Don’t tell me with a straight face when you have access to the data more than anyone that these posts aren’t getting flagged en mass. We are all watching it happen.
Of course. I've spent most of my time this week posting explanations and answering emails about this, so it's a bit odd to hear that I'm denying it, but I understand how these perceptions arise.
It may seem strange, but both of these things are true:
(1) it's the most-discussed topic that exists on HN right now; and
(2) most of the submissions about it are getting flagged.
If you think about how the internet (and HN) work, it's to be expected: there's a tsunami of submissions; some are getting through and producing condition #1; others are getting flagged and producing condition #2.
This has happened many times on HN over the years, and every time it happens, the community splits between the people who want more and the people who feel like it's too much.
For example, here's a case from 2020 where someone felt that HN was suppressing stories about what in fact was
the most-discussed topic on the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. This dynamic has been around a long time.
Voting and flagging are intimate data—I wouldn't dream of disclosing that about anyone. I think most HN users would take that as a betrayal of the basic community contract.
Also, I don't see what good would come of it. It would lead to much more conflict, and would change the character of the site. People would no longer feel free to express their preferences—actually they would no longer be free to express them. This is not a way to fix the problems we face as a community.
Maybe the number of flags a given post has could be exposed? Or other, non PII information about flags, like number of flags from old accounts or accounts with high karma, or showing that a post has the flag shield enabled? Just spitballing here but theres a lack of transparency into the process that throws some people into conspiracy theory land so just imo but it kinda seems like there's got to be some changes that could be done to assuage the fears of the more rational readers, so that we don't get the same boring accusations of some shadowy cabal burying inconvenient stories on every contentious subject. Maybe just linking to the active thread for an MOT for the flagged&dead posts so people can see the topic is being allowed, just elsewhere? Maybe allowing users to mark a thread a dupe instead of just flagging?
(sorry if this has already been asked & answered. I saw the post about turning flags off but haven't seen anything about exposing when it has been)
I see where you're coming from, but I don't believe that one can assuage people's fears or diminish accusations this way. It's the other way around: it would just provide more material, more degrees of freedom out of which to curve-fit those pre-existing views.
I could be wrong about this—my own fears and preconceptions definitely affect my thinking here. I fear trying things that can't easily be reversed, because I don't want to cause damage. Also, I'm suspicious of the idea of technical measures to solve non-technical problems. The conflicting emotions and perceptions that dominate this question seem deeply non-technical to me.
The part where he tries to point to a handful of exceptions to refute the idea that discussions about Musk are getting flagged en mass. It’s really not a difficult bit of text to parse.
Edit: I have to reply to the comment below by editing this comment because I’ve now been banned from making new comments but I couldn’t help but notice you managed to take the original quote and literally remove half of it which would have made your argument look very silly. To be fair Dang did the exact same thing.
Second edit: oh and would you look at that… it’s flagged. Exactly as predicted.
But the claim was "No discussion of this sort shall be allowed on hn", and his data shows that significant discussion is happening. Mass flagging doesn't change this.
That is despite violating HN's "intellectual curiosity" rule.
You know perfectly well that the original top comment was expressive and hyperbolic in nature, stop trying to analyze it as if it were a dry quantitative claim. The point, which is extremely obvious, is that many posts are being systematically flagged for reasons of favoritism.
They're clearly HN relevant, given that they relate to a tech titan effecting drastic changes in government structure, with significant security and other, by technical rather than legal means. Systematic flagging of posts about the activites of the Biden administration would have been equally questionable.
I don't believe that's reliable, but more importantly, you seem to be denying the emotional thrust of what you wrote. "You know perfectly well [etc.]" is an aggressive trope to begin with, and you followed it with other similar thrusts ("Stop trying to", "which is extremely obvious").
Your comment would have been just fine if it started at the "Many posts are being [etc.]"
Weird you are able to characterize 'you know perfectly well' as an aggressive trope without having any special insight into my mental state, but when I characterize something someone else wrote, you want to be all philosophical and say that we can't make any inferences about other people.
My original comment expressed skepticism about the idea that an expressive remark should be interpreted as a formal assertion of fact. I think your efforts at semantic policing are misplaced.
HN's software contains spam filters and similar things that automatically kill certain posts. Those get marked as [dead] and removed from public view. [dead] posts are visible only to users who have 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile.
Other posts that have been heavily flagged by users get marked as [flagged][dead]. Those have been killed by user flags, not software.
I'm not interested in minimizing conversation on the topic! I just want the conversation to be fresh in each major thread. That requires enough new information to support a substantively different discussion. I didn't see that in the OP and I don't see that in most of the submissions that get posted about this topic.
In case anyone is interested: the way we approach situations like this comes out of what happened with the Snowden avalanche of 2013. It seems obvious now, but at the time we weren't clear about the difference between articles containing significant new information [1] and copycat / follow-up posts [2]. Tons of repetitive stories were on the frontpage, and there was a backlash from users complaining about it. The current principles around to handle this came from reflecting on how we could have handled that situation differently.
What we need here, in order to keep having major threads about this topic, is a story containing significant new information—something that moves the needle on the discussion. If one of those is getting flagged, I'd like to know about it!
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting there aren't flags, and a lot of them. The argument is that this is pretty much how HN works and is supposed to, for most repetitive topics. You can certainly make the case it should work some different way, either in general or for this topic specifically. But it's not some nefarious plot.
As I write, 4 out of the top 10 stories on "active" appear related to Musk, Trump, or both (numbers 4, 5, 8, 10):
1. Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data
2. Apple Ordered by UK to Create Global iCloud Encryption Backdoor
3. Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin resigns from Linux kernel
4. A German court rules: X must provide researchers access to data
5. Elon Musk's Demolition Crew
6. The origins of 60-Hz as a power frequency
7. Stop Using Zip Codes for Geospatial Analysis
8. Announcing the data.gov archive
9. U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users' encrypted accounts
10. Feds Halt the National Electric Vehicle Charging Program
If you prefer what you see on "active", you can bookmark that as your standard entry point to HN. I flag stories when they appear to be getting repetitive. I haven't actually done that with any of these stories, but I have previously done it with submissions about COVID, OpenAI, and Matt Mullenweg when they come in waves.
