[cotelletta]

Which of these principles demands you let a cabal of intersectionalists flag their enemies off the front page? Just curious where the intellectual curiosity and lack of reflexiveness comes in.

I ask because if there's one thing I've noticed, it's that these people are unable to tell the difference between low quality arguments and low status arguments. Consistently.

[dang]

Those are just 4 principles- there are dozens more where those came from. As Marshall McLuhan used to say, "You don’t like those ideas? I got others."

Everybody with ideological passions feels like their enemies always flag them off HN's front page and dominate HN in every other way too. This is not an accurate perception—it's produced by your passions. I don't mean that you're imagining the datapoints you see, but rather that you're filtering out the ones you don't see. Since there are more than enough datapoints to supply any perception, this creates von Neumann elephants (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

In your case the passions are clear from how you swoop in with guns blazing—"cabal of intersectionalists" and so on. The people with opposite passions—your enemies—are just as shocked and dismayed by what they imagine, which is that you dominate HN. I can give you endless examples, but if you're able to make do with a few dozen, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. The striking thing, to the rest of us, is how closely you and your enemies resemble each other. The comments and rhetoric are isomorphic—they just have the sign bit flipped.

During the Stallman saga of a couple months ago, we were getting all sorts of "why are RMS stories all being flagged off the front page" (note that word all) in comments and emails, even after 30+ major threads about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636. Similarly, during the George Floyd aftermath of a year ago, people were saying "any mention gets aggressively removed from discussion" (note that word any), even though it was the single most-discussed topic on HN by a long shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. As I said at the time, when you're 10x bigger than Rust on HN, and someone calls that "aggressively removed from discussion", we seem to have left behind shared reality.

That is why I say that these perceptions are (a) inaccurate; (b) produced by political passions; and (c) isomorphic under ideological flippage.

The bias here is probably that you notice what you dislike and elide the rest (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you felt differently, you'd notice a different set of stories getting flagged and overlook different ones remaining on the front page. The filters are in you. By "you" I don't mean you personally, of course. We all do this.

There's a serious discussion to be had about how flagging actually works on HN, and I've posted many answers about that too, but when the "question" is so ideologically driven, my experience is that it doesn't help much. For anyone who's interested, you can find some of the past explanations here:

We sometimes turn off flags when an article can support substantive discussion: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

For common topics, significant new information is generally needed: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

(See? More principles!)

[skinnymuch]

I believe I agree with the last paragraph and that the issue ends up becoming a status quo issue and unfairness.

I assume that’s what you mean by low status? Something that may be good, but isn’t of the status quo?

This is a much harder and rarely attacked or solved problem.

EDIT: it is all the harder when people like your sibling play the victim and say they are being oppressed. Which could be true for low status comments, but the oppressed/victim mindset/thinking is true across all quality of posts.