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Comment by metadope | Hacker News Reader

Anything critical of the administration is going to be, by definition, political.

There is a large contingent within HN who never want any political discussion.

This appears to be an ongoing dynamic tension. The flagging might not be from the right. Just same old same old HN foosball.

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Bollocks. Politics is endemic to tech. It’s impossible to discuss tech without politics.

What some folk want to squash is very particular politics which they don’t want to confront. It violates everything it means to be a hacker in the true sense of the word but I have realized a long time ago that these types of people wear the badge of hacker for their ego only

For me personally, I only want to see politics that are directly tech-adjacent here. I have many other channels for political news that have a much better signal-to-noise ratio. Diluting the tech focus here with average mainstream politics attracts the wrong crowd and adds little of value.

> Diluting the tech focus here with average mainstream politics attracts the wrong crowd and adds little of value.

Flagged stories are some of the most active stories on HN. If the goal is to act as a filter on the kinds of acceptable topics to discuss or the kinds of people to attract to HN, it's a failed one, because the "wrong crowd" is still being attracted and commenting on those stories.

If anything, I see far and away the most amount of bad faith flagging/downvoting and throwaways on those threads. Are people getting their flagging privileges taken away? Are the throwaway's main accounts being banned? Who knows...

The wrong crowd includes organized astroturf groups, bots, trolls, and political junkies who all probably have feeds set up looking for those posts. Can’t escape it anywhere on the internet where general political posts are allowed.

At least the flagging keeps the noise off the front page and discourages an excessive number of general political/news posts.

> Can’t escape it anywhere on the internet where general political posts are allowed.

You actually can. I have political discussions with people who disagree with me in many social spaces.

What you can't do is have there be zero friction to join the conversation and be overly reliant on user moderation tools to do the hard work of moderation for you.

>For me personally, I only want to see politics that are directly tech-adjacent here.

Since when is government censorship of social media posts[1] not "directly tech-adjacent"?

I adore the mental gymnastics here.

[1] The post with Mark Kelly being discussed: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DRMxZAnlUF9/

The article did not make it clear that this was related to social media at all. It just said he “released a video” over and over again. I guess it is related, but it’s a terrible article for not including that fact or linking to the original post.

Thanks for adding context. No thanks for the “mental gymnastics” snark.

The fact that it was a social media post is not an interesting part of the story - he could have just as easily said the same thing on TV to the same result. They aren't trying to censor social media as a result.

> There is a large contingent within HN who never want any political discussion.

There is a large contingent within HN who are bots, and/or are 100% in-line with Thiel and Yarvin

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