The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

One of the theories I read somewhere is that there may be a threshold number of user-flags before the title gets tagged as [flagged], but flagging that happens fewer than that threshold still serves to down-weight the article. So there could be a lot of user-flags burying the article before it shows up as [flagged].

It must work that way. When I flag articles and they don't immediately show as `[flagged]`. I would guess the number of flags is weighted by upvotes, maybe (but less likely) by the karma of the person flagging the article. The software must track who flags articles since you can lose flagging privilege if you do it frivolously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173809

As far as I know, once an article is flagged it cannot become unflagged by user action. Only dang can unflag articles he thinks the community deserves to discuss.

Articles can also become `[dead]` which I think happens automatically for submissions detected as spam. Per dang, users can vouch for such submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43268468

I think from the way stuff is getting flagged & the comments, it's really a change in the user base becoming slowly less techo-anarchist/libertarian and more rightwing/authoritarian curious.

Something really in the water the last few years in tech circles. Or maybe just disgruntled as the stock compensation infinite money printer has ended.

I'd love to see the results of some kind of sentiment analysis on HN comments over time. My hunch is that HN's user base has gotten deeply more rightwing over the years, similar to what's happening in many other online communities. Related to getting more rightwing: I'd also guess (without knowing the data) that the flagging:user activity ratio has steadily grown over the years. HN users are no longer willing to simply downvote comments/articles they disagree with and move on. We are becoming more interested in attempting to silence these comments/articles via flagging.

Precisely my observation

I'd like to see whether the perceived rightward direction is new, younger people joining, or older people changing.

Determining that scientifically is going to be near impossible.

Kinda like convincing people to adopt Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation lol.

Pretty much all the stats coming out recently show youth male vote has gone much more +R than in recent history, so could very well be the case of the next gen of SWEs joining HNs and being mad about affronts to orange man.

Some of it just feels like a small part of a constellation of cultural/society/business leader behavioral changes which are the natural pendulum swing overcorrection from peak +D sentiment in summer 2020 going back to the other end.

> ...change in the user base...

Agreed. (Change in the user base, or in the sentiments of the user base.)

That user base, and its apparent coordination (directed, or emergent), is the main reason I don't engage as much here any more. It's a dirty pool.

I disagree. Some cursory searches on Clickhouse show me:

1. There was an exponential increase in people talking about FOSS, leveling out in 2021.

2. There's been an exponential decrease in people talking about startups, leveling out in 2021.

With that in mind, remember that there are karma gates to flagging and that you need many fewer flags than upvotes to sink something. My suspicion is that HN had a pretty big culture shift starting around 2016 but really peaking by 2021 that shifted from the old startup, builder focus to its current FOSS, anti-authoritarian mood. In other words the culture that used to be on Slashdot and technical subreddits found its way back onto HN. While the older HN was more homogeneous in its makeup and narrower in its topics it was also a lot less contentious than today's HN is, mirroring the culture found on Reddit and comment sections of tech-focused publications like The Verge. Today's HN is broad, unfocused, and a lot more like a mix of r/technology and r/programming than it used to be.

Flaggers, I suspect, have older HN values. They preferred the narrower focus of the old site and really dislike the highly contentious big comment threads that are on today's HN. It's hard to have proof of this since flaggers only interact by flagging, but it certainly is the opinion that I have as an older user well over the karma threshold to flag. As such I suspect we're seeing a culture clash play out where the flaggers are trying to hold onto older HN values while commenters here are engaging with HN in the way it's considered in the zeitgeist today, namely an alternative to tech subreddits.

Maybe the flaggers will keep the site balanced between the two perspectives but I suspect either the flaggers will get tired and churn.

The natural pendulum swing of “Rs get in govt, f things up, so people get mad at them, elect Dems, who largely stabilize things, and so people forget they got mad at the Rs because they f’ed things up, reelect them because they’re better at lying about their promises, and then the R’s f things up and people get mad at them…”.

This cycle has basically continued ever since Reagan.

If you think about the last two R->D changes it was peak Global Financial Crisis and COVID .. Hail Mary passes to Dems to "please fix".

Yet there isn't much reward for any fixing.

> We are becoming more interested in attempting to silence these comments/articles via flagging.

Which as always, is such a tell from those supposedly all about free speech and no censorship. You have Elon banning whomever he disagrees with or makes him look like a fool, press kicked out or people/companies critical of Trump essentially blackmailed. It's dangerous.