Am I imagining it or has flagging become more frequent? I wanted to suggest that might warrrant an update to the policy on the FAQ and maybe an announcement if it's official.
I think the community is in a phase right now, driven by the massive increase in clawd spam. So the flag button is likely getting clicked more and that has leakage.
Flagging is something the community does, not the two official moderators. What do you see changing in the FAQ?
That makes sense and is certainly legitimate. But I was noticing some politicla topics seem to be most likely to be flagged. I also sometimes see them get flagged before the thread even gets long. So I was wondering if some political topics seem to be off-limits.
Yea, the political side is another aspect, similar to Trump 1.0 if you were around HN for that, but also amped up like everything around Trump 2.0
I was not around for 1.0; it sounds colorful. The HN guidance on curiosity, kindness, being thoughtful and substansive...all solid. The same guidelines describe "politics" as "off topic" but not prohibited. I had thought there may be specific subtopics which are actually prohibited. What I probably have been seeing is that clawdbot is more active on divisive topics, because of key words, and thus gets flagged.
Generally politics gets to the front when it overlaps with some other topic HN is passionate about. Trump must make headlines each day, so the frequency of stories that overlap are elevated.
The number of flags to kill a post is part of the secret sauce. I think dang/tomhow never told anybody about the threshold HN uses. It probably changes from time to time, or perhaps no, who knows.