Meta comment: have noticed some posts get flagged. Is it because they are political?
replies(4):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44398710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44438884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44448854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44438360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434239
What’s the split? Who knows. But I’ve seen all three types on HN.
Agree with you here. HN users can have some well thought-out and nuanced takes on political issues that span the political spectrum†, but the flamewars are often some of the worst I've seen as well. It's unfortunate because I can't think of anywhere on the internet that has better potential for reasoned political discourse. The only other place is Reddit, and the subreddits there are strictly echo chambers for your own preformed opinion.
† Funnily enough, I've seen flagged accusations that HN users are both too conservative and too liberal; too libertarian and too socialist.
These are mental health preserving and physical health preserving until they are not.
Nobody wants to hear that if you don't do something bad things are going to happen and nobody in power, such as mods, wants to have their power challenged or use it to threaten others in power because it is going to make them uncomfortable or their lives harder.
What you are seeing is how Nazi Germany happened. Not this specific thing, but this behavior scaled over an entire population. People with empathy and others subjected to stress enter a state of grief, and the first stages of grief are shock (disbelief) and denial (not asking questions you know the answer to because the answer is too awful to bear), people tell them they are overreacting or that they are "too political." "Protest somewhere else" is a common sentiment for anyone inconvenienced by those who feel unjustly treated, and only once they personally experience harm do they start to change their mind.
It is flagged because most people want to be comfortable, and hearing uncomfortable things in comfortable spaces is something they don't want to tolerate, even if it threatens the existence of their comfortable spaces in the long term because curiosity is not compatible with authority and authoritarianism.
I don't think HN mods operate as conservative or liberal (although curiosity is an extremely liberal cause), but I think they will come to understand the cost of neutrality.
If anything I think they have not fully confronted the paradox of intolerance or realized that the times are different than they were in the last 30 years of internet flame wars. In the past when Godwin's law and flame wars were the rule of every forum, there weren't historians at prestigious universities who studied the holocaust/fascism warning us that fascism is happening here in America right now.
This follows the content policies of HN.
It clearly does play favorites when we are hearing the first firsthand account of an "unsaleable prison", but users will vote on the 20th AI article posted here.
Also, I expect better from the HN community when it comes to data. 5 (4, in reality. Because one of your links is flagged now) articles in a week not flagged for a forum that receives hundreds of submissions per day does not even meet the minimum statistical threshold.
I've been taking glances at the front page and top daily submissions for a week and was disenheartened that there were no articles on the Big Beautiful Bill that gained traction, or weren't flagged. I'm not particularly surprised at this point given historical trends, but a shame nonetheless.
It's very easy to have no flamewars if we don't talk about it at all. Technically correct, but I'm not a big fan of "O(1) performance!" achieved in such way. Optimization is about doing useful work, not avoiding it.
It's a real shame suppression is part of the strategy. Instead, encourage users to 1) be mindful in touchy topics and consider every little word in their post and 2) to ignore those who clearly aren't trying to facilitate a discussion.
> I think Dan G is doing a admirable job with riding the line as well as is possible.
Apathy is submitting in to the status quo. There are plenty of times where I disagree but can understand a status quo that does not benefit me.
This is not one of those times. This status quo is dangerous to everyone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44451722
So no, it's not new information.
I really have to question if you ever look at your own biases, because you just made up a story that agrees with your preexisting viewpoint. For the links I posted, I literally just searched "Trump" and took a few of the many unflagged posts from that search. It was in no way exhaustive. Why did you assume it was? It's quite easy to see that in a week, there are literally hundreds of unflagged political posts. My intention was to post an example, not a list of all of them.
I follow the HN raw RSS feed, so I see a lot of articles that don’t make the front page. I find that pretty much any article that refers to trans people is flagged. Many — not all — articles that are show the Trump regime or Musk in a negative light are likely to be flagged.
YMMV.