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by ryandrake 486 days ago
Flagging is supposed to be for rule breaking, not to be used as some sort of mega-downvote for things you really don't like. If you don't want to read an article, why not just use the "hide" feature or move along to the next row?
1 comments
fngjdflmdflg 486 days ago
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics.[0]

I guess if GP had said "I've been flagging most posts I see related to politics" that would be fine.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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ryandrake 486 days ago
"About politics" is kind of vague. It's not like an article is either political or it's not. If you saw these headines at the top of HN, which of these would you consider "too political" and worthy of flagging?

- "Funding for NASA's next science mission in question"

- "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems"

- "State governors band together to propose new cyber-security rules"

- "UK government again takes aim at encryption"

- "List of IT systems DOGE staff members have access to"

Are all of these things just not-discussable here anymore, merely because they brush up against a government or politics?

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dang 486 days ago
That's correct. I use the tagphrase "political overlap" to post about this, so there's a trail of past explanations about how we handle this here (if anyone doesn't already know, and wants to):

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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fngjdflmdflg 486 days ago
Well there are two qualifiers there:

>unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

and

>If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic

Going off these, I would say "A deep dive into the IRS's legacy computer systems" is clearly fine, and the others could be considered questionable to varying degrees. I think it's fair to say that a news update should not automatically be considered an interesting new phenomenon because almost by definition all TV news will have some new element to it, and that is expressly labeled as "probably off-topic."

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fngjdflmdflg 486 days ago
(For the record https://news.ycombinator.com/flagged shows zero entries for me.)
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