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Comment by forvelin | Hacker News Reader

why is this flagged ?

I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:

1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful

2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)

3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation

An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.

You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...

We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.

In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.

Can you remember any pro-Israeli posts you turned flags off for since the October 7 attack?

They don’t get flagged though.

Yes they are, just like the comment you answered to will.

Can you point to any pro-Israeli posts on HN since October 7, flagged or not?

I can't remember virtually anything - this is not a joke - having one's brain be sandblasted by the firehose every day turns memory into a dodgy thing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). I believe there have been some, though not as many. That's largely a function of the submission feed, i.e. which articles the community submits, upvotes, or flags. All we can do is respond case-by-case, and we try to do that in a principled way. The principles we apply (or try to) have been explained many times and can be found via https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... and links from those comments.

If you feel like the submission feed and/or the moderation decisions on top of it are biased, all I can tell you is that everyone feels that way, especially on any topic they are passionate about. You needn't look far for examples of commenters complaining that we're suppressing and censoring the Gaza story - there are some in this thread.

What I feel a lot more confident talking about, in terms of balanced moderation, is the comments. We've moderated, warned, and banned many accounts for breaking the site guidelines while posting anti-Israeli (and sometimes even anti-semitic) comments, and we'll continue to do that. That's something we take very seriously, and of course, we do the same the other way round as well.

Thanks for the answer (and what seems to be unflagging the comment). Having some experience moderating (of course, much smaller) communities I understand it's impossible to keep everyone satisfied.

I, of course, can't judge the intent or the effort. What I can say is that I read all captions of 150+ votes submission, rarely skipping any, and I saw 20+ pro-Palestine ones and zero pro-Israeli ones. I think this is quite objective measure.

At some point I thought it might be intentional but now I think it is just bias amplification: these submission are flagged too fast and upvoted too slow to get anywhere.

Coincidentally, I just used hn.algolia to look up one of your old comments where you describe being sandblasted, and was surprised to find the most recent use of "sandblasted" on HN is by you, linking to an algolia search of you saying "sandblasted".

Thank you sincerely for your sacrifice, Dan. Whenever I have an urge to flame, I picture my impending comment as one more grain of sand speeding towards your cranium, and instead I step away from the keyboard.

This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content?

What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.

I literally can’t say anything pro humanity without it being flagged even if it hints negativity towards Israel.

> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective

I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.

What are you talking about? Iran topics get flagged at least as often as Gaza (in proportion to the amount to posts on the topic).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599742

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849715

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553599

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839106

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754132

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624529

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me.

I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.

I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.

Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.

Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.

I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.

Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.

I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.

The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.

@dang any explanation for this being flagged?

Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?

I also would appreciate knowing if the mods see this. I'm worried that flagging is possibly automated and vulnerable to campaigning.

We eventually saw it, but only randomly.

In case you didn't see them yet, here are some of my other comments in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141678

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141517

Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.

Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.

I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.

The rise and fall of peer review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123133 - Feb 2026 (0 comments)

Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899 - Feb 2026 (692 comments)

Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119210 - Feb 2026 (440 comments)

Music Discovery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114672 - Feb 2026 (56 comments)

The 7-Year Bug That Took 3 Minutes to Fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090261 - Feb 2026 (1 comment)

AI made coding more enjoyable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075400 - Feb 2026 (97 comments)

RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934499 - Feb 2026 (52 comments)

Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845567 - Feb 2026 (9 comments)

There is an AI code review bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766961 - Jan 2026 (249 comments)

Proof of Corn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511 - Jan 2026 (307 comments)

XLibre XServer 25.1 Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474846 - Jan 2026 (4 comments)

Python Data Science Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120611 - Dec 2025 (61 comments)

NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995834 - Nov 2025 (228 comments)

Best shipping logistic aggregator in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 - Nov 2025 (0 comments)

WebDAV isn't dead yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698070 - Oct 2025 (128 comments)

Unicode Footguns in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689443 - Oct 2025 (20 comments)

AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627171 - Oct 2025 (124 comments)

Super Ace: Your PH Home for Jili Slots and a 300% Welcome Bonus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939 - Oct 2025 (0 comments)

Pkgbase Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 - July 2025 (42 comments)

As always, thanks for the transparency.

It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?

If the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions.

If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.

Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.

Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.

I know I'm changing the goal posts here, but out of that list, while the articles' quality does vary, I don't see much (or any) rulebreaking, besides https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939

Are you saying that flaggers flag things that shouldn't be flagged? If so, I agree, of course.

That sort of flag is usually outweighed by other variables though.

(@dang doesn't work. I only saw this randomly.)

Your question is answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443, but the short version is that your assumption that we see everything is incorrect.

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