This should not have been flagged off the front page.

I really worry for the people in the US, but I'm hopeful it's hegemony is ending.

Techno accelerationists don't like to be reminded of their complicity.

I don't think accelerationists would mind - even if they believe that what's happening is wrong, going further in is the backbone of the whole ideology, so why would they be having second thoughts?

I think the real group behind this is people who are capable of sensing that this is wrong at least on some deeper level, but who are so complacent that they just want not to think about it too much. Maybe it's because they're in too deep, maybe they make too much money off of it to care, maybe their heels are too dug in on social issues for them to ever try to reconsider. Possibly a combination of any of the three.

You will be affected by the (hypothetical) fall of American hegemony, whether it’s increased aggression in spheres of influence (Russia, China, India), market failures, or even a fracturing or collapse of digital services (Azure, AWS).

I don’t understand the insistence that this isn’t on topic. Hard not to paint it as anything but willfully ignorant.

I'm not ignorant. I just don't want it in my morning cereal when it's also everywhere else.

Awareness of your country's politics definitely isn't the issue here. I am keenly aware of the US presidents' threats to invade my country.

The issue is the insistence that it has to be discussed in every community, all the time, and that the importance transcends categorisation. Every website just becomes another dumping ground for US politics, and when you bring that up, Americans get indignant.

It's Hacker News. I am here for news for hackers. The guidelines are pretty explicit: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic".

Okay so you didn’t really argue against it being on-topic, just that it bothers you / puts you in a bad mood.

IMO it sounds like you’d be better off reading Linux mailing lists and open source READMEs if you want to avoid politics. Just so happens that right now politics is uncomfortable, but it wasn’t 10 years ago when the interest rate was effectively 0% and the US gov and SV had still some semblance of separation.

To be fair, “guidelines” and “rules” are two different things. There’s no strict prohibition on politics in the guidelines. If you read the whole thing in context, it’s trying to discourage topics that are mundane, frivolous, or vacuous — not to prohibit all politics.

“MOST stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”

Emphasis mine

I'm looking at the front page right now and it's entirely "news for hackers."

You had to go out of your way to find this thread and make multiple comments complaining about it.

Just ignore the thread, or hide it and move on.

Yes, because the flagging system works. I'm advocating for things staying that way

One can see flagged stories and the vast majority including the flagged aren't political in nature. Yet people like yourself single out the minority that are, regardless of how civil the discussion is, and flag them anyway.

So the visibility of these stories isn't the issue, and the quality of discussion isn't the issue, since neither matter.

I wonder what is it that people actually object to?

Then maybe go to a subreddit on embroidery instead? The world is going to pieces and you are worried about your breakfast?

The web site already has a tool for this: The "hide" button. If you don't want to see an article, just click it and go on eating your cereal.

That can be said about any post that goes against the guidelines. At that point, why even have guidelines in the first place?

Guidelines are for comments and post. If I don't comment nor post it's not my job to care about that. If it drains all the curiosity off the site (which I doubt), then I migrate.

I'll make sire not to male the park dirty and maybe pick up a litter or two. But I'm not a ranger.

If you don't like my constant screaming, just get ear plugs

Yes, the internet is a loud place. Adding to the noise never helps. People who really care about this should male a quieter space for themselves, or start really pushing on mods and admins. Arguing among the rabble is the slowest method to achieve change.

If someone screams at you, they are actively invading your space.

On the other hand, if you actively click on an article, read it, and make multiple posts on it, well that’s on you.

Despite the name, this isn't a community for only "hacker" articles. It's overall to promote curiosity and engage those curiosities. There is no hard "no politics" policy here. The spirit of the rule is to not turn this into a 24 hour real time report of the state of the world.

But this article isnt that. If you don't find any of the last years of happening this year curious at the bare minimum, I wonder how deeply aware someone really is of it.

>If you are not American, it’s rather tiring to have every website and news outlet talk about it ad nauseum

I'm sure greenland sees it as tiring too. But of there wasn't such a huge pushback, "tiring" would be the least of their concerns. Why can't we then have a deeper discussion after that to analyze how it came to this (and how to prevent it)? We sure can't have that discussion on Twitter.

Also, I'm pretty fundamentalist when it comes to posting on social media: if I don't like it, I don't click in. If I clicked into every AI buzzword post, I'd go insane. But others want it, who am I To judge? Certainly not a moderator. If you want me to moderate, we can discuss pay.

Then go ignore it on your country’s version of HN.

When your political reality becomes scary. Confronting reality is scary. Politics is scary but honestly living in facism is just about the worst thing for founder culture imaginable

I really wish there was more transparency around mod actions

I think it isn’t mod actions but rather the very likely fact that there is a small, but large enough group of flaggers who will act in unison to remove any such post from the front page. If you want an affirmation of the efficacy of the moderation system, what you should want is transparency into the voting behaviors of the population. If you see a heavy voting correlation between flagged posts and either a specific set of users, voting timing (these types of posts get flagged much earlier than those that lean the other way politically), or both, then there is cause for concern that the algorithm of HN’s self moderation tools is being gamed. My bet is that it’s not the mods doing anything, but rather that there is already a critical mass of flag happy users that are controlling what gets to stay on the front page. I think it would be very interesting to see a write up on this topic, but it’s highly unlikely because I think it would violate privacy and user expectations of anonymity.

Close. Takes tenured accounts to unflag and any schmohawk can flag. That dicotomy alone makes things way more likely to be flagged on average.

There are enough trump supporting idiots on HN that flags on such articles are meaningless. They really don't like being confronted with the truth.

Very tenured apparently. I certainly can't unflag and I'm relatively active on a mature account.

I do wonder of boosting the flag threshold for posts to double that of a downvote would change much. Probably not depending on the flag threshold and of this truly is coordinatied

> it isn’t mod actions

It's intentional inaction. From the mods.

This post, and many many others, ought to have been unflagged.

So, so, so many popular and active stories about Musk and DOGE and Trump have been removed this past year, while at the same time Garry Tan and PG were cheering them on on their Twitter feeds.

People who call this out too much get banned. For super unrelated reasons, apparently.

Dang has explicitly disallowed any and all posts talking about the weaknesses of the flag system. IT'S PROTECTED.

Let me see if I can outline how we approach this in a way that might make sense to you...

People use the word "transparency" to mean different things. Here are the ways in which I think it's fair to say we're transparent about mod actions: (1) we explain the principles that we apply, frequently and at length; and (2) we're happy to answer questions, including about specific cases.

What we don't do is publish a complete moderation log. To understand why, it's probably easiest to look through my past answers about this at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234189.

In our experience, the current approach is a reasonable balance between the tradeoffs. It's true that we don't see all the comments like the ones you posted here, and we can't address what we don't see. It's also true that, as volume has grown, we've found it harder to reply to absolutely every question. But it's still eminently possible to get an answer if you want one—especially if you're asking in a way that signals good faith*.

(*I add the latter bit because some people use the format of "asking a question" as way of being aggressive and in such cases we may respond otherwise than by taking the question literally. That's pretty rare though.)

The problem is that a relatively small group of people (flaggers) just veto what we see and don't see. This made sense when we relied on flagging to just remove spam, useless posts, etc. but its now being used to remove anything that goes against MAGA.

I'm pretty sure that if you sqldump the list of flaggers of this and other posts (like the MN posts) you will find it's not a uniformly distributed list of users.

You've replied before I even had a chance to add a second sentence! Edit: admittedly it is taking longer than usual...

I've answered that point many times, e.g. recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818. If you take a look at that and have a question that isn't answered there (or here), I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

I haven't had a chance to look at the flaggers of these recent stories to verify that they fit the same pattern, but the pattern is so well-established that it would be shocking if they didn't. Btw, when you say "anything that goes against MAGA", the converse is the case as well (possibly even a bit more so). And when I say (quoting the comment I just linked to):

> There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.

... I didn't add that we do this the same way in either political direction, because that goes without saying, or ought to. But I'm saying it explicitly here.

This is a really rough spot, giving users the tools to remove visibility from a post will eventually get abused. I would genuinely be interested in some form of anonymized stats on the individual accounts and the posts they are flagging but that's a whole deal.

Am I wrong that there used to be a flagged option on the lists page, or am I missing where that is?

Honestly I don't ask for anonymized stats but rather public stats.

If you flag a post, you are inadvertedly trying to push a hn post away.

That's fine if the current moderation finds it okay and I respect HN moderation but once again another post gets flagged & dead.

If someone flags a post, they should have a reasoning why. So have it public, so that its easier to call people out if they are being unfair and it would make people more aware of who they are flagging and actually why.

Flagged articles should just list the usernames that flagged it--in a queryable way so anyone could do an analysis and see who is operating in bad faith.

Sorry, but I can't imagine doing that - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581665.

You could publish hashes of the flaggers' usernames rather than the usernames themselves. The point is not to go on witch hunts--it's to stop the endless discussions and questioning around whether what we are all seeing (certain topics always seeming to disappear quickly) is the result of flagging activity that is evenly distributed across the site or coming from a relative handful of brigaders.

Everything I know about internet dynamics and human nature tells me that that wouldn't work—it would just exacerbate the conflict.

The problems we're talking about come from the fundamentals: how HN is defined (i.e. its mandate), how the site is structured (one front page that everyone shares, only 30 stories per page, etc.), how people feel, and what's going on in the world at large. Given those fundamentals, these conflicts are inevitable. All we can do is work on how we respond to them—trying to respond better, more creatively, more relationally. By "we" I mean all of us: mods qua mods, users qua users, mods qua users, and users qua mods.

That's not going to happen to anyone's satisfaction, but if it can happen at all, that has to be good enough.

I feel like Freud telling you guys you're all doomed to frustration!

Thanks. Ultimately, as users, we need to trust that you guys are taking the right actions to defend against what appears from our point of view to be a sustained and coordinated cyber attack on the website. I hope I speak for a lot of my fellow users, that we trust it is being treated with the seriousness that you'd treat any other security vulnerability.

I went through and looked at all the accounts that flagged the current thread, which took a long time since there were many of them. I found a handful (about half a dozen) who looked to be flagging for exclusively political reasons. That's a small fraction of the total.

In other words, the situation on this story turns out to fit the usual pattern as I described it a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818):

The accounts that flag these stories are almost always established accounts, so I'm not too worried about them being sockpuppets or paid influencers.

From everything we've seen, flags on political stories are a coalition between (1) users who don't want to see (most) political stories on HN, and (2) users who don't like the politics of a particular story they are flagging. In other words, users who care about the quality of the site, and users who care about a political struggle. This dynamic shows up on all the main political topics.

There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.

This, so far, seems sufficient to me. If we start to see indications that it's not sufficient, we'll take more action.

To make the point clearer, I went through all the other accounts that flagged the OP (i.e. not including the half dozen abusive cases) and collected examples of other stories they had flagged. I'll put that list in a reply to the current post since it's so long. I think anyone who browses that list will see what I mean when I say that most of these accounts are not flagging for purely political reasons.

I don't know if that assuages your concerns—probably not, because it's in the nature of the internet that people feel this way and explanations, data, etc., don't address those feelings—but we can at least try.

Ultimately we have to trust you, dang. Thanks for the example posted here.

I flag a lot and I would be absolutely fine with those flags being completely transparent.

I understand you're between a rock and a hard place on this one but I also notice that this thread has not had its flags removed, which you could easily do.

I understand what you are talking about but trust me when I say this that HN users are genuinely really really frustrated about current flag situation of HN.

Please don't just say that the system is as is and no change can be upgraded.

I feel so frustrated at times whenever I comment in posts and I am observing a lot of the articles themselves getting flagged effectively killing the discussion.

I spent an hour today trying to find HN api to build my own custom HN alternative on which people can respond after a post turns dead for not much apparent reason.

It frustrated me because it was about Children's safety & how EU's taking action against Grok in this case... I mean I just want to share my frustration right in here that people aren't thinking of even children but an us vs them dynamic or some reason and flagging and deadding posts. This is a new low that really really frustrated me & I feel like you might understand why too.

Please change the system. I beg of you to fix it because I am seriously frustrated by not even knowing what can get flagged or not or even Dead. I am not against the moderation but can we make it so that instead of auto flagging atleast, its a flag that moderators have to pass?

Please dang, I know you want the best of HN community too. Let's work together, I feel like much of HN community really appreciates you (myself included) but we are all frustrated about it. How do we convey such change in any way where the idea of change seems feasible because It just seems that the idea of change seems like something which doesn't feel possible in HN from whenever I read such threads and that does depress me because HN is the best community i am part of. I am proud of being part of HN and many others are too and this is why we are vocal about some need of change. Some need that moderators are willing to hear our demands of frustrations and fix some aspects with change.

Once again, thank you for your moderation efforts. And I hope we can have a fruitful discussion about my comment in which I have tried to express my deep frustration today...

I am a minor dang, I have got female friends my age and If any one of these photos would've been abused by Grok, I will tell you that they would've been scarred for life, maybe worse. These could have been someone's sisters and daughters.

And what HN community flagged was a post about EU trying to levy a 6% fine on Grok...

My blood boils thinking that there are people in the community I am proud of being whose first thoughts were to flag such an extremely important discussion to make it dead.

I don't come here for politics but I still discuss about them often. I primarily come here to enjoy tech but man oh man I hope you realize my frustration and other users frustrations & are able to implement some thing which can satisfy us well instead of doing nothing please!

I know you aren't a corporate sellout and are passionate about this community, I just hope that something can be done. I believe in you & trust you after writing this message that you will do what you feel is right.

Have a nice day dang.

Edit: Looks like the other thread got reopened again. If Dang opened it (maybe after reading this?) then thanks a lot broski! This is absolutely great that you fixed it man!

But I hope that Hackernews can have such that things like these just don't happen ie. wrongful flags of genuine topics in the first place etc. or something can still be done or atleast some discussion about it within HN discussions or if possible, please discuss it with a community by creating a ask HN just once and discussing it with other (moderators? if I remember I think you are the only one paid moderator, or maybe tomhow iirc) but my point is please just involve the community just once and weigh in for this problem once again.

Modern problems require modern solutions. I just hope that Hackernews keeps on growing and false positives can be stopped and such system can be generated to prevent such as I must admit that the amount of frustration at that time was seriously immense.

Thanks once again for opening that discussion again and once again have a nice day dang!

100%

Phrasing political flaggers as "those who care about the quality of the site" already shows the hand here. You can argue downvotes are for disagreement, bit Flags are for slop and spam, not blocking what I don't agree on.

Flags are basically me waving my hands in the air calling for a mod. That's not something I do unless I feel it's outright harmful to the site. I'm a late commenter so I pretty much never have to flag postings (mostly just comment responses that come straight out of Twitter).

dang, first thank you for the moderation explanations

Besides those who flag political posts they don't agree with (which is a problem), I see a conflict in the comments between

those who think HN should be "politic-frei" because this is a "tech site" and "if I wanted to read about politics I'd go to reddit",

and those who agree this is a "tech/science/expand-curiosity-about-the-world site", and that's what makes HN a great community, but that it's sometimes, and especially recently, not possible to disentangle politics and tech. Musk/DOGE is a great example. No one asked Musk to drag politics into tech, and I wish I never had to read any articles about it and we could just talk about EVs and SpaceX, but he did, and so it's important to be able to talk about the impact which that has on tech, and on society, because this directly impacts us who are involved in tech/science. Tech/science does not exist in a vacuum.

Yes, both of those positions are ones that one hears in the comments, among others.

The 'official', if I have to call it that, position of HN is closer to the second than the first, although I wouldn't say identical.

>>When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.

I have observed that any post that is negative about Musk gets flagged. Almost 100% of the time. In that regard, it has certainly occurred to me that someone with Musk's wealth would find it trivial to hire millions of people to monitor and attempt to influence his image on social media - and imo it would be quite surprising if he didn't have massive numbers of people whose full time job was to do precisely that.

In that regard, I find it obnoxious someone of his wealth should be entitled to such personal privileges on HN. I don't mean to imply HN is actively supporting that - just that I believe HN should be taking affirmative steps to prevent the removal of 100% of things that would annoy Musk from ever reaching the front page.

Any post that is positive about his muskness gets flagged as well, and even harder IIRC.

I hear you about privileges and I don't disagree, but we're mostly just trying to optimize for interesting discussions.

>but we're mostly just trying to optimize for interesting discussions

Thanks for taking the time to respond - and I certainly agree with the above. It's what makes HN pretty unique.

They flag what goes against the topic of the website, and the HN guidelines. Not everyone wants every website to be about US politics, and that is not a right wing conspiracy.

The mods (dang and tomhow) have written probably 50,000 words on the subject. I've also emailed the mods and promptly received personal replies.

Transparent as you could ever hope for: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

So the explanation for this removal condemning the ongoing fascist revolt in the US is where?

At least that's what it looks like to an outside observer from elsewhere in the world. It's been fascinating as an outsider to watch your republicans suddenly unsure about the second amendment after the last few days.

Mods didn't remove it, user flags did.

The issue isn't the flaggers per se. It's that moderators show no interest to seriously investigating flagging patterns.

Its very similar to ICE. Obviously they are guilty, but I place the real blame on lawmakers' hesitancy to tale actions to reel this in. They have the power to do so and won't even investigate the issue in ways the public cannot. That's complicicy.

Mods didn't restore it either.

There's no uncertainty. Republicans now openly assert the 2nd amendment belongs to supporters and defenders of the regime, and no one else.

The movement opposes equality because equality stands opposed to their need for hierarchy. It is a domination and submission movement. It boasts about its application of double standards. Double standards are not logical fallacies, when they use them they are virtues. To enjoy for themselves what they deny to others is a display of dominance.

I think generally the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war.

The issue, of course, is that literally anything can be "political", and moreover by trying to actively avoid political discussions you sort of tacitly endorse the status quo.

It's a tough line to draw, and I'd be lying if I said where I knew where to draw it; HN is a fun forum specifically because the moderation is generally very good. They're not perfect but they do try and shut things down before they devolve into flame wars and personal insults. If there weren't aggressive modding, HN would devolve into 4chan or 8chan, and it wouldn't be appealing to me after the age of ~17.

It is a difficult issue. For the longest time, the status quo-favoring position of not complaining about anything divisive too much worked well because the status quo had been relatively unchanging - most people grew up with it so everyone took it for granted, and even most types of pushback was far more reserved than what we see today.

But now that the status quo of Western countries had begun rapidly shifting into something completely different, the other side of that initial ruling is starting to bear fruit. I really think that at this point they should revisit this policy - not to abandon moderation, but make amends that try to distance this place from the current political establishment. What was yesterday's implicit favoring of the boring consensus is now a defined position that's supportive of whatever the current powers do. But, being more cynical, given how close HN is to Y Combinator, I'm not sure if that option is on the table.

The main reason to avoid flamewars is to protect the atmosphere on HN but you can't make the case that if the world is on fire we can just sit here and pretend it isn't happening and discuss the latest tweak to react as though it is the most important thing in the world.

I've long argued for a 'other' category as one overflow method or a homepage that is generic and subject specific pages for those that only want LLM news or Apple. I'm sure we could agree on a 10 level 'top' set with 'All' the default. That's one step closer to Reddit of course, but with the growth that HN has seen over the years you can't continue to pretend that the 'small town' measures still apply to this big city. A lot of this really is just about scale and you need to adapt to scale.

We would have curtailed the AI discussion years ago of preventing flame wars was the primary issue. I do think that they simply cling to outdated sentiments that politics is "dirty laundry" to take out instead of properly cleaning hoise.

I've been frustrated by the flagging (because fascism is so real right now) but I've been a moderator in the past and I know it's impossible to keep a large majority happy. It's hard for me to criticize the mods much.

Yeah, I’ve been a mod on a relatively small Discord server (~60 users) and even in that scope it can be difficult to keep people happy with stuff I’ve done.

Best way to mod is to strive to keep discourse civil (by setting up a policy) but at the same time let people talk about what hey want to talk. Not letting them talk because they may fight or disagree is a patronizing behavior.

Makes enough sense. I'm not a mod of that server anymore because I got an in argument with the server's owner, and decided to leave, so I haven't gotten to practice my mod stuff in awhile.

> the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war.

You're correct that we like to avoid flamewars, but not correct to say "anything involving politics". We don't try to (or want to) avoid politics altogether—a certain number of threads with political overlap have always been part of the mix here*. For (reams of) past explanations see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

What we want to avoid is HN being taken over by politics altogether, and thereby turning into an entirely different site. We want HN to adhere to its mandate, which is to optimize for intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). That certainly includes some political discussion, but (a) not beyond a certain threshold, and (b) not every kind of political story or article. (For example, opinion pieces are usually less of a fit than stories which contain significant new information, and so on.)

Unfortunately, this way of doing things inevitably generates conflict. For politically passionate users, that "not beyond a certain threshold" bit is far too little—especially in turbulent times, as now. Apart from that, there's no agreement on which particular stories deserve to be on the frontpage, and even if there were such agreement, there's still no way of making sure that the most deserving stories get the spots (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306).

Everyone has the experience of being frustrated when a story that they care about gets flagged or otherwise falls in rank. When feelings are running hot, people jump to the conclusion that we're secretly on the opposite political side, or trying to suppress discussion on a particular topic. That's not the case at all—it's all explicable by the principles that we've been repeating for years—but that none of that changes how it feels.

Then there are the users who feel like HN has gotten too political and is a shadow of its former self—this also has always been with us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.

Double unfortunately, I don't know of a fix for any of these binds, because all of them derive from the fundamentals of what HN is - e.g. a single frontpage with only so many slots (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

(* Or to put it differently, note the words most and probably in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, as pg once said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426.)

Let me just preempt this by saying that I think you and tomhow do a very good job at moderating, and I'm just some goober on the internet sitting on a high-horse, so take what I say with as much respect as possible.

Hacker News is my favorite forum in no small part because this forum's users are, on average, a lot more educated than the average internet user. If not formally, a lot of the people here still do value learning and education as a whole. Those environments aren't organic on the internet, and it is largely due to efforts from folks like you to cultivate this audience and I do not want to dismiss that.

The concern, then, is that when the educated people can't discuss (and let's be honest, argue about) politics, then the only people who will be discussing politics will be the uneducated people. Politics is inherently contentious and we can't make progress (however you want to define it) without occasionally hurting feelings.

Now, a perfectly valid counter to this is "we're not stopping you from discussing contentious political issues, you're welcome to discuss it on one of the many other forums on the internet, just not here". That's fair enough, but it can come off as a little arbitrary, because virtually anything can be deemed "political"; I could argue that disagreements with type systems or the ISO standard of C or complaining about SQLite could be construed as "politically motivated".

I do realize that a line has to be drawn, though. The last thing I want is for the forum to devolve into 8chan or The Drudge Report or something, so while I don't completely agree at where you draw the line, I do understand why it is drawn.

>The concern, then, is that when the educated people can't discuss (and let's be honest, argue about) politics, then the only people who will be discussing politics will be the uneducated people. Politics is inherently contentious and we can't make progress (however you want to define it) without occasionally hurting feelings.

I completely agree. That's why ultimately I abandoned the mainstream stuff (outside of YouTube. Yay monopoly) for discussion and go to Tildes for a lot of political talk. But Tildes is small by design and will have some blind spots.

I feel denying a quality article like this (or rather, upholding the minority's rule of denying) cracks into the idea that these policies work to keep HN high quality. Especially when what's on the front page right now is "I ported typescript to rust in a month with Claude!". These don't feel quality driven.

I think a useful litmus test for these kinds of stories is: do the people who most actively participate on them believe there's a conversation to be had, with multiple perspectives, not all of which agree with theirs? That's what this site is for.

If not, they're wrong for this site; more than wrong, corrosive. The stories themselves aren't bad (I have a lot of strong political beliefs too), but they're incompatible with the mode of discussion we have here: an unsiloed single front page and a large common pool of commenters.

(For the record: I don't believe there's a productive conversation to be had about ICE in Minnesota and wouldn't care to argue with anyone defending their actions. All the more reason not to nurture threads about it here.)

PS: I'm a longstanding "too-much-politics-on-HN" person, and even I'm a little annoyed that Jonathan Rauch's piece won't work here, if only so I can annoyingly noodle on the varying definitions of fascism. But flags are the right call here.

>For the record: I don't believe there's a productive conversation to be had about ICE in Minnesota and wouldn't care to argue with anyone defending their actions.

Funny because I'm probably very radical about ICE and I can still find subtleties on how to reform this. I've never been "Defund the police", quite the opposite. I believe LEOs should have standing, qualities, and training that makes them stand by their emergency peers. Truly the best of the best. Getting that badge should be a similar thrill to being accepted into a top college. They should have years of schooling before truly starting to gain their title.

Getting into a firefighting isn't easy, so why should an LEO see of as a career as a backup for failing to graduate high school? That's where all this falls apart. And now the standards barely get these ICE goons a month of "training". That needs to change.

But with current times, that's not a topic I can discuss on X nor Bluesky. That makes it all the more frustrating that HN plugs its ears on such subtlety instead.

I probably agree with like 90% of this but feel like if we actually tried to hash it out we'd get drowned out pretty quickly by vitriol.

If that's the case, then I suppose this community is no different. And I don't like saying that because 1) I don't personally believe that and 2) it's against guidelines. But reality can be disappointing at times.

Then maybe you should put that assumption to the test.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46762767

Is a pretty good comment, but it got flagged, there is a degree of unfairness here.

I didn't flag it, but it's not an example of the kind of productive comment I was talking about either.

I recall us having a conversation about checks and balances long ago and you were pretty strongly trusting in those keeping the US safe in the longer term. I am quite curious what your expectations are for the mid-terms and the presidential election three years from now based on the recent past, are you willing to write about that?

I don't understand what you're trying to do here but think at this point it'd be best if we just disengaged. Sorry, and thanks for understanding.

> do the people who most actively participate on them believe there's a conversation to be had, with multiple perspectives, not all of which agree with theirs?

When I see a submission like the current one, I get the impression just from the title that the OP doesn't believe it.

The easy fix is to let go of the unsiloed concept and to add a couple (<10) main subjects and an 'all' page. That way whoever wants to can discuss what they want and flags can go back to their original meaning.

You should go build that site! It's exactly what HN isn't.

Huge problem on those stories, too! A lot of those threads are dreadful. My point exactly.

Yes, I've been flagging a fair amount of them too.

Although generally I think the un-nuanced AI hype/doom articles are not nearly as damaging as the flood of one-shot LLM projects being presented under "Show HN" with apparently none of the framing text (HN post, project README, responses to feedback) being human-written.

I think Show HN was due an overhaul even before vibecoding jammed it up, but I agree that's an issue too.

I'm happy to hear your ideas about this, including off-site (I could email you if you like) if you don't want to go further off topic here.

This thread isn't a great place for it, but I think we should formalize Show HN a bit (don't let people post freeform "Show HN" posts, have a submission queue) and then I have a lot of thoughts about community-based coaching.

My point is that the discrimination to flag one and not the other seems arbitrary. It has nothing to do with promoting/preserving intellectual curiosity etc. We are deluding ourselves by repeating that.

In that we are practicing the very doublethink we criticize in the society.

I flag overheated AI stuff all the time.

I was referring to the general zeitgeist on the site rather than you specifically. Apologies if it seemed personal.

Oh, I didn't take it personally, I just disagree with the premise.

And Dang will take action any day now...

What makes you think he isn't? That's a rhetorical question; he and Tom obviously do intervene with those stories.

I've read his responses here and in other topics over 2025. He still seems to maintain that politics is something to avoid, regardless of quality. Not explicitly, but the way he talks about it gives that impression.

Having a tepidness when it comes to the dozens of slop articles on some trivial Ai blogs contradicts this mission to encourage curiosity and encourage a quality discussion. It feels outright contradictory and feeds into this sentiment that "anything tech is fine, nothing political is". Having flaggers do the work and promoting it as "community vote" is a convinent smokescreen, even though we all know flagging is based on a super minority of the community.

I know it feels knee-jerk, but I had this sentiment for a few years now as AI rose, and it of course hit a fever pitch in 2025. I think seeing a Tesla earnings call flagged because it wasn't stellar earnings really made me go from quiet apathy to being more vocal on the phenomenon. The actions (which I disagree on) simply do not match the words behind it (which I overall agree with).

> I think seeing a Tesla earnings call flagged because it wasn't stellar earnings

This is a perfect example of imagining or assuming our (or the community's) motivations or allegiances then criticising us for what you imagine or assume.

Tesla is far more commonly criticised than praised on HN these days. The moderators have no allegiance or care for Tesla, its reputation or its stock price.

If a ”Tesla earnings call” story was flagged, it would be for the same reason that almost all earnings call or stock price stories are flagged on HN; they usually don't qualify as great topics for curious conversation.

The quality of threads in politics discussions is absolutely dismal. Just the worst. Many of the flagged stories are quite good! But good stories are a superset of good HN threads, and threads are the point of the site.

I think it's noteworthy that we couldn't even keep a metadiscussion of this topic completely civil. This shouldn't surprise anyone. "Don't bring up religion or politics"; it's a rule of etiquette (and probably the most common bit of advice in the "Respect" section of every page on WikiVoyage). Why do we think we're exempt?

It's very difficult to talk about, because it's important and people have strongly held beliefs. Respect that, and the purpose of this site.

> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Mods is a part of the community the same way your manager is part of your team. The power dynamic cannot be ignored and is often used to the advantage of those in power.

Calling out hypocrisy, especially of a superior, is important for order in a community. Otherwise you get a smaller version of the US c. 2025

Amen.

For what it’s worth, I visit HN before my first coffee, and I am fine with not getting a faceful of US politics first thing in the morning. If I need that I can look in any other direction already. I visit this website specifically because it talks about other things.

I'm tying it to the Hacker News guidelines, if you care to look at them

The limit should be outright fascism. It's not a tough line to draw if you've any inkling of 20th century history. The USA isn't sleepwalking, it's goose-stepping into a fucking nightmare.

Does this help?

https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged

Can we have a discussion that improves in quality if people dissent to the view of the article, agree with the article, or hold a view that is something in between?

If the answer is no then the risk that someone will flag the article increases dramatically. If the discussion environment isn't open and peaceful then how much more likely isn't it that people will just disengage, flag, and then move on.

Open and peaceful isn't the same as accepting an objectively incorrect viewpoint as equally valid. But I agree that what you describe as how some people read it is likely what is happening.

No one has to be accepting to have an environment where people feel safe to participate in a dialog. Civil disagreement is a good thing and can improve a discussion just as civil agreements.

If however a large portion of comments get flagged or downvoted to the point of being killed, or met with hate rather than polite and constructive discussion, the result becomes a hostile environment. Repeat that experience a few times and many people will stop engaging in the discussion and just use tools like downvote and flag without making a single comment. It becomes a battle ground where moderation tools are a weapon, rather than a forum where moderation is there to improve the quality of those wishing to participate.

There has been a few times where dang has removed the flags of an article but also done some more heavy handed moderation with a seemingly focus on civility and tone. Personally I would also like to see them remove downvoting for those articles, leaving only upvotes as a way for people to appreciate other comments. It is a nice way to give people room to have a serious and open discussion around political topics here on HN, but with some supervision.

Considering how often I’ve been seeing people on HN ardently defending everything Trump and “owning the libs”, I somehow doubt “open and peaceful discussion environment” is the deciding factor in flagging submissions of this nature.

> It is against the rules to call anything fascism

If that's true then this site and pg can go ahead and fuck themselves with a rusty knife.

> socialized healthcare

So why does the US spend more per capita on healthcare than the EU?

I'm no fan of the US administration (I live in Denmark and am LGBT), but leave that inflammatory rhetoric off of HN.

> Probabilistic prediction is inherently incompatible with deterministic deduction

Prove that humans do it.

> Seasoned drivers have a six sense about the environment.

> * Everyone over estimates their driving ability vs the average

Reflect on that for a moment.

It wasn't by mistake, it was there to let replies know I had reflected on it.

Humans aren't [100%] rational, never will be. That is why Spock is so popular.

If they're not American, then following their own logic they probably shouldn't be heavily implying that they are. It's misleading. They should give context in each and every comment so that we know.

Is it too much to ask for clear communication?

You know that in many parts of South America, most Europeans are considered just as gringo as Americans? As are Canadians, Australians, etc.

If you're going to critique, you should probably try to get your facts right first.

Or how about the US starts using ".us"?

> The US is the center of the world though

Give it a few months.

> Weatherspoons charge under £3 for a pint in town. That's 15 minutes at minimum wage.

Yeah but then you've to drink at spoons.

The thing is, they've purchased so many historic pubs, that if you refuse to drink at one that's a choice. I'm not saying that's a terrible choice, but it's a choice that bars you from an awful lot of pubs.

isn't weatherspoons like getting drunk at applebees basically? comparing that to a "pub" is kinda laughable

Not really. Applebee’s is still too food oriented.

Wetherspoons are definitely pubs. They just have a reputation for cheap drinks and cheap meals. But there’s still a significant proportion of people who go there for drinks only.

It’s more like a drinking warehouse with carpet on the floor and a menu of mostly beige food than a larger version of a cosy country pub with a roaring fire and a varied food menu sometimes involving vegetables that have not been deep fried.

It's the VA for survivors of the 1980s as it doesn't allow music or TV inside, so tends to get ignored by the soccer followers of a weekend and the younger generation entirely.

TBF their curry club and other food specials are basically subsidising old bachelors to the point of being an ersatz social service @ £8.45 to £11.45, including a drink, for 12 hours of service every Thursday.

https://thewetherspoonsmenu.uk/wetherspoons-curry-club-menu/

Generally speaking, its best described as the RyanAir of pubs. It gets you there, cheaply, but the juice may not be worth the squeeze in terms of ambience and clientele.

no music or tv? that sounds fucked... why don't ppl just drink in a park? iirc public drinking is actually legal in the uk?

(I know in some countries it's actually not -- Bratislava being one surprising example, though some cops were really chill when I was like hey sorry, I thought this was allowed, it's cold out so I bought a pounder and I wanted to warm up on the way to my hostel I'm not trying to bother anyone... though maybe they may have been letting me slide mostly because they were amused by what a pounder is once I defined it)

(A pounder is a big can of beer that got it's nickname because American frat bros will "pound" (chug) it to get very drunk quickly in places where the sales of beer are looser than liquor)

Isn’t it a pounder because it’s 16oz (US fluid ounces) which is a (US) pound?

(Note a US pint is about 474ml compared to the UK pint which is 568ml).

Of course US fluid ounces are a different size to UK (Imperial) fluid ounces. Plus the UK has 20 (Imperial) fluid ounces in a UK pint whilst the US has 16 (US) fluid ounces in a US pint.

How does it go? “A pint’s a pound the whole world around, except the UK where a pint of water is a pound and a quarter.”

As for drinking in a park, it is either something you do in the height of summer, or something you do if you are a tramp. There’s not much middle ground.

I have been to a nice ones, like the one in Exeter (but the owner is from there so that figures); I forgot the other two that were nice. Not many nice ones but they do exist.