I believe that Dang does make an attempt to unflag some of these kinds of topics, but there's also the issue that the discussions can become highly politicised too which is not the stated purpose of HN.
Indeed, higher category theory is a veritable minefield of political rabbit holes.
And who could possibly trust HN denizens, those notoriously toxic and tech-ignorant people, to sensibly discuss such things as a tech oligarch delivering Nazi salutes at an inauguration [0, 1]. Or the same man (wealthiest known on Earth) being given physical access to the US treasury [2]. Or warnings from five former treasury secretaries in the NYT about the danger this poses to Democracy [3], the EFF bringing lawsuits over this (unflagged after many hours)[4], or the ability to even discuss all the false flags which we have been riddled with for the last month [5, 6].
This last month has been a real eye opener. Even Paul Graham and Garry Tan have been cheerleading for DOGE, and it's fucking disturbing that we're not allowed to discuss it on any active thread.
> it's fucking disturbing that we're not allowed to discuss it on any active thread
This is the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. You're talking about the most-discussed topic on HN, by far, of the past several weeks.
If you, or anyone, want to know what's happening with these threads and flags, how we moderate this, and what the principles are, there are a bunch of links here which should answer all your questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43050893. If you familiarize yourself with that material and still have a question that I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Btw, you can't evaluate this with a random sample of links on a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic). You need to look at the threads that have had significant frontpage time and discussion. Obviously there have been many more submissions than that—that is the case with any MOT. If most of these didn't get flagged and/or downweighted, then HN's frontpage would consist of little else.
I realize that some users feel so passionately right now that they would welcome that, but I don't believe that the bulk of the community wants this (far from it), and in any case we couldn't let HN be completely taken over by any MOT without ruining it for its intended purpose.
So I'm curious, what's the deal with the thread at hand? It looks like the "[flagged]" tag on the post title is now gone, but, as far as I can tell, the post itself still does not show up on the main page at all, so effectively it's still hidden?
It's probably a lot to ask for, but the context for a flag could be helpful. I came across this one since I just posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43059077 which I thought was on-topic (maths are, and we have had plenty of useful conversations on how science is done too), but that post was flagged.
I turned off the flags on it yesterday, but that wasn't enough to make it go back onto the front page. Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.
Why did I not restore this particular thread to the front page? The short answer is repetition. There have been many other recent major discussions on this topic—not about this specific detail about a paper on category theory, of course, but that alone is not enough information to constitute a new topic that can support a substantive new conversation. In HN jargon this is called SNI (Significant New Information), and it was lacking here.
Here are two other recent posts that explain this in more depth:
That a paper on category theory got caught in the ongoing funding purge is absurd, of course, but it's not a different topic in the sense that there's a substantively new discussion to be had about it, relative to the other recent threads about the funding purge.
Internet discussion has the tendency, as the same divisive topic gets worked over and over, to become more repetitive, more snarky, more shallow. All that is what we're trying to avoid here. It also gets a lot more meta, meaning you get comments about other comments, other users, the site, the community, the process, the mods, etc., rather than about the actual topic. It is a sure sign of a deteriorating discussion when even the people who most want to have the discussion can't find anything new to say.
When the juice has all been squeezed out of the lemon, nothing but rind is left. Making up for a lack of new information with a surplus of indignation is the opposite of what we want on HN.
Threads like this are a variant of the old joke about a group of people who know all the jokes by heart so they can just mention them by number and everybody laughs—except in this case the response is not laughter but anger, the list is not of jokes but outrages, and what gets mentioned is not numbers but catchphrases and talking points.
That showed up in the current thread very clearly, so this is actually a good example for people who want to understand this aspect of how we moderate HN.
> Whether that made it "hidden" depends on what you mean by that word. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN [1] - there are only 30 slots. Does everything not in those 30 count as hidden? I wouldn't say so.
I checked the first 10 or so pages of 30, until reaching the point where all posts were much older, and there were enough of a similar age with fewer points that it seemed unlikely that all of them had been up-weighted.
It spent half an hour on the front page and 90 minutes in the top 10 pages. You can call that 'hidden', but everything falls off the front page(s) after a while, so everything ends up 'hidden' that way.
The more important question is how much time on the front page(s) a story had, and whether it was too much time or too little. I think I've answered that in the GP comment and the other links there, but if not, let me know.
Every post I've seen recently talking about all the false flags here has ended up rapidly flagged.
Feel free to prove me wrong, by showing one single post on this topic, at any time over the past couple weeks, which wasn't flagged. Such an obvious way to manipulate discussion here needs to be addressed from time to time; now being one of those times.
The discussion in those threads (ie [6]) shows widespread agreement; far from your assertion of what "the bulk of the community wants".
You can assert that stories about DOGE are not being deliberately and widely suppressed here, or that they are but for a good reason - but I don't believe you. And I don't think you believe yourself either. If you do, you shouldn't.
Nobody is saying those threads aren't getting flagged. The issues are who is flagging them, why they're flagging them, and what we should do about it. I've been posting about that a great deal.
If you want a serious answer, I need you to engage with what I've actually said and explained, not some imaginary substitute which you then find hard to believe. If you follow the link in my GP comment, and the links there, you'll find all you need to know and then some. You're welcome to disbelieve any of that, but please at least disbelieve something I actually said.
Sorry for being tetchy—I'm happy to answer any HN user who has a question, but I need you guys to do a bit of work too. There aren't enough hours to always repeat everything from scratch. If there's a question that I haven't already answered many times, I'd like to know what is and I'd be happy to try to answer it. Cross-examinations, though? not so much.
> The issues are who is flagging them, why they're flagging them, and what we should do about it. I've been posting about that a great deal.
Are you saying that this is a discussion we could have as a community, without the thread on it getting flagged? Or are we supposed to just listen to what you have to say and leave things there.
The short answer is that meta submissions are nearly always off topic but there's plenty of discussion going on in the comments.
However, this is the sort of question I was talking about. Had you familiarized yourself with the relevant material, your question would have answered itself. For example, here's a recent subthread with plenty of back-and-forth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993029. No one was "just listening and leaving things there", and I responded 20 times in that thread alone.
I don't expect you (or anyone) to see all of these, but there's a lot of redundancy, so you don't need to see all of them.
> this is the sort of question I was talking about. Had you familiarized yourself with the relevant material, your question would have answered itself.
I wasn't asking what the rules are, but thanks for revealing your condescension.
I was asking if you, Dang, the moderator of this site, would allow such a discussion. And indeed, you answered my question; if indirectly.
