[dang]

I haven't looked closely, but based on what I have looked at, plus prior experience, I believe that flags of this kind are a coalition between two subgroups of user: those who dislike the content of an article for political or ideological reasons, and those who are more concerned about the content being bad for HN (e.g. because they're worried about flamewars).

[arp242]

> because they're worried about flamewars

Huh? I've never seen a flamewar on this topic?

I wish HN was more granular about measures for users, e.g. by marking these highly contested topics and just giving people topic-bans. Some people just completely lose their shit, and then other people lose their shit in response, and these people post a million messages by the time the rest of us managed to actually read the article and perhaps some relevant background info. It just craps up everything.

That's what Wikipedia does. Works reasonably well.

Of course it'd have to be programmed.

[oefrha]

> I've never seen a flamewar on this topic?

What? Do you have showdead on?

I flagged this one, because “discussions” on this topic are mostly hot garbage, they are dominated by extremely motivated people shitting canned flamebait all over the place, especially early on. Indeed by the time I saw and flagged this there were already like four or five people doing exactly that, and by keeping it up, more of this type of users are invited. They are largely flagged by now, leaving an entire page of flagged stuff and more interwoven in the somewhat visible page; must be one of, if not the lowest signal-to-flag stories on HN. I can only see like 20% of 352 comments so far without showdead.

[arp242]

> What? Do you have showdead on?

I was joking – "woosh" as I believe the kids say.

And this is why I'd be in favour of a "topic ban".

[rightbyte]

The problem with topics bans is that you can sabotage topics you don't like to silence them. E.g. Rust evangelicals could have been silenced quite easely by flame baiting their posts.

[arp242]

Some people really don't need a whole lot of baiting; for example there's a top-level comment that reads (entire comment): "'peaceful support of Palestine'", without condemning Hamas is still pro-Hamas action in this case."

Never mind the stuff that's just outright beyond the pale.

So we can start with that.

[rightbyte]

Just some blend war mongerer trying make us choose side between Netanyahu and Hamas, pretending those are the options. Or what is your analysis?