I wish politics articles wouldn't make it to the top page of Hacker News. There's already enough political discussion in a million other places.
replies(4):
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1696896000&dateRange=custom&...
While I don't agree with your recount of history, it's off-topic to my question to @dang
In fact, the presence and tone of comments like yours vs the lacking and flagging of pro-Israel gets exactly to the root of my question.
It's common for people with strong feelings on a topic to leap to the conclusion that the mods are biased against their side and secretly supporting the opposite. This happens from every perspective on every divisive topic.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Quote:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, [...]. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I don't mind about what are your personal political affiliations or sympathies, however, I still maintain that this topic is textbook against the guidelines, and because of that I'm still afraid we will see post against candidate X in the front page in a few months. Time will tell.
We only turn off flags when it seems like there's some basis and at least some chance for a reflective, substantive discussion. That isn't possible in the immediate aftermath of a shocking event like the atrocities of Oct 7—the reactions are necessarily going to be reflexive rather than reflective; completely understandably so—but the odds of any thoughtful conversation in that state of shock are basically zero.
Not that this thread or the related ones have been anything close to what I would wish for on HN, in terms of thoughtful conversation, but unfortunately we don't have the ability to make that happen, and not discussing the topic at all seems out of the question as well, so here we are with no good position and no solution.
Your comment doesn't stand to any reason and discussion here on HN are highly moderated, in my opinion at times it's balanced towards Israel as the term 'anti-semitim' is thrown around to stop any discussion and valid criticism about the Gaza war.
You can't appease everyone and 'anti-Semitism' has been weaponised very successfully by people who know exactly what they're doing.
But as I understand you, it's left to the moderator's discretion to unflag topics.
Is there a checklist / criteria of judging whether the users can have a "reflective" or "reflexive" political discussion?
Would 9/11 not be covered because it would be too "reflexive"?
Why was this discussion of this "genocide" viewed as not too "reflexive"?
You have to see how it looks very one-sided. It would be nice for political discussion topic allowance details to be explained.
Currently it leaves a lot of assumptions as you point out.
I'm sure that you have legitimate reasons to feel the way you do, but you're posting to this thread in a way that is against the intended spirit, as I tried to explain it in the pinned comment at the top. Please don't do that. If you can't post in the intended spirit, that's understandable, but in that case please don't post until you can.
(Exactly the same thing, of course, goes for the commenters you're in disagreement with - for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39151611)
The question of how/where to draw the line is tough, but it's also one that we arrived at a relatively stable answer to a long time ago. I've written about this a bunch: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
I'm not saying we always make the right call—we don't, and anyhow people always disagree about what the right call is. But the underlying principles are at least pretty clear.
> Would 9/11 not be covered because it would be too "reflexive"?
Probably? I'd prefer not to discuss counterfactuals because it's impossible to know.
I've explained at length on many occasions how we approach the question of which political topics to allow or turn off flags on - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I know it's unsatisfying, but moderation of these things is never going to be (and certainly never going to feel) completely consistent. We try our best, but it's not possible, and especially not in hindsight, because moderation is guesswork.
Are we allowed to discuss the objective facts on the ground in Gaza or are those facts anti-semitic?
Why must Israel act in a way that includes indiscriminate bombing? Those aren't just my words, by the way, but President Biden's [0], who's a self-proclaimed Zionist. [1]
Isn't it (A) not effective at eliminating Hamas and (B) likely to increase anti-Israel sentiment and radicalize the Gazan population, which is harmful to Israel's long-term security?
[0] https://apnews.com/article/biden-israel-hamas-oct-7-44c4229d... [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/i-am-zionist-how-joe-bidens...
Mokay, but then can I grumble? I've posted several articles on the subject of the alleged genocide of the Palestinians by Israel's IDF, here on HN I mean, and they all got flagged and not unflagged. I took care to post opinions on both sides of the subject, e.g. this public statement by "over 800 scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies" warning of potential genocide [1], and this NYT article by historian of genocide Omer Bartov, saying that genocide is not in evidence ("yet") [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38036236
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38228704
Those are articles by scholars who discuss the subject in the most dispassionate manner imaginable (Bartov is particularly a pleasure to read for his level-headed and erudite analysis, although it's obvious he'll find it very hard to admit genocide by his country which he clearly loves) and I'm pretty sure that means they satisfy the "curious conversation" goal you, dang, hold sacred (and it's good that you do).
So what's up? I've been posting this stuff for months and now the subject has exploded in mainstream discourse with the ICJ case, which makes it even more emotionally charged than before. Wouldn't it have been better to get a chance to discuss this before it got to this point?
And while I appreciate there's not one side that HN favours, the ability to flag anything anyone dislikes shapes the discourse in the way vocal minorities prefer.
Sorry for grumbling. I hope you know I respect and admire the work you've done to keep HN on the straight and narrow.
(My partner claims "<3" looks like I'm mooning you. I assure you that's not the intended meaning).
The usual pattern is that flags come from a 'coalition' of users: some because they hold opposing views, while others just think the story doesn't belong on HN. Maybe they think it's off-topic or otherwise against the site guidelines, or they think the story has already been covered a lot recently, or who knows what.
I took a look at the flags on your two submissions. They followed this pattern. I saw one user whose flagging history looked primarily political, but only one—less than I expected to see. Among the others, here's a sample of other stories that at least one of those same users has flagged:
An Open Letter to the Next School Shooter - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31721682
Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33732913
“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34707305
Call Girl in Calangute Beach Escort Service And91-9319373153 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927067
Humanity Just Witnessed Its First Space Battle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38195174
Did Ancient Rome Have Windows? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38733970
Joe Biden Plans to Ban Logging in US Old-Growth Forests in 2025 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779191
Pregnancies from rape occurring in abortion-ban states - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39147669
Gazan civilians have told Hamas was preventing them from leaving combat areas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39160294
As you can see, there's a range of topics there (all the way to outright spam) and possible motives for flagging. The last one is interesting because unless I'm mistaken, it has opposite politics to the articles you posted. This is a sign of what I mean when I say that not all flaggers are politically motivated.
So that's the flagging side; now for the admin side:
First, we can't moderate anything we don't see and we don't come close to seeing everything. There's just too much. If there's an article you (or anyone) think particularly deserves consideration, I can always be reached at hn@ycombinator.com and I'm happy to take a look.
When deciding whether to turn off flags, one thing we consider is whether a story is substantive enough to provide a foundation for a thoughtful discussion rather than a flamewar. (On a topic like the OP, the odds are sadly awful no matter what the article is, but it is still an important consideration.) I hear you that you think your posts met this condition—I haven't read them, but let's say that's correct. The thing is, it's a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. There are other concerns.
For example, we have to consider how much the topic has been covered recently, and how much coverage of it HN can 'take' without showing signs of breaking under the strain.
People have wildly diverging views about how much is too much. For some users with strong feelings on a topic, no coverage can ever be too much; any limitation at all must be proof that the mods are biased against it. For other users, any coverage is already too much and proves the mods are biased against them. So it goes.
It's trickiest when there's a major ongoing topic that goes on for months and generates a series of stories. We can't just say "no, HN covered that a couple months ago" if there has been a significant state change; but we also have to be careful not to let many follow-up articles onto the front page (e.g. articles that repeat what has already been discussed, perhaps adding some minor twist or opinion take, or media outlets circulating their own version of the same story), because they'll use up the community's 'attention budget' for that story, leaving nothing for later.
For example in 2013, the Snowden saga dominated HN's front page—there were so many follow-up articles that when something important did happen (e.g. when he finally left Hong Kong or whatever), it got drowned out, or bogged down in the "I'm so sick of all these posts" complaint that repetition inevitably generates on HN.
The principle we ended up settling on was the Significant New Information (SNI) one: does the new submission count as SNI in the sequence of threads that have already happened? SNI can mean some objective new development in the story; or it can mean something with enough of a diff from previous related submissions to count as a somewhat different topic.
There are other considerations too, for example about HN as a whole, which is a different scope than a particular topic. But this comment is already too long, so I'll skip those, and anyway I wouldn't be able to remember them all.
Putting all of the above together, your submissions got flagged by regular users for regular reasons, and we either didn't see them or decided not to turn off the flags, probably not because the articles weren't substantive enough, but rather because either (1) the topic had had a major thread recently; or (2) we didn't think they cleared the bar for SNI. I'm just speaking generally because I don't have any memory of those posts.
I'm afraid I've given a false impression that this is all somehow orderly or co-ordinated. It isn't. It's random and ad hoc, and various random factors (like whether we see something at all) are at least as significant as all this stuff. It's not a repeatable process. Moreover, we just make bad calls sometimes—especially in hindsight. Some of it is accidents of timing. People are far too quick to infer general patterns from specific data points they observe. That's true about everything on HN, but it gets more true as the emotions are more engaged.
I have one last thing to respond to in your comment:
> I've been posting this stuff for months and now the subject has exploded in mainstream discourse with the ICJ case, which makes it even more emotionally charged than before. Wouldn't it have been better to get a chance to discuss this before it got to this point?
I don't think that's right. It was just as emotionally charged before, and threads about those articles you posted would have ended up in the same place that this thread did, as did the earlier threads in this sequence. So no, I don't think it would have been better to discuss before it got to this point; I think it's the other way around—by waiting till this point, we at least had clear grounds for having a thread, since there's no question that this was SNI.
I had a disagreement a while ago with a user here and they said something that irked me so I asked them "is that the internet that you want?". And they seem to be taken aback by that because obviously there was some kind of internet that they wanted and that included a frank, but productive, exchange of views, and they seemed to agree their style of commenting wasn't conducive to that. So the conversation went a lot better afterwards. I have convinced myself that you, too, want a certain kind of internet -one where "curious conversation" can be had- and you're doing what you can to make HN, at least, that kind of internet. And I think it's working: the amount of flames and slagging matches on HN is near-zero and you still get to hear different opinions on everything (in fact, a few too many of those but, eh).
Which is to say, I didn't grumble for the flags to imply your moderation is one-sided, just to be clear. I was a bit surprised that the flags stood for two reasons: one, because I assumed when something gets flagged, it is brought to the attention of the moderation team and that makes it less likely that it will stay flagged if the flags are one-sided; and two, the reason I pointed out above, the scholarly credentials of the authors of the articles I posted.
Well you've answered both of those I guess. In particular:
>> It's not a repeatable process.
I understand that, but I tend to forget it. My bad.
I accept also that the ICJ case is "SNI". But the articles I posted were among the first to raise the issue in a scholarly manner, so I thought they were salient.
Btw- Bartov's text was really top-notch (I kind of disagree with him, though I have to defer to his obvious expertise). It's a bit dated now that so much time has passed and he's updated his opinion a bit (still not genocide) but anyway, for anyone interested in this subject and having an urgent need for a voice of reason amid the madness, for now at least he will do.
> the amount of flames and slagging matches on HN is near-zero
I wish. But I guess if anyone has this perception at all, that's a sign of something working.
> I assumed when something gets flagged, it is brought to the attention of the moderation team
That's mostly true, but not as true as it used to be. There are a lot of flagged stories. While at least one moderator does note them all, it has to be done quickly and it's easy to miss salient details.
I meant the ones that escape the flagging to death. Those are relatively few, compared with my experience from other places on the 'net.