
Ask HN: Unfairly Flagged Submissions? - yesenadam
There was an interesting story from the Guardian submitted today (not by me), &quot;The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes&quot;.. Which was fascinating, well-written, well-researched, about how a lot of things in the world are designed to fit men&#x27;s bodies, and can cause problems (or death) when women try to use them. It first attracted 1 horrible comment, then after 3 more comments it was [dead][flagged]. I didn&#x27;t see anything in the article that would at all warrant flagging, so I tried submitting it myself, but just ended up on the comment page of the previous attempt. The topic seems one very relevant to people in computer-related fields of all kinds, and one I don&#x27;t remember reading about before, so I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s been done to death on here.<p>So I was wondering... 1. Does this often happen on here, stories on particular topics flagged to seemingly censor them, prevent them being discussed (which is a matter of opinion, I guess, which ones fit that description and which don&#x27;t). Are there notable examples of this from the past?<p>And 2. What should I do here? I don&#x27;t know if it was a couple of people effectively vetoing the article, or some kind of consensus. I was very surprised to see this story flagged, and would have liked to see it discussed.
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smt88
Gender-related articles inspire a lot of nasty HN threads, often bringing in
politics and pseudoscience.

My opinion is that they’re within the scope of science and curiosity that HN
encourages, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people on both sides of gender
issues are flagging them because HN just hasn’t been a good forum for that
discussion.

I personally have been so disgusted by some of the commentary on gender-
related articles that I’ve considered quitting the site, and the only other
topic that has made me feel that way is race/eugenics. Neither gender nor race
seem to be topics that are tolerated for long here and, while I don’t flag
them, I think that might be for the best.

~~~
yesenadam
OK thanks, yes, maybe you're right. Well, 'hide' would work for those people.
It's a shame. (This article was also about design, technology etc. Also there
seemed scope for startups to help with the problem with new better designs.)

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yesenadam
This was the dead/flagged submission:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19250686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19250686)

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mattmanser
The HN moderators will respond to you if you email them, it might be worth
emailing them and asking them what happened. They can take a while.

Their email address is in the contact link at the bottom of the site.

Unfortunately HN does have a misogynistic contingent, however some readers
also believe general news is against guidelines (it's not). In this case it's
clearly been flagged against the norm as you can see that most other guardian
articles don't get flagged:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theguardian.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theguardian.com)

I think HN also has an anti-flame filter, it might have been caught up in that
too.

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farseer
At least the users flag gender and race based submissions organically or so I
have noticed.

Try submitting anything here that criticizes China, Russia, India or Israel
and watch an army of accounts flag your submission. They seem to have the
hallmarks of a state sponsored clean up, especially true on the subject of
China.

~~~
dsl
HN has a very diverse user base, many of which love their countries of origin
dearly. What is sometimes seen as organized behavior, often grows organically.

Because HN does not expose downvotes to users with less than 500 karma,
flagging becomes the "I disagree" button.

~~~
jaclaz
Yes, but it is a very inappropriate "I disagree".

Or, maybe better, it is "I disagree and thus you shut up". :(

EDIT: In the meantime, I "vouched" for the article and read it (for the sake
of "freedom of speech"). Though it doesn't "deserve" IMHO to be "flagged" it
is all in all a "plug" for a book (that from the excerpt in the article
doesn't sound as a good one).

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Tomte
That's normal. HN users will randomly flag everything to death. Just now,
people flagged my Paul Krugman submission.

A few years ago people flagged an interesting article about a strange medical
condition and there were a few comments that this is totally unbelievable, and
the publication is obviously crap. Today they would call it fake news.

So I thought, okay, it is easy to mistake. And submitted the paper published
in a reputable peer-reviewed medical journal about that incident. Flagged
again. I just resubmit every now and then.

Don't take it personal. People are stupid and/or malicious. Sometimes there
are enough of those to succeed. Mostly there aren't and normal people prevail.

