I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

Why is this flagged?

First of all, it's about an entrepreneur traveling to the US for a startup, which is directly relevant to a significant proportion of YCombinator founders themselves.

Beyond its direct relevance to the core founding audience of HN, it is not clickbait or wantonly inflammatory, and is clearly of interest to many based on the comment activity and votes.

Possibly because the comment section will inevitably collapse into a partisan flamewar.

This is ironic. I thought there was a big push from the right for less censorship and less moderation in social media. Now we’re flagging posts because the comment section may get heated.

This has been HN policy since the beginning, and while HN is usually still quite unpleasant, policies like this one are largely responsible for preventing it from being worse. There are social contexts where discussions of topics like US immigration policy can do good rather than harm, but HN is not one of them.

>This has been HN policy since the beginning,

This is not true, at least according to dang if I recall correctly. There was a change in moderation strategy since the pg days. The way I remember dang's own explanation was that pg was more hands off in his moderation of political topics. Sure, you can say that it wasn't the same community back then, less flamewars etc, but the fact of the matter is the creator of this site moderated things slightly differently.

Maybe you won't find it ironic, but the creator of HN is often sharing posts on twitter that would be flagged to oblivion if someone other than him posted it on here. Regardless of all the reasonable explanations (this is a tech site, journalists/politicians are on twitter), it's still an interesting datapoint that the creator of this forum in this day and age thinks it's more important spending his own time talking politics on twitter more than talking tech on this forum. I'm going to go out on limb and bet that he does this not because he enjoys or prefers talking politics but because he feels compelled to do so more due to the unprecendented nature of certain events.

I think people who say "do it on twitter like pg, instead of HN" forget that pg's positive twitter experience is largely due to the fact that he has a million plus followers on twitter and people in other fields know who he is so he is able to get high value engagement that counteracts the trolls. Your average HN user is not going to have pg's twitter experience, and so they'd rather try their luck posting in the best forum that's hospitable to them, HN.

You're right; the guideline to not submit most stories about politics was not present from the beginning, but rather newly added in May 02008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080527112502/http://ycombinato...

But that greatly predates the changes in moderation strategies or hiring dang and sctb.

Surely the understanding of the site's social dynamics has evolved over time, though, and so the reasons for the same guideline are different now.

>But that greatly predates the changes in moderation strategies or hiring dang

dang explicitly states they do it differently than pg it:

when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869