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by untog 2706 days ago
I can't speak for the OP, but I've been frustrated to find that any time a controversial topic comes up on HN (say, sexism) it is immediately flagged off the homepage. A small cohort of HN users get to dictate what the site at large discusses, and I'm not sure that's for the betterment of the industry.
1 comments
bilbo0s 2706 days ago
???

So is this basically a revolt by the more political oriented people? I mean, the people who want to discuss the political type controversial stuff and not so much tech and science?

Just wondering why I never heard of it until I read that comment?

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nostrademons 2706 days ago
It's interesting, I just checked it out (I'd never heard of it before) and a number of the usernames seem familiar, and are not who I'd think of as more political-oriented people. The topics are actually more technical and arguably interesting than what shows up on HN these days.

I think it may just be that beyond a certain size, online communities break, and you get crap. And laarc is effectively a splinter off HN of users who got fed up with the content here.

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untog 2706 days ago
> Just wondering why I never heard of it?

Because it gets flagged off the site immediately.

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bilbo0s 2706 days ago
In fairness though, if you want a politics version of HN, you can just make your own. I think there are a large number of flags required to get a post removed from the front page. So, to me, it sounds like there are a lot of tech, math, science types who are just not interested in posts that they feel "pollute" the stream so to speak.

I mean, again, if we're being fair, those guys should get as much of a say as you do.

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untog 2706 days ago
I think the core contention is that tech, maths and science do not live outside of politics - they're all political topics. Books have been written about the politics involved in science.

> those guys should get as much of a say as you do.

Absolutely agree. But the flagging mechanism means that a small number of users make the choice for the rest, who never see the story in question.

I'm not suggesting I have an easy fix, community moderation is one of the biggest problems out there. But I'm not sure the current approach is the best one, that's all.

EDIT: and you might notice it happening now. This story has slipped down to 23rd on the front page, despite having far more upvotes in a shorter space of time than the stories that surround it. Soon it won't be on the front page any more.

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bilbo0s 2706 days ago
>But the flagging mechanism means that a small number of users make the choice for the rest...

That's the thing though, "a small number of users" made the choice to put the post on the front page in the first place. It only really takes a tiny fraction of the daily user count to promote a submission to the front page, and, to my mind, YCombinator is just kind of saying, "well, since there's no way to downvote a submission, we'll have this flagging mechanism." I think that's a reasonable compromise.

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