I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

Generic ideological tangents never lead anywhere interesting and pretty much guarantee contentless flamewars, so please don't take HN threads in such directions.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15010185 and marked it off-topic.

Could you explain why this post is disapearing from the frontpage as fast as it is? Even though it has the most votes in very little time. (see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011458)

Users are flagging it heavily, as they have been flagging most opinion pieces that have appeared during this tidal wave.

People who feel strongly one way or the other typically want to see the articles they agree with stay on the front page and the ones they disagree with get flagged. But from a systemic point of view, it isn't in HN's interest to have the front page dominated by repetitive arguments (and certainly not repetitive flamewars) about the same thing. That's not what the site is for and not why the majority of HN users come here.

I find the stance of HN admins/managers on these type stories incredibly biased. When something is agreeable to the "more X in tech" trope it stays on the front page for hours and gets hundreds of points. When a story that is counter to that trope gains traction it quickly drops off the page and admins/managers are all over the discussion picking and chosing what to suppress. The whole google memo/James Damore thing is a perfect example of this. I don't know if it is general community bias, astroturfing, censorship, or whatever. It is clear that the community has a lot of interest in this and some entity is very eager to minimize the discussion. It's disgusting.

I think maybe flagging needs to be reworked into: - spam - nsfw content - breaks the rules

So people can flag "bad" stuff and don't remove topics based on their political/social views instead? Currently the system seems to be broken if this happens. This way you could easly penalize the users who try to manipulate by flagging "valid" topics.

I hear you that it seems that way, but it seems the opposite way to people on the opposite side.

Plenty of articles arguing both sides of this hurricane have spent time on HN's front page, and there have been many thousands of comments for and against. At this point nothing new is emerging. If significant new information appears in the developing news story, that's fine, but until that happens, these threads are effectively dupes and it's not unfair for users to flag them. Repetitive rehashing of the same scorched earth is not why most people come here.

Re HN moderation, the phenomenon behind your perception is that both sides of each ideological divide believe, quite fervently, that we're secretly moderating HN to favor the opposing agenda. I'd love to figure out something we could do about this, but alas there doesn't seem much hope of it. For sure these accusations can't all be right since they say opposite things, and what's remarkable is how similar they are except for the one flipped ideological bit.

More on this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14994960 and lots more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... if anyone is interested.