I have formed the impression political threads in general are being flagged, and rapidly.
I'm concerned about potential misuse of the flagging mechanism.
Does any data or insight exist into the who/what/where/when of thread suppression via flagging?
Is it reasonably known that what seems to be happening the genuine will of the mass of readers? or it there potential for misuse, to suppress discussion?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45267159 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This "Is HN being censored" comes up probably daily - the answer is that it's being curated, the same way it has always been, by all of us, with Dan and Tom, who we know and trust.
Otherwise I flag all non-technical/finance government-related threads (i.e., ICE raids on XYZ city), even as a left-wing anti-capitalist socialist. This just isn't the place for those threads. They never lead to a good discussion, and most people discussing those topics are simply farting into the wind.
There's no mis-use or "suppression" with the flag, flagging is an individual choice with individual determination. Just like the American government taught me to be!
(And I flagged this thread, too. Email the admins like you're supposed to if you have complaints about HN.)
Some externally documented HN features: [1] not my repo
HN is not a forum for every topic of speech. It is a very openly a heavily moderated community board.
In general the moderation is very excellent and the range of allowable speech is very open. But topics that are wildly unrelated probably belong on other sites.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
It's rare that I see something political that passes the "interesting new" test. The political stories almost always turn into partisan shouting and no real conversation. In my very subjective opinion the vitriolic tone then leaks into other more interesting threads.
For better or for worse the moderators will in fact occasionally disable the flagging for threads.
toomuchtodo•4mo ago
https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals for thread removal tracking
political moderation methodology by:dang - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718396 is helpful context
HN Search: political overlap by:dang - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
HN Search: turn off flags by:dang - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...