On: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

[dang]

This is a (very) well-explored issue on HN and the solution we arrived at has been stable for many years: most stories about politics are off topic, as the guidelines say (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but some stories with political overlap are on topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).

Here are a couple recent posts to look at if you (or anyone) want to understand the principles by which we decide which ones get to count as "on topic":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

If you read those and follow the links there, and still have a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

> What's the point of having the flagging mechanism if you just remove them when people complain?

I made precisely the same point a few minutes ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993906

The answer is that we don't "just remove them when people complain". We only remove them sometimes, when doing so seems in keeping with the principles by which we moderate HN.