Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

Anything that triggers the flamewar detector gets down-weighted automatically. Those two trigger discussion full of fast poorly thought out replies and often way more comments than story upvotes, so stories involving them often trip that detector. On top of that, the discussion is usually tiresome and not very interesting, so people who would rather see more interesting things on the front page are more likely to flag it. It's not some conspiracy.

Exactly.

Even looking around the thread there's evidence that lots of other people can't even have the kind of meta-level discussion you're looking for without descending into the ideological-battle thing.

Yes, it is tiresome.

Perhaps it’s not a conspiracy so much that denying technology’s broader context provides a bit of comforting escapism from the depressing realities around us. Unfortunately I think this escapism, while understandable, may not always be optimal either, as it contributes to the broader issues we face in society by burying them.

> the flamewar detector

which simply detects the speed of new comments. The result is that it tends to kill any interesting topic where people have something to say

I might be more inclined to believe you if Elon-related posts were being flagged across the board, but they're not. Just yesterday, the Grok 4 launch video was on the front page, and the associated comments were full of flamewar content. Yet that post didn't get flagged -- presumably because it was a launch video favorable to Elon's interests.

There's a clear bias -- either on the part of the flaggers or on the part of HN itself -- in what gets flagged. If it has even a hint of criticism of Elon, it gets flagged. That makes this forum increasingly useless for discussion of obviously important tech topics (e.g., why one of the frontier AI models is spouting Nazi rhetoric).

I think the intent is to de-amplify topics that produce shallow responses (the kind that can be quickly made and piled on). I still see plenty of those rise to the top of the feed though, so it's more of a "turn down the volume" than "mute".

I completely disagree. I've seen lots of interesting threads with well thought responses flagged just because people were commenting too much.