Previous flagged discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43544534
210 points, 146 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43544534
210 points, 146 comments
I think this shows the worst part of HN. You can have thoughtful and interesting discussions 100+ comments and wider. But when a few people are triggered, they feel that they want to ruin the discussion for everybody else. Whereas they could have closed the tab, and move on.
No clue how to solve it at a wider scale. For me? I just don't engage in topics I don't care about. No need to force my views on others.
Update: it took 5 minutes for this article to also be flagged. Sigh.
Maybe to flag, you should have to click 'hide' first, and be angry enough that you then go and look it up in the hidden list to flag it.
It's short sighted, when this kind of thing comes banging on their door, they won't be able to 'flag' it away.
Edit: I don’t have the exact theory of the inner workings but always assumed that’s why vouching existed. You are more effectively weighting the opinion of higher karma folks to help drive the site. You could always vouch for something but with each cycle it might down weight it as that’s a signal the story is too contentious. You probably lose some valuable discussions but also get to cut many more that are worthless.
I'm looking at the simple fact that flagging/disappearing an article with 150 comments by a select minority is abhorrent in of itself. (Doubly ridiculous is the disappeared article is about disappearing people.)
Again, if you're too triggered about a subject matter, close the tab. Turns out, that's a really simple operation.
As the person who you responded to noted, you don't know why other people flagged a thread. None of us do. That you believe it's due to tribal battles is your own projection.
What's not a projection is that many people chose to have a discussion on a topic despite the flag, and that's interesting, so maybe worth discussing.
But you don't know that, so the claim is projection. As a flagger, you only know why you flagged, but don't know why anyone else flagged. There are many alternative reasons any given story, political or otherwise, could be flagged. People can be engaging in tribalism as their reason for flagging. What's worse: engaging in discussion that is along tribal lines, or hiding discussion for tribal reasons? Which does more damage to this community?
Since we can't know why a given story is flagged, a better discussion might be: given that many people in the community want to discuss a topic despite a flag, how can HN better support those community members?
We have one signal: a low-fidelity binary flag we can't know the reason for and how many people voted for it; and another signal: the discussion, a high fidelity signal we can look into and see all kinds of useful discourse. So clearly your claim that these topics are not wanted on HN is false, given the community involvement in these topics.
Maybe there is some tribalism, but generally it's not at all like reddit, and I find those discussion insightful. Maybe you don't, and that's fine. But why does that mean you get veto over the many people who want to have those discussions here?
Why can't we support those discussions, that again people here want to have, in a way that doesn't involve treating the topic as verboten? Because you keep saying these topics miss the HN mark, yet the community is continually interested in these topics.
So maybe it's the guidelines miss the mark and need updating to meet the community where it's at.
And yes I'm aware of how the flag and vouch system works.
My point was that given the amount of discussion that occurs every day about how this mechanism is failing to meet community needs, perhaps HN needs to start talking about better ways to serve the people.
However there is a large difference in mindset between the following:
1. I don't like the topic or the conversation, so I'm closing the tab or leaving.
2. I'm going to shit on the people who are talking, and force THEM to leave.
That's what flagging does.
And I'm arguing that flagging a post with 150+ comments where people are having spirited discussions is a terrible poisonous thing for a community.
I can speak for myself, I don’t care to see political posts that don’t involve anything new and also have low signal in the discussion. You end with either side either demonizing or praising. Again that’s simply my take on it which might differ from others. It’s not I don’t like the topic but rather I don’t want HN to be another space that gets overwhelmed with political talk. Same with discussions on Israel vs Palestine.
> 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 may be familiar with the layer structure of communications: Internetwork layer,below that transport, below that link layer, and at the bottom the physical layer. The physical layer is where it gets really messy: noise, interference, reflections,whatever.
In human interaction, at the bottom layer is the simple fact that at any time, any human can just not follow the rules. That's not necessarily wrong. Maybe the rule just isn't important, and everyone recognises that. Or maybe some deep moral principle should override it. But at that point, other people have to make a moral call - do they ignore this breach of the rules? Do they object? Do they assess the moral principle as overriding?
The military have some usefully neutral terms for behaviors, one of which is 'revisionist'. A revisionist power wants to change the rules, a status quo power wants to keep them. It's fairly clear that the US government is presently a revisionist one. That means that pretty much everyone has now to make the call as to whether what they see is allowable or, given the scale and power of the US federal government, a five-alarm fire. And they will often want to take that to places where they have some kind of trust in the intelligence or good will of the other people there. For a lot of engineers, that's right here. If this were a workplace or uni, there would be break rooms and water-coolers where this kind of discussion could go. But HN has none of that - there's only one category of discussion. So if you flag every such discussion, you're denying them the opportunity to do that. And that's not keeping politics out of HN - that's a political act itself.
If you think you can bury your head and ignore politics for any amount of time, you are mistaken. Your purchases, comments, and actions are all political and strategic, whether you want to believe them to be or not.
It's good to compartmentalize topics. Your argument is like complaining you're not learning Geography in your Physics class. The subject of the site is not politics and that is by design.
This design has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of any given submission related to the topic of politics. Conflating "people who want to keep conversations on-topic" and "people who support policy X" is not fair, helpful or accurate.
Could you recommend some other forums where politics are allowed but people also have a deep technical knowledge and understanding? With also an expected level of mutual respect and effort given to discussion?
Go flag this one then.
Maybe think about this before knee-jerk flagging
We are not in normal times to have normal rules.
The spirit of HN guidelines still exist. What value do you believe is derived from a discussion like this?
I believe the people sent to a gulag would dislike more people not eschewing the sanctity of a internet forum, than someone 'trivializing' their suffering by using them for argument about how their situation should be discussed in said forum.
The value is that right now a HN user on a visa could be disappeared in to dungeon for months for political speech if Marco Rubio's goons notice him.
[I w]ish there was a "vouch" option for when things that the US political right feels is an attack, despite it just being facts and worthy of discussion in an economic sector that is heavily connected with immigration, is flagged.
I think they detract from HN and before you start accusing me of being something I am not, I fully support due process. It’s bit of a blurry line but it comes down to seeing how polarizing these topics are and the horse has already been beaten. I always have felt that HN is a mix of excellent moderation as well as a bit of the will of the audience. I don’t want this to be a place to talk politics, it’s already so pervasive.
On Bluesky and X you're actually fairly likely to read the conversation or at least policy viewpoints of actual policy makers and think tanks. Rather than hackers speculating about a field they have little experience in.
This community DOES generally have a higher level of discourse than other parts of the internet and I don't believe that is wholly because we avoid contentious topics. (thus my vim vs emacs example)
Israel v Palestine. Lots of posts will pop up over time. If it’s simply an another attach or similar and you start seeing a he roll of disagreement from both sides, flag. There is nothing additive to it. I remember vouching a story though that was touching on Israel’s PR marketing ability of the war. That’s fascination and both new as well as high potential to discuss something new.
In the current immigration and administration. I feel like to some degree the horse has been beaten. There is not much to add for yet another misstep in the administrations policy. There is both no new interesting angles from the news itself and the discussion has been beaten to death by both sides already.
It is not an indication that the topic is not important but to me that there is nothing left to say on the topic. I am certain there are folks that would love to keep going on and on about it for either side but nothing new or engaging comes from it. I am sure others disagree but that is my mental model.