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Comment by int0x29 | Hacker News Reader

And it's flagged. It is far to easy for organized fringe groups to control the narrative here by just killing anything they don't like.

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If users didn't flag opinion pieces on hot divisive topics, HN's front page would consist of nothing but opinion pieces about hot divisive topics. As that would be an entirely different site, user flags are vital to preserving HN for its intended mandate. As I put it years ago, we need those white blood cells.

If you want to call that an "organized fringe group trying to control the narrative", I suppose it's really just a different way of wording the same thing.´

When I look at /new and /active, where flagged topics are present, I definitely don't see them "consist of nothing but opinion pieces and hot divisive topics."

I didn't know this was a thing thank you so much

I have my homepage set to /active, which includes flagged posts. What you're saying here is a constantly repeated justification, that is demonstrably untrue with a single button press.

My feed looks like what an actual, organic tech forum looks like. Discussing topics that are important to people in tech, which obviously includes the important happenings in politics, but is largely interesting stories in the geekosphere.

You only have that luxury because of the tireless effort we put in to preserving the bulk of HN for its intended purpose. The /active page doesn't exist in isolation from the rest of HN; it's a product of it. It depends entirely on a balance that by no means just-happens, but is meticulously and carefully tended to. If we didn't do that, there would be no "organic tech forum" for you to be enjoying, because the site would have been consumed by flames a long time ago.

I thought moderators aren't involved in content flagging (just [dead]-ing) and it's entire user-driven?

Not to diminish the work of mods, of course, but this is mostly about the users who immediately flag stories.

Moderators add flags sometimes, but almost never on submissions. (It's different with comments.) See "What does [flagged] mean?" in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

Please keep in mind that making something a divisive topic is a specific and intentional strategy for suppressing speech.

The topics I'm talking about are genuinely divisive, in the sense of large groups of people opposing each other and feeling passionately.

I don't think "paracetamol doesn't cause autism" is a divisive topic, nor should it ever be. By letting these articles be buried, I believe HN is fostering a culture where lies and misinformations are held to the same standard as actual facts. And in my experience, this seriously degrades the experience of browsing this website.

It's not a question of what "should" be a divisive topic. Every topic in all the major politically-determined topic sets is divisive, and the proof is what happens in the threads when people try to discuss them. Acetominophen might not have been a divisive topic before it got politically charged, but it is now.

It's not the moderators' job to decide what's true and impose that decision on everyone else. The community would hate it if we tried to run HN that way—it's probably one of the few things that political enemies would come together and agree on.

We don't have a truth meter [1]. It's the community's job to sort out what's true and false. It's the mods' job to (try to) ensure that people (try to) do that through thoughtful, respective conversation rather than flamewar, snark, or attacks, in keeping with the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's easy and all too satisfying to imagine that if the mods would simply impose your idea (<-- I don't mean you personally, but any of us) of what's true and false, what's lies and misinformation, etc., then the site would get magically and massively better. However, different users have radically different sets of what they consider true vs. lies—why should we select one and not another? This would just be a different way of imposing our own viewpoint on the community. It's not our temperament to do that, and as I mentioned, the community would never tolerate it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

By my count, a very effective strategy.

I submitted this because I thought the article made insightful points about how an announcement like this can pave the way for downstream policy changes. I’m not trying to start a debate about the announcement itself.

there is nothing wrong with what you posted

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