
Hcrknews.com (Flagged / Censored content can be seen) - mzh0
http://hckrnews.com/
======
md224
I'd love to get a discussion going on whether people support or oppose the
flagging (and subsequent disappearance) of politically charged topics on HN.
While HN is not a politics site, some of these censored topics have been tech-
related.

I guess it comes down to a value judgement: is it worth discussing tech
politics even if it spawns flamewars and heated arguments? I think it's worth
it, but this is certainly debatable. Curious what other HN users think.

My own thinking is that political discussion between opposing factions is
always going to be contentious, but that doesn't mean it should be suppressed.
However, angry rhetoric can lead to further polarization, so I'm not sure what
the right approach is.

Edit: funny enough, this topic itself was flagged and killed! I've vouched it,
but I'm open to hearing arguments for why this link doesn't belong.

~~~
john_moscow
Maybe just add a special topic flag "politics" and let everyone have a
convenient switch in the profile settings whether they want to see those
topics in the feed or not?

~~~
forthefuture
That topic flag is called reddit.com/r/politics. We are already choosing to
come here instead of there.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I have always bowed to the wishes of PG and the mods when it comes to calling
out articles as too "hot"

This is a funky one, though. The issue itself is about how politics affects
what we can say and not say online. In that way, it's a "meta" issue.

I can still understand the flagging and death, but damn. Google, Apple, and
Facebook are huge monsters that control hundreds of billions of dollars in
cash and virtually everything a huge chunk of the world's population sees and
does. This is a tech story. It's a politics story. It's a story about
business. It's all of that.

This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their
head in the sand. For ten or twenty years, we've created the internet and all
the things people use today. When asked about morals, ethics, and politics,
we've just said something like "We make the tools. We're not responsible for
their use"

And here we are in a security and surveillance state that _we 've created_.
We're refusing to _even talk_ about Google's desired monoculture because we're
unable to maintain civil discourse.

I get it. But fuck me. Something's really wrong here. I can't help but feel
that the tech community at large -- and HN in particular -- is no longer
working towards the betterment of mankind.

Something is terribly broken. And we had a big part in breaking it.

~~~
jacquesm
> This is the first time I've felt the tech community actively sticking their
> head in the sand.

This happens _all the time_. Techies being 'apolitical' is a huge problem, and
of course those very same techies then turn around and scream blue murder when
laws are made that hurt their interests or when their tech is used to further
some political goal they do not agree with.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Being apolitical is fine. I try to be that way publicly and in my work. I fail
sometimes, but I try.

But when I look at huge messed up things in society, and I _know_ there are
people on HN who had a big role in making them that way?

At some point you gotta cut the crap. Not taking a stand is taking a stand.
Nobody gets a free ride. There's no special "get out of difficult
conversations for free" card that we tech folks get that others don't have.

I do not think HN needs to be reddit. But yes, I do think a second room for
the intersection of tech and politics (and _only_ that topic) is way overdue.
We are better than this.

~~~
jacquesm
> We are better than this.

We could be, but we're not. This is what we are right now, a bunch of people
that can't even have a rational discussion on a subject such as this.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I spent my entire youth reading sci-fi stories about mankind making new
technology that eventually wipes out the species: giant robots, viruses,
nuclear bombs, and so on.

And this it what we got? Tweeting and liking posts? This is the scary tech
that's destroyed mainstream media and now threatens to lay waste to civil
discourse in general? Typing little comments into boxes? Really?

Nobody can say the universe doesn't have a sense of humor.

~~~
true_religion
Some of us have spent our entire adult lives working to prevent technology
that "wipes out species". It's not an accident that these things did not
occur.

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as1mov
FYI you can view dead/flagged submissions by going to your profile and
enabling showdead.

I don't know if this is the correct place to criticize HN's moderation
policies, it's kinda disheartening to see the list of submissions that were
removed. News articles regarding the diversity memo were allowed but
submissions linking to the actual memo were removed for some reason. If the
actual memo is sexist/bigoted, then people can read it directly and decide it
for themselves, instead of relying on second hand information.

I mean even if you agree with what Google did, isn't it good that we discuss
about it and point out the things that were problematic with that memo. What
good does it do if we just try to shove the incident into a closet and pretend
that it never happened?

Edit: Even this post was flagged :/

~~~
greenyoda
_" News articles regarding the diversity memo were allowed but submissions
linking to the actual memo were removed for some reason."_

No, this article, the first one to publish the full text of the memo, got 353
points and received 616 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14937895)

Several subsequent submissions of the same content were flagged as duplicates.

~~~
as1mov
The Gizmodo article omits several of the links to various studies that the
actual memo makes. Even though the article actually mentions this, I doubt
many people will actually will make the effort to know what those references
were. And to be honest I don't think many people read beyond the articles
summary, as evident by the discussion of the post.

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wvl
As an aside, I do find it interesting that this submission is nowhere to be
found from the main page itself (or at least 5 pages back, despite 50 points
and 17 comments. I guess it was flagged/vouched back, but having showdead on
in your hacker news profile does nothing to help if the algorithm drops the
submission into nowhereland.

That is reason enough for the existence of hckrnews.com, imo.

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forthefuture
The flagging isn't a rogue algorithm.

It's the majority of the sites users saying they don't want to keep seeing the
same two toxic viewpoints throwing shit at each other.

~~~
jacquesm
If that were the only way it was used it would be fine. But it is also used to
simply shut down rational discussion on subjects the flaggers don't like.

~~~
forthefuture
I use hckrnews myself and don't see this happening. Would you mind identifying
which threads you think have been incorrectly flagged?

~~~
jacquesm
In the last 24 hours you'll find plenty of those about the Google affair, most
likely shut down by Googlers flagging those links to shut down any discussion.
Hard to tell without knowing who the flaggers are, which is one reason I don't
like flagging.

~~~
wvl
I find the chronological history of hckrnews.com adds context to why many
things get flagged. For example, immediately after the bloomberg article was
posted about Google firing the memo author, were several other articles with
the same content (from arstechnica and nymag) which were immediately flagged.
Any time an inflammatory subject gets beat to death, the same process happens.

So in that respect, I often agree with the submissions that get flagged
(including this one), but I do think news.ycombinator.com could do a better
job of collecting and displaying these flagged submissions. For example,
duplicate submissions could be made children of the submission that was
allowed to stay.

~~~
jacquesm
Those merges sometimes happen but they're a moderator intervention and so have
a pretty high cost associated with t them.

The biggest gripe I have with the flagging is the paternalistic aspect.

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amingilani
If you want to see flagged or censored comments, you can enable those in your
profile settings, just change _showdead_ to _yes_

~~~
daxorid
Yes, but it's rather difficult to find censored articles in the first place,
once they've gone dead.

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beaner
When posts are flagged, is there a reason that is provided and is it viewable
somewhere?

It seems like there's a lot of legit, even large threads that have been
flagged and removed. Even ones that don't seem offensive, they're just related
to or covering news on some things that perhaps some people find offensive.
Seems crazy that they'd disappear.

I'd be interested in reading the justifications for removal.

~~~
DanBC
Users flag posts. It's not a moderator action.

There's a setting called showdead that you can change to see all the flagged
posts.

~~~
beaner
Ah, thanks. Sometimes I see mods intervene on comments and that kind of thing,
so I figured flagged posts went into a queue before removal.

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venning
To create an intentional false dichotomy: if I have to choose between a site
that surfaces all content regardless of controversy but accepts that related
discussions will be lower-quality, and a site that directly or indirectly
suppresses some content to maintain higher-quality discussion overall, I will
choose the latter.

I appreciate that some people feel that the "loss" of some submissions due to
automatic flamewar detection algorithms or user flagging is a problem, but I,
for one, appreciate that the discussions that remain on the front page (for a
long time) have a reasonable guarantee of being high quality.

Relatedly, it may also have an effect on the non-controversial submissions by
establishing that flamewars will not remain in high positions for long. (I
realize that's a bit of a "broken windows theory".)

~~~
as1mov
Most of the recently flagged submissions were related to the diversity memo. I
don't mind if fluff articles from dailydot are removed. But then when a
verbatim copy of the memo was posted, and even that was flagged. I highly
doubt that was flagged because it would have low quality discussions. People
just abuse the flagging system to hide content that they don't agree with.

~~~
venning
I also doubt that it was flagged _because_ it would generate low-quality
discussion. But I do not doubt that low-quality discussion would have followed
had it not been flagged off the front page.

I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a
high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are going
to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more powerful tool
(comments) poorly.

~~~
jacquesm
> I see flags, especially when they are abused, as indicators that having a
> high-quality discussion is going to be next to impossible. If people are
> going to use one tool (flags) poorly, it's likely they will use a more
> powerful tool (comments) poorly.

Flags are the more powerful tool. A single flag is the equivalent of many
upvotes and annihilates the whole discussion. That's a lot more power than a
comment, which can be dealt with on an individual basis.

~~~
venning
That's a fair point.

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ComputerGuru
Meh, the stories were killed for a reason.

Thanks @dang and the rest of the team for keeping HN relevant and sane. It's
never a fully objective decision, but I'm glad to leave that to them rather
than have to dig through crap to find something good ( _cough_ unlike reddit
_cough_ ).

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Artemis2
Besides the flagging, I really like hckrnews as a daily reader. The ability to
see immediately what is new since my last visit (and to tune the number of
posts I want to see) is a huge timesaver.

~~~
madmax108
Absolutely absolutely agree with this! hckrnews is what I use to keep track of
what's new on HN since I last visited!

