You Are Still Crying Wolf

I don't live in the US but this election has made me extremely sad. The amount of false information on both sides, causing both sides to become even more entrenched into their beliefs and hostile to each other.

And like I said in a previous post: at the end of the day, blue states voted blue, red states voted red and swing states were won/lost on very, very few votes. If you removed TV and media from the equation (that is, if you removed the ridiculous 1+ year long campaign season in the US), this election would look as if it were just any old regular election.

People like to say Trump is an outsider but this isn't his first presidential bid and he seems to have been preparing for this for a long time. And for an outsider, he knows how to play politics really well. He knew to hijack the republican platform in his favour, for example. He played the media like puppets, giving him a ton of free air time.

There's very, very real issues with not just his campaign but the upcoming 4 years. The people he already appointed, or is considering appointing to his staff for example (including the famous climate change denier as head of the EPA; and people are also already mentioning Bannon here in the comments). But when the data is drowning in a ton of nonsense noise about assassinations, conspiracies and ad hominems, neither side even wants to hear the issues anymore. When you've spent a year building up a few grand canyons worth of divide between the two parties, no matter how loud you shout the other side is not going to hear you.

Edit: This quote deserves a highlight:

Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?

Edit 2: Sigh, the article's been flagged. There goes any hope of actually having a discussion about shit that matters.

Users flagged it, and were correct to flag it.

I understand the desire to use HN to discuss "shit that matters", a.k.a. political and social controversies, but it isn't what HN is for. Were we all to let it be what HN is for, HN would become like all the other places we come here to get away from.

This has been distorted by the political season. We can't expect to be immune to macro trends. But that makes it even more important to remind ourselves what HN is and isn't. Is: a place to gratify intellectual curiosity. Isn't: a political or ideological battlefield.

Outside of a clickbaity headline which plenty of valid articles have, how does this article qualify as the item of a "political or ideological battlefield"?

I definitely don't want to start a "flagging this article is censorship!!" flamewar, I'm just curious about the rationale. And even though I've been posting here for a while I'm still relatively new and don't know all the rules and conventions. This is the first flagged article that I found interesting and worthwhile. (In fact I read the article, then went back to read the comments here, and had trouble finding it again because it was flagged!)

That's what's happening. Users flagged this story, moderators haven't touched it. My comment just says why I think the user flags were correct.

Edit: btw, on HN the term "flag" and the "[flagged]" marker always indicate community action: users clicking on links that say 'flag'. Moderators do other things, some of which are visible and some not, but we didn't do anything here. We never use the word 'flag' to describe a moderator action (we might say 'penalize' or 'downweight' instead). On HN you can think of 'flag' as a semi-technical term with a precise definition.

That's what's happening.

Discouraging discussion of this story may be the best for HN, but it doesn't seem fair to call this a 'community decision' unless the number of flags is comparable to the number of upvotes. If it's not, once the moderators have noticed the flagging, it seems fair to say that the moderators have made a decision that the minority should prevail. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad decision, but once you've reviewed it I think you should own it as informed editorial moderation.

On HN you can think of 'flag' as a semi-technical term with a precise definition.

Sometimes articles are marked as both [flagged] and [dead]. What's the difference in status between the two? I thought flagged meant the article was moved down the list, but I didn't find this one present even when following 'More' to the end. Is 'vouching' something that is possible only on [dead] articles? Does it make sense to view 'vouch' and 'flag' as counteracting each other? Even if it doesn't make the article visible again, it might be nice if it was possible to register a 'no-flag' dissent.

Re second para: User flags make a post drop in rank and, beyond a certain threshold kill the post as well (unless it has many comments). [flagged] means there are lots of flags. [dead] means the post was killed. A [dead] a.k.a. killed post is closed to new comments and is visible only to users who have 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile. Flags are one way for a post to become dead, but there are others, such as the site being banned. Moderators typically don't kill posts, unless we're banning a user or a site. Vouches are anti-flags but only exist when a post is [dead]; their purpose is to counteract any flags that are making the post be [dead]. You're right that we could have 'vouch' show up even if an article is merely [flagged] rather than [dead]. I'd have to think a bit about that. Have I answered your questions? :)