[msbarnett]

An extremely partisan voting block heavily flagging something is a piss-poor signal for on-topicness, come on. That kind of sloppy logic is a great way to let organized voting rings suppress uncomfortable news, though.

Incredibly embarrassing statement for someone moderating this place to be making.

[dang]

Sorry, I'm not following you here. The sensational-indignant OP, just like anything sensational-indignant of whatever political flavor, is obviously not in line with HN. That should be obvious both in theory (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and in practice (https://news.ycombinator.com/front). So it was correct for users to flag the submission. If people hadn't been flagging such things for well over a decade, HN wouldn't still exist.

I mean, if you want to argue that the story is actually a substantive and intellectually interesting one, containing significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), and it's just the title that's sensational-indignant, that would be fine. But that bar is necessarily pretty high when it comes to garden-variety political pieces. If it weren't, then HN would just be a political site.

Edit: btw, adding comments definitely does not help a post stay on the front page - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34041016.

[msbarnett]

> I mean, if you want to argue that the story is actually a substantive and intellectually interesting one, containing significant new information

Why would I want to argue that? It certainty doesn’t describe the million identical ChatGPT circlejerks that rocket to the front page without getting flagged out of existence.

This NFT story was no less tech adjacent than them, and no less vapid and inane than them, but it had the appearance of being embarrassing for a certain hyperpartisan political segment, so it was flagged by a bunch of those supporters, and you in your infinite fecklessness are sitting here back-inventing justifications for this flag based on “well no I’m sure all those flags were about the low intellectual quality of the article” as if 97% of the front page wasn’t idiotic pablum aimed at potted plants.

It’s hard to take seriously the suggestion that you’re too stupid to realize those flags weren’t politically motivated and not just a comment on its indistinguishable-from-any-other-garbage-that-gets-popular quality.

[dang]

Sorry but I really think you're off base here. It's true that politically minded users (or partisans of any strong cause) tend to flag stories from the side they don't like. But it's also true that many HN users flag stories that they think don't belong on HN, given the site guidelines. You can tell the two categories apart by their flagging histories. I looked at a bunch of the flags on the OP—not all, because there was a massive number of them—and saw plenty of examples of the latter, including some from users who have been high-quality HN contributors for many years and never shown signs of politically motivated flagging.