When you see [flagged] on a story it means users flagged it. We don't know why users flag things, but it's probably not hard to understand in this case. The topic is inflammatory, the threads have both been flamewars, and there's not much information to discuss.
Incidentally, some of the users flagging the story are people who, I know from their usernames, are sympathetic to the cause of the protestors. The flagging is therefore not exclusively ideologically driven. Seasoned Hacker News users often flag threads that they feel are bad for the site (e.g. because the thread is a flamewar), separately from their own views on the topic. That's community stewardship, not ideological suppression.
Edit: also, is it really a mystery what's happening here? The article linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867746 seems to explain it pretty well: the feds have sent police to Portland and there's a strong disagreement between the federal government and the state and local governments about whether they should be doing that. If those are the facts, it's not surprising that the threads are flamewars, because there's really not much for commenters to comment on other than to repeat the political commitment they already have.
HN has never been a site to shy away from political flamewars. You can look back through the various posts we have on China here where people rightfully claim the government in China has been responsible for various atrocities. Those threads fall along similar political lines and there's no real debate to be had, yet they still survive [1]. Hell, we can even talk about the recent threads on Trump [2] to see similar threads explode in popularity and make it through unflagged.
But we have a very obvious instance of something that all sides should be able to agree on, which is the feds picking up people off the streets without identification or recourse. This shouldn't even have political contention because both the left and the right should be able to agree it's a Bad Thing. Especially here on HN where there's a running trend of anything that involves censorship or rights being taken away [3] [4] [5] [6] gets massive amounts of traction but a story of very obvious government overreach ends up getting flagged.
This isn't to say that I think all topics are driven like this. As you've linked before, there are various discussions on police brutality made here on HN. But I've noticed those threads also go through significant periods of being flagged or pushed off the page until there's enough users to vouch for it or vote it up to bypass those flags. Which is to say I firmly believe stories nowadays are being flagged not on the basis of discussion but because of ideological reasons even if there are a few users using flags as it is intended. Otherwise why do those other stories explode in popularity considering they have the same levels of political flamebaiting?
When you break the site guidelines the way your account has been doing—by outrageously breaking the rules in comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867312, and also by plainly using HN primarily for ideological battle,
I don't think your lengthy arguments about how HN should be moderated hold much water.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23884760. As I explained there, I've held off chastising you for much, much longer than we normally do with users who are abusing the site the way you have been. This needs to change. If you want to use HN for its intended purpose, that won't be hard—plenty of users who share your ideological views manage to do so, and I'm happy to give you any explanations that would be helpful. But if you don't want to, you need to conduct your battles elsewhere. No, this is not because we secretly side with $appalling-position. It's because it's the only way to protect the commons, and the commons has to come first. Scorched earth will do no good for anyone.
Nowhere did I accuse you of secretly siding with a position. I don't believe you're siding with any appalling position but what I do believe is that HN will not survive in the current way y'all moderate content here. Eventually there'll be some sort of controversy or problem that'll pop up with the site as a whole and all of the bad faith actors will come out of the woodworks to take advantage of it. I've even personally emailed you about the people that are outright threatening other HN posters and what do you think will happen when one of them decides to take it more seriously and actually attack someone here? Since there's a lot of people that actually have PII as part of their account info.
The person I plainly insulted and called a liar is a great example of that sort of poster. You can literally look at his post history and see how he's been arguing and you even noticed that he's created multiple accounts to fuel that shit. As I've mentioned before flagging and upvoting only works as a preventative measure if the community can collectively deal with people who are not engaging in good faith. But when the person I was arguing with was explicitly advocating for the destruction of dissidents [1] there is no other side to be had.
But you know what, I'll go ahead and say I'm done posting here. I appreciate your restraint in dealing with me but I've said my peace. I've noticed older users start to become fed up in the same way I've been and once the people that were managing the commons leaves, who will be left?
In reality, that's just not the case. Lots of topics just lead to low-quality discussions and those are flagged. I'd be inclined to flag something with this submission's title without as much as looking at the discussion thread.
Sure, but my point being that I linked multiple topics which lead to very obvious low quality discussions that don't end up being flagged. In fact, they end up becoming the topic of the day in many ways. So the argument becomes why do those topics end up becoming popular and topics such as this one do not?
Obviously I'm already giving away my ideological slant here which is that I firmly believe the story in question is horrific. But what I find frustrating is that flagging only works if the userbase agrees to flag topics that will lead to low quality discussions. If the userbase ends up not flagging those topics, then flagging comes down to ideological divides and that's what I see.
Things drop off the front page through flagging long before they pick up enough flags for [flagged] status. So I'm not sure your 'not flagged' metric is actually right.
It works for the low effort, low interest stories. So the stuff that trolls might submit or stories that are otherwise uninteresting.
But what I'm referring to are the high interest, high flamebait stories. Which all of the stories I've linked are examples of where the discussion largely falls down along partisan lines and the end result is poor quality discussion. Then there are stories which fall somewhere in the middle such as this one, which are high interest but end up flagged over ideological reasons. One of the ways you can tell that is specifically the case for this story is because it's been submitted a number of times now [1] with a large amount of votes and a varying degree of flags.
Because the headline is nonsense. The cops are not 'unidentified', they are clearly identified as federal law enforcement and they are arresting people who they believe have broken the law. They are not kidnapping random people off the street.
I didn’t see the men identify themselves in the video. Did you? Seems pretty clear cut definition of “unidentified” to not say who you are or what organization you’re with.
People make generalizations about HN based on what they see, but they see what they notice and are far more likely to notice what they dislike and weight it more heavily (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Basically that means your image of HN is likely to fill out as an inverse image of your own views. In other words, HN will seem to be full of your enemies. That explains why the other side sees the forum as being made up of their enemies.
Everyone here needs to accept—because it's reality—that the forum is simply divided on divisive topics. It's divided roughly the way that society at large is divided in the many countries whose citizens participate here. No doubt there is some skew (because of factors like education and class), but with the exception of a small number of issues like, say, software patents, it's likely not a major skew. Perceptions of major skew on HN are overwhelmingly rooted in cognitive bias, which explains why they're so contradictory and all over the place.
One reason this is so important is that when someone perceives HN as being dominated by enemies, they are much more likely to go into battle mode. If instead you perceive it as being a more-or-less representative sample of the world, that's still rough—the world is not as we would like it to be—but there's at least a greater possibility of openness. I wrote more about this here, if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
I wrote out a longer post, but decided to delete it because it wasn't as charitable as I wanted it to be. Simply put I disagree. What is considered to be divisive is also political.
Sure, divisive topics are political, almost by definition. No argument there.
This point is a factual one though. People's perceptions of skew on HN are massively distorted by cognitive bias, and that includes your perceptions if you think that HN is "made up of primarily right wing users".
Please don't underestimate this phenomenon. It's probably the most significant one that I observe here and it's incredible how reliable it is.
For example: you're reacting to two police-related submissions getting flagged and seeing that as a sign of right-wing users dominating the site. (Actually, I can tell you for certain that some of the users flagging these are left-wing users who must have other reasons for flagging it.) Meanwhile you're not counting the many major threads that HN has had about police brutality in the last couple months. There was one yesterday, in fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23860829.
If you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962, you'll find an analysis I did a few weeks ago showing how George Floyd-related topics, including police brutality, were by far the most-discussed topics on HN in the previous month. That's a fact—and yet it doesn't stop people from claiming, not just that the topics are underrepresented (which would already be completely mistaken) but that they are being completely suppressed! ("aggressively removed from discussion", one complaint said.)
That is the bias I'm talking about in action. You simply can't go by what you notice and dislike (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you do, you may well end up with a picture that it is the exact opposite of what's really going on here. Needless to say, I'm not talking about you personally, but about all of us.
Incidentally, some of the users flagging the story are people who, I know from their usernames, are sympathetic to the cause of the protestors. The flagging is therefore not exclusively ideologically driven. Seasoned Hacker News users often flag threads that they feel are bad for the site (e.g. because the thread is a flamewar), separately from their own views on the topic. That's community stewardship, not ideological suppression.
Edit: also, is it really a mystery what's happening here? The article linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867746 seems to explain it pretty well: the feds have sent police to Portland and there's a strong disagreement between the federal government and the state and local governments about whether they should be doing that. If those are the facts, it's not surprising that the threads are flamewars, because there's really not much for commenters to comment on other than to repeat the political commitment they already have.