
Ask HN: Why is news about the DNC fiasco being flagged? - personjerry
It seems like every post about the DNC emails hack (and its relevance to Clinton vs Sanders) is being flagged on Hacker News. Perhaps I&#x27;m being too much of a conspiracy theorist, but is HN following a political agenda?
======
DanielStraight
It's off-topic.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, 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."

~~~
personjerry
Email hacks, especially around Clinton, have historically been very on-topic,
and like the faq says, anything intellectually interesting is on-topic.

~~~
gus_massa
I've see one of two of them, but they are from sites that have all the
submissions [dead] by default. Do you have an example to make the discussion
more concrete?

The problem with "anything intellectually interesting" is that it may include
politics or not, it depends on the definition you are using, but I think it's
off topic here. The interaction between politics and technology is in the
borderline.

(Another example:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12156778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12156778)
Is this on topic? I stared at it like 30 seconds because I was no sure.)

~~~
personjerry
This post in particular:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12154841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12154841)

I had to vouch for it before it got any interest at all.

~~~
gus_massa
I read the article. It looks like a discussion about corruption inside a
political party. It has some side accusations to the Russians, but without any
proofs. The discussion about the email server and hacking is very small. I
think it's a political article.

A few weeks ago there were articles about the configuration of the server, and
IIRC how the hacker could enter it. I think that were on-topic.

I also remember an article that correlates the number of emails in the
official Clinton's email and in the unofficial. Most of the times the number
is correlated, but they spot some strange non-correlations that signal a
possible erasure of some emails. It was a little conspiracionist and I'm not
sure the analysis was 100% right, but I think that were on-topic.

~~~
personjerry
Hm, fair enough. Thanks for the analysis!

------
gyardley
There's no need to assume a central conspiracy when the same thing is easily
explained by just a few too many random people flagging the posts, for what's
probably a wide variety of individual reasons.

~~~
personjerry
That's fine, except I saw a similar article from WSJ and it had been already
flagged (not sure where it is now) in 5 minutes, so I started to get
suspicious. I might very well be wrong--I just wanted to know if anyone else
found the same thing.

------
enuffznuff
Utter bs. I've lost count of how many brexit, trump, and refugee related
threads I've seen. I think HN has a similar agenda to twitter...

------
personjerry
What's also strange is that despite this Ask HN being at 6 points in 1 hour, I
couldn't find it anywhere in the first 5 pages of HN. That means it's behind
posts like a 30 point, 7 hour post, and an 8 point, 2 hours Ask HN. This
suggests, then, that HN is actively trying to stifle this DNC stuff, and I
don't like that they are doing this without any communication.

------
gadders
Well, YCombinator/Sam Altman did hold a DNC fundraiser:
[http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/04/22/obama-
to-...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/04/22/obama-to-visit-y-
combinator-because-sam-altmans.html)

