That's only a solution for half of the problem on Hacker News. The other half is that most submissions about gender/diversity get flagged to death very consistently, which make it difficult to have any meaningful discussion about these topics.
One of the problems with the topic is that essentially every Hacker News reader feels as though they're qualified to comment on the topic. This translates into massive nested threads that blow up with people arguing the same points.
I'm not convinced that discussion of these issues on Hacker News does anything to push the ball forward. I have yet to meet the person who changed their position on the subject due to an internet argument.
Not many people commented on it. I believe the flame-war detector only takes significant effect when # comments > # points, which is a pretty good heuristic for a flame war that has gone out of control.
This is the fundamental problem. No matter how a story gets made invisible, once it gets in that state nobody knows how it got there and whether or not it was justified. Not to mention that no matter how those stories vanish, HN (by community or systems) is not facilitating discussion on diversity, sexism, racism, etc. in tech.
It isn't user flagging that makes meaningful discussion difficult. It's the discussers, unfortunately, who are doing that. I wonder if you may have cause and effect reversed here.
Also, it isn't true that most of these submissions get flagged to death. Some do, but most don't, so in most cases the discussions continue. Moderators also sometimes unkill stories that were flag-killed, precisely so discussions can continue. (An example from last night is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8083596).
Are you wondering whether revoking selected users' flagging privileges would change the balance on these stories? I doubt it would. We're talking about a larger-scale response than measures like that can really address. The community is divided in at least two ways: on the issues themselves, and also on the HN discussions about them.
I used to flag a lot of these stories as soon as I saw them. I stopped doing that and now I wait until the discussion turns toxic - which it almost always does - before I flag them.
I'm not sure that waiting for the conversations to turn awful is a useful tactic.
Also, it would be great to know if there was vote-ring style detection on some of these threads. It feels pretty clear that there is infiltration from RedPill like posters who vote and post in groups, but I am aware that this is strongly playing to my biases and perhaps it's just people who happen to agree with each other.
I don't think I've ever flagged a thread based on the comments (down votes are sufficient), but that's not a bad idea.
Overzealous punctuation. Fixed, thanks.
I have no idea how you folks did it, but you've somehow gotten rid of all those people. I've scanned all the comments here and, though I don't agree with all of them, none of them appear to contain ridiculously specious arguments.
On the other hand I have had such discussions suck many hours away. I understand that this is a topic very dear to many peoples hearts, but it seems like one of those things that are just not a good fit for HN.
There are a lot of us who think that the code you write matters more than the gonads you carry or the color of your skin. We're quickly becoming pariahs as our workplaces become more politicized.
I don't know why more people don't understand that equality of opportunity is perfectly compatible with inequality of outcomes. Does nobody read Harrison Bergeron anymore?
It's an easy theoretical thing to understand, it would be good to see equality of opportunity in practice.
I find it funny. Some controversial or just plain stupid opinion gets posted, dang responds to it with basically "I disapprove of this post soooo much, and I'm glad that HN does too, judging by the downvotes. Pats HN on the head". Then a whole bunch of regular users reply with how awesome his reply was for telling the poster that he was an idiot/bigot.
I mean, they can of course moderate or whatever in whatever way they want to. I just don't understand why so many are fascinated by it.