Hacker News Guidelines

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics

I'd welcome a firmer hand on eliminating these submissions.

The solution space for this is pretty small, meaning that most things that feel like they might work (e.g. just ban politics) don't actually work. But the answer we've converged on over the years is pretty stable: some political overlap is inevitable and ok, but the articles should be ones that can support an intellectually curious conversation rather than just garden-variety flamewar.

Here are some past explanations of how we approach this. If anyone reads those and still has a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 (July 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 (April 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 (Nov 2019)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 (May 2018)

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

users tend to be quite good at flagging most highly political stories, so they disappear off the front page pretty quickly but can still be found by those who really want to engage. The status quo is good imo

Certain high profile stories get flag protection, which seems controversial to me, especially when used silently and only admitted to after the fact. I can't remember the specific one but it was one in the wake of Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. It ranked highly despite the flags it was getting, according to dang.

Sure, we sometimes turn off user flags when the article contains significant new information and the topic seems intellectually interesting.

Most of what we do is "done silently and only admitted to after the fact". HN is a curated/moderated site; it always has been. We don't publish a moderation log but it's always possible to get an answer to a question—you just have to ask.