Why do people flag anything related to ice coverage? Ice are literal nazis cracking down on dissent, dont support the administration. You gain nothing for fighting their battles online.
I can only speak for myself. If the news article has anything to do with tech and things "interesting to hackers", I upvote. For example, the article about Palantir and ICE yesterday [1]. But articles like this one have nothing interesting to me. There are plenty of other places to discuss this like BlueSky, X, reddit, Facebook, etc. I beg you to please spare this last interesting forum.
Also it pisses me off how nobody talks about certain very relevant elephants in the room on these discussions. And it's more like venting and coping. Nobody will change their minds. Nothing will be done. Nothing is learned.
Because the people who comment in these threads tend to be mind-killed by politics, and it serves very little purpose to have a threads full of such opinions.
I’ve been able to have some quality discussions around these issues but I get your perspective. I hope at some point soon, we as a country, can go back to viewing politics as a rational and civil discussion of differences in policy approaches rather than as a tribal team sport or as an excuse to push extremist positions.
There are plenty of websites intended for political discussions. HN, rather explicitly, is not one of them.
I could write about how political discussions reduce the quality (and go against the purpose) of this site, but thankfully Dang has already covered that, so I'll just link to him instead.
On a final note, I'll add that responses like these are a great example of the general degradation of discussion norms that occurs in these types of threads.
It's not my "weird fucking content policing", it's literally the stated guidelines for this site -- reiterated repeatedly by the lead moderator, as I linked.
Since you're in such disagreement with the rules of this site, maybe, rather than trying to change them, you should take your comments elsewhere.
You’re misrepresenting what the content policy says (making it appear to favor your position more strongly than it does), as I believe a political article that engages intellectual curiosity should not be flagged according to the spirit of HN (which is subjective, of course, and leaves a lot of room for biased implementations even when someone believes they are not being biased).
It’s not an easy problem to solve and is hard to balance fairly, so I think your painting of the content policy as being crystal clear is a misrepresentation that isn’t properly taking into account the subjectivity of what is viewed as political and what counts as intellectually stimulating to different HN users (as it seems if something is “interesting” then that tends to override the “political” in many instances on the home page, and is entirely subjective).
The application can be messy, but the policy itself is clear [1]. My position is that you can feel free to argue specific cases, but if someone's against the concept of moderating political stories, then that's directly at odds with the stated policy of this site and they would be better off posting elsewhere.
[1] > "I know there are many users (actually a small-but-vocal minority of users) who complain that flags are being abused to suppress political stories. What these complainants never seem to take into account is that we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a critical reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all." (-dang)
It’s already extremely clear that you don’t actually give a shit about the rules because you certainly don’t seem to make any effort to follow them yourselves. As someone else pointed out you’re just lying and misrepresenting things to stop others from talking, I really couldn’t have much less respect for someone like that.
I flag all irrelevant political posts I see, regardless of political valence -- as per the guideline in question -- do you?
If you don't have anything substantive to say on the topic and want to keep making personal attacks instead, feel free, but I don't think it helps your point.
It’s not a personal attack like it’s some disagreement. I’m simply accurately pointing out that the reasons you publicly state here have no resemblance to your actual activity on the website. You’re a dishonest individual whose hobbies seem to include policing what random strangers are allowed to talk about on the internet.
Nobody else wants you here either. So just leave and take your weird fucking content policing nonsense with you and let adults have a conversation in peace. Don’t you have some kids skateboarding on the sidewalk to yell at instead?
And yet you felt the need to dress up your cowardice as some kind of moral argument. You’re exactly the kind of person I thought you were from the start it turns out. Congratulations.
You are the one who replies here looking for a response despite knowing exactly how it was going to go. Don’t be upset when you put yourself in that situation intentionally and it doesn’t go the way you want it to and for no other reason than to misrepresent the data to suit your favourite company yet again. Please just do both of us a favour and don’t reply
I think you’re odd and I’m not trying to be impolite but you’re going to have to accept the fact that people find your hobby weird.
You have once again however just done the exact same thing I accused you of where you are responding to an argument that nobody actually made and then pretending you’re somehow victorious which again is odd behaviour.
I hesitated before banning, because you've also attacked the mods a lot and we don't ban people for criticizing us. However, attacking the mods doesn't make it ok for you to attack others, and I believe that's something the bulk of this community can both understand and agree with.
And I'm simply pointing out that you've not actually yet commented anything substantive. All four of your comments here have included some sort of swipe at me, and none of them actual engage with the topic at hand beyond (charitably) the first one. Do you actually have opinions about the rules here that you wanted to share?
I'm not one to dig through comment history to make a point; but if I did, I'm guessing it would look like more of the same.
So, unless you have an actual argument to make about the moderation guidelines here, I don't think this conversation is adding any value. I'm not interested in trading swipes with a stranger.
I'm flagging because early on these obvious alerting news got flagged within seconds, while the equally political happenings, the less immigration-related thus somehow more relevant and appropriate ones, were tolerated.
I have since decided that this site does not deserve to know.
I think I can understand why someone from Europe or wherever else might flag these stories because they're not interested (...ignoring the whole Greenland elephant in the room for a second), but given that Scott Adams got a massive post on here despite the thread being mostly political shitflinging for obvious reasons it's really lowering my overall opinion of your average HN user. I'm increasingly inclined to say they need to show some information on who's flagging and why, especially if there's a consistent pattern and time of who is doing said flagging.
Some of the posts break thru the wave of people seemingly flagging these stories immediately like the Palantir stories but otherwise your best bet is having show dead on and looking in /Active instead.
The people running YC and their entire social circle voted for this. Half of them are still riding the grift. Now they are all practicing for their Persilschein.
