[fzeroracer]

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.

[pvg]

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.

[fzeroracer]

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23870693

[pvg]

How can you tell the 'degree of flag' other than show their time on FP, though? I'm saying there's no real way to evaluate your claim with the links you've given because they just show you, dunno, that it was a story on HN. And again, 'high interest' is just an assumption of yours. A story can be high interest and lots of people can think it's just a poor HN fit.

[fzeroracer]

That's why I qualified my claim with 'believe'. There's no way for either of us to validate our claims because flags are not public, so all we have are inferences and figuring out what stories survive and why.

But this goes back to my main point is that what people think is a good fit on HN boils down to ideological reasons. That's why stories about Youtube banning someone gets a large number of votes upwards with complaints of censorship while stories like this one get flagged.

[pvg]

Sure but you started by saying these things weren't flagged and they probably were. Lots of things are flagged, it doesn't take a lot of flags to throw something off the front page. I'm sure people flag for 'ideological' reasons but I think the chances are pretty good it largely evens out.

PG's most recent essay got banished off the FP (correctly, if you ask me) within a couple of hours, with zillions of upvotes and a thread made of pure HN hell. You can actually interpret that outcome N different ways to support a preferred narrative. One might be that HN is just a place for oblivious techbros. Another one might be that HN's immune system worked and deep-sixed the thing.