

Right, my point is, it's not in fact a small group of people.

Getting 500 karma is a trivial task and not some tiny group. Are there any HN regulars (that don't just lurk) that don't have that much karma?

The point is a flag has higher weight than an upvote, and it's easy to get the ability to flag posts.

Right, again, my point: the cohort of people who can be flagging these articles is quite large. It's not a small number of gatekeeping old-timers.

dang has admitted that flagging carries more weight than voting, we just don't know what the weighing is.

Sure, sounds right.

So then it's not an equal flagging vs equal upvoting, it's fewer flags by fewer people being able to derail a post off the front page which may have been upvoted by 10x or 100x as many people as flagged it.

The fact that it's easy to get the ability to flag just makes it easier to abuse by people who want to censor certain topics.

It's worked this way for 1,492 years (in Internet years) and mostly for the best. When stories get flagged inappropriately, you email Dan, and he usually fixes it. Seems good to me.

Because it's very longstanding precedent, you're going to have to do more than just notice it out loud for the first time to change it.

For what it's worth, I didn't just not flag this story, or even just upvote it; I submitted it (and was beaten to the punch). It's a good HN story! But I can absolutely understand why the Trump-Story-Flaggers would have reflexively flagged this story. These threads are incredibly tedious and corrosive to the community.

I realize this website has operated more or less the same for a long time. But as it becomes increasingly popular it's going to become a bigger target for abuse by people wanting to push a narrative. I'm just commenting on why it's been more frustrating for me lately than it has in the past.

There is no correct answer to this problem. I'm just critiquing it in its current form and explaining why, to me (and many other people who have complained about it recently), it's getting worse.

Another thing it's been it's been for a long time is "increasingly popular". If anything, groupthink and common narrative are easier on a smaller site.

There's this strain of navel gazing on this size where people think that they talk about productive shit and this is somehow a better site than other social media sites because 'we don't talk about politics or celebrities, we talk about curiousity!'

But people on HN upvote and argue about California zoning laws or San Francisco drug policy here, AI policies from the US federal government or the DMA from the EU. Or the SLS rocket. It's all politics.

Sam Altman and PG are the celebrities here, not the Kardashians and people never stop talking about poops on San Francisco streets as if this is an important issue for the US or international community of the site.

'political' is just used as a euphemism for 'taboo' and there are many unspoken taboos about what is talked and not talked about here.

I would be shocked if anyone came up with a new argument about this dynamic, which has been argued about since the earliest days of the site.

I'll tell you the new argument about this dynamic -- the US is tanking hard and the influence of sites like HN is going to wane and will inevitably be replaced by European sites.

People outside of the bay area and outside of the US are tired of this crap.

Don't threaten me with a good time! I'd love it if there were more places like HN. I like Lobsters, but it's too insular. Start Euro-HN!

I think Dan is an amazing moderator, one of the all-time greats, but there are lots of different moderation arrangements that can work, and different goals for forums to have. What I like are forums! Not just this forum.

> I'll tell you the new argument about this dynamic -- the US is tanking hard and the influence of sites like HN is going to wane and will inevitably be replaced by European sites.

I'd much prefer it be replaced by something led/focused/moderated out of the Global South....if I didn't loathe the idea of doing content moderation myself, maybe I'd fire up a HN-clone marketed in those other regions...

I'm totally down with that, I just think that it will probably originate from Europe because of inertia with money.

If anything it'll be from some middle ground in that it will originate from a country like Estonia that has a lot going on with startups and the whole digital democracy thing figured out.

My argument isn't about 'political' at all, neither are the public moderator's main arguments.

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