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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I’m glad the flagging system exists on HN but I think it could do with improvements. I think it would be interesting to be able to see how many flags an item has gotten and who has flagged it.

There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc) despite those topics generating a lot of discussion. It would be interesting to have clearer visibility into whether this kind of thing is spontaneous or whether there is a core group of power users censoring topics they dislike.

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Agreed. While I really value HN's commitment to not becoming Reddit, the intersection of politics and tech (and their effects on our lives) is indisputable. If we can't talk about the government's use of technology as a tool of the state without it being considered a 'hot button' topic - especially considering the relevance that politics have always had to 'hackers' - then this is really just a site for discussions about technology fluff.

The biggest example of this is on military stuff. You can literally post northrup grumman placed articles from military trade journals fawning over some new weapon system and that's fine, that's technology. But any comment about the applications of that technology, who it will be used on, by whom, for whose benefit, with what consequences, all of that is off limits. That's political.

I fully understand that this is a legitimate preference of a lot of people. But it is revolting.

Different caliber, but same thing happens with Grok.

New Grok release? Fun, exciting, let’s all talk about it.

Well-researched articles describing Grok’s alignment with far-right/white supremacist politics and clear evidence of Musk’s thumb on the scale? Nothing to see here, flag flag flag.

Oh look, it’s Grokipedia! Surely this will be a font of well-sourced information!

Sigh.

Something I've been trying to work out the last couple years is how much is this a nazi site now, that we are reputation laundering by continuing to participate here in good faith. These moderation policies may not have been intended to create this outcome but they have, and they are not being changed in light of that.

You must also understand this is hacker news, not politics news. Sure, this may be a comfortable area for many users and one of the only forum/news sites they browse, but nonetheless it's not a politics site. I, for one, would rather not see politics on this site. If I want to partake in that discussion, I'll go elsewhere to a place more "built" for it

But the definition of what counts as "politics" is entirely arbitrary. A thread complaining about, say, homeless people in SF will remain just fine. We'd all be better off with meaningful guidelines.

I think my last paragraph addressed your position already?

in some cases you can't disentangle the two

If we can't talk about the government's use of technology

The same goes for technology's use of government, be that in the form of subsidies to tech firms or golden presents for politicians. This has to be talked about since the intersection with product lines or tech pricing etc. is converging on 100% (hyperbole, but still).

> There’s a clear pattern to items that get flagged (those that are critical of right wing causes in particular, Musk, DOGE, ICE etc)

Have you considered that it could be that left wingers are more likely to submit political posts on a technology forum rather than right wingers only flagging left wing posts?

Your faulty assumption is that any criticism of DOGE, ICE etc is automatically “left wing”. Not true.

My point is not a left vs right one, it’s that topics like DOGE are worthy of discussion on HN. They are absolutely tech relevant. Many other topics with a tech angle are left up, but those are not. It’s not difficult to see why.

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