
Why Does Hacker News Flag Many Scientific Articles Regarding Discrimination - externalreality
I&#x27;ve seen articles breaking down the science of white supremacist shooting. I&#x27;ve seen articles on the lack of diversity in tech. They seem to get flagged pretty frequently by hacker news. Why? Do they get flagged because the comments start to get out of control? Or is it something else?
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dang
I'd need links to be specific, but the general answer is that HN has had many
threads on these topics. Some don't get flagged and some do. We sometimes turn
off the flags when an article is particularly substantive. But there are also
many articles on these topics that aren't so substantive, and those are
especially prone to flamewars. The quality of the article has a lot to do with
the quality of the resulting discussion, so we tend not to override user flags
on the less substantive sort of submission.

From our point of view as moderators, these subjects are not necessarily off
topic on HN, but it depends on the specific article. Is it conducive to
intellectual curiosity, the main value of this site
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))?
Or is it more focused on stirring up anger and rallying support to a cause?
What's its information-to-indignation ratio? There isn't necessarily anything
wrong with indignation—on the contrary, it can be very important in the larger
social context, more important than most things on HN—but because its effect
is to promote flamewar rather than intellectually curious discussion, we are
more likely to moderate it here. We have to, or the site would soon go up in
flames (i.e. become dominated by political battle), which would destroy the
things it exists for.

The community is often in disagreement about which topics belong on HN. People
who feel strongly about topic X tend to think that HN hasn't enough X and even
that X is being suppressed. But frontpage space is the scarcest resource on
the site. There isn't enough to go around, so every X ends up getting
shortchanged. Beyond that, when a topic is repeated often enough, it becomes
predictable, and predictability is the enemy of curiosity. We try to moderate
HN for variety because the community strongly prefers that. My sense is that
most of the time when X gets marked as [flagged], the flags are a sort of
coalition between users who don't want to see X because they disagree with it,
and users who actually agree with X but are tired of its predictability. If it
were only the first group, there usually wouldn't be enough flags to win the
tug-of-war against upvotes.

If you think an article is particularly substantive and shouldn't be marked as
flagged on HN, you (i.e. anyone) are welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com
so we can take a look.

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rpiguy
The mods do a decent job, I commend them. Articles get flagged by users. Users
have a wide spectrum and differing opinions on what is relevant to be
discussed here.

In my experience, articles directly related to tech, like diversity in tech
will stay open to comments for a long time before mods respond to flags and
lock it, allowing a decent amount of discourse.

Articles that are science, but not directly related to tech (white supremicist
shooting research) tend to be shut down faster if they are flagged. Why do
users flag them? Probably because the arguments, potentially from either side
make them uncomfortable and they’d rather it not be discussed here. The mods
are just responding to user flags.

I have seen threads get uncivil, at which time the mods will lock them down,
which I think is also fine.

~~~
greenyoda
> In my experience, articles directly related to tech, like diversity in tech
> will stay open to comments for a long time before mods respond to flags and
> lock it...

Actually, the mods generally don't get involved in this at all. If an article
is flagged by enough users it automatically gets killed (marked "[dead]"), at
which point you can't add any more comments.

Sometimes the mods will revive a killed article if it's not off-topic and
people ask for it to be reopened.

You can reach the moderators at hn@ycombinator.com if you have concerns about
moderation issues.

~~~
rpiguy
Cool!

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sadris
The use policy explicitly states that they don't want this site to become a
political message board.

~~~
externalreality
I guess political nature of the article take precedence over any form of
science or tech found in the article. Moving on from hacker news waste of
time.

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HNKingpin
Maybe because a "racism" thread will inevitably turn into a political
shitstorm. There's thousands of other places to discuss politics.

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rolph
everyone has different reasons for flagging, some people flag because they
disagree in some way with the topic others flag because theyve seen the
subject before ad nauseum, and it always leads to a degenerate commentary.

I have a hunch some flaggers may not yet have enough karma to downvote, but
enough to flag so they flag in lieu of downvoting but thats just a guess.

another thing to consider, is that HN comments do show up in google searches
at times, so cleaning things up quick is a positive thing regarding,
profanities, or potential liabilities.

~~~
greenyoda
> I have a hunch some flaggers may not yet have enough karma to downvote, but
> enough to flag so they flag in lieu of downvoting but thats just a guess.

Flagging is only supposed to be used for violations of site guidelines (off-
topic, spam, uncivil or unsubstantive comment, duplicate submission, etc.),
not for disagreement. People who flag on-topic articles or comments may get
their flagging privileges revoked by the moderators.

~~~
rolph
yup, i can forsee some mistakes as well. ive had a couple times i was sure i
hit fav but hit the flag, as was evidenced by the unflag option in its place.
so commentors do have the option of unflagging for a period of time. The algo
flags are an other matter

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externalreality
Well, its time to move on from Hacker news. This will be my last post, I will
try to get them to remove my account. Suppressing conversation about topics
very relevant to technology is where I draw the line. There is nothing
political about facts. If the moderators of hacker news can't handle that
(because they too are a white male dominated company) then that is just
something they are going to have to deal with - even if reality is something
they can't deal with.

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bayareanative
There's hard science, and then there's pretend social science being used to
justify politics. HN doesn't do politics and hopefully not SJW/hierarchy-of-
victimhood drivel either. Keep civil debates raging but I don't want to see
items about (insert identity politics label) + engineering... a person's
melanin content, sex chromosomes or any other random identity label is
irrelevant and obnoxious when discussing probabilistic data structures and
algorithms. And furthermore, the people pushing forced "equality" of outcome
without equity of opportunity are implicitly advocating advantaging some while
disadvantaging more qualified people by collective punishment.. you know, like
canceling men's sports programs because Title IX says everything has to be
exactly the same and women don't want to play the same sports. Also, the
outrage and offense culture, cyberdisinhibitionism, and modern social fascism
of deplatforming and silencing debate tends to prevent any meaningful
discussion.

