[zzleeper]

The problem is that a relatively small group of people (flaggers) just veto what we see and don't see. This made sense when we relied on flagging to just remove spam, useless posts, etc. but its now being used to remove anything that goes against MAGA.

I'm pretty sure that if you sqldump the list of flaggers of this and other posts (like the MN posts) you will find it's not a uniformly distributed list of users.

[dang]

You've replied before I even had a chance to add a second sentence! Edit: admittedly it is taking longer than usual...

I've answered that point many times, e.g. recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818. If you take a look at that and have a question that isn't answered there (or here), I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

I haven't had a chance to look at the flaggers of these recent stories to verify that they fit the same pattern, but the pattern is so well-established that it would be shocking if they didn't. Btw, when you say "anything that goes against MAGA", the converse is the case as well (possibly even a bit more so). And when I say (quoting the comment I just linked to):

> There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.

... I didn't add that we do this the same way in either political direction, because that goes without saying, or ought to. But I'm saying it explicitly here.

[figgis]

This is a really rough spot, giving users the tools to remove visibility from a post will eventually get abused. I would genuinely be interested in some form of anonymized stats on the individual accounts and the posts they are flagging but that's a whole deal.

Am I wrong that there used to be a flagged option on the lists page, or am I missing where that is?

[Imustaskforhelp]

Honestly I don't ask for anonymized stats but rather public stats.

If you flag a post, you are inadvertedly trying to push a hn post away.

That's fine if the current moderation finds it okay and I respect HN moderation but once again another post gets flagged & dead.

If someone flags a post, they should have a reasoning why. So have it public, so that its easier to call people out if they are being unfair and it would make people more aware of who they are flagging and actually why.

[ryandrake]

Flagged articles should just list the usernames that flagged it--in a queryable way so anyone could do an analysis and see who is operating in bad faith.

[dang]

Sorry, but I can't imagine doing that - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581665.

[ryandrake]

You could publish hashes of the flaggers' usernames rather than the usernames themselves. The point is not to go on witch hunts--it's to stop the endless discussions and questioning around whether what we are all seeing (certain topics always seeming to disappear quickly) is the result of flagging activity that is evenly distributed across the site or coming from a relative handful of brigaders.

[Imustaskforhelp]

100%

[johnnyanmac]

Phrasing political flaggers as "those who care about the quality of the site" already shows the hand here. You can argue downvotes are for disagreement, bit Flags are for slop and spam, not blocking what I don't agree on.

Flags are basically me waving my hands in the air calling for a mod. That's not something I do unless I feel it's outright harmful to the site. I'm a late commenter so I pretty much never have to flag postings (mostly just comment responses that come straight out of Twitter).

[keernan]

>>When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.

I have observed that any post that is negative about Musk gets flagged. Almost 100% of the time. In that regard, it has certainly occurred to me that someone with Musk's wealth would find it trivial to hire millions of people to monitor and attempt to influence his image on social media - and imo it would be quite surprising if he didn't have massive numbers of people whose full time job was to do precisely that.

In that regard, I find it obnoxious someone of his wealth should be entitled to such personal privileges on HN. I don't mean to imply HN is actively supporting that - just that I believe HN should be taking affirmative steps to prevent the removal of 100% of things that would annoy Musk from ever reaching the front page.

[dang]

Any post that is positive about his muskness gets flagged as well, and even harder IIRC.

I hear you about privileges and I don't disagree, but we're mostly just trying to optimize for interesting discussions.

[keernan]

>but we're mostly just trying to optimize for interesting discussions

Thanks for taking the time to respond - and I certainly agree with the above. It's what makes HN pretty unique.

[insane_dreamer]

dang, first thank you for the moderation explanations

Besides those who flag political posts they don't agree with (which is a problem), I see a conflict in the comments between

those who think HN should be "politic-frei" because this is a "tech site" and "if I wanted to read about politics I'd go to reddit",

and those who agree this is a "tech/science/expand-curiosity-about-the-world site", and that's what makes HN a great community, but that it's sometimes, and especially recently, not possible to disentangle politics and tech. Musk/DOGE is a great example. No one asked Musk to drag politics into tech, and I wish I never had to read any articles about it and we could just talk about EVs and SpaceX, but he did, and so it's important to be able to talk about the impact which that has on tech, and on society, because this directly impacts us who are involved in tech/science. Tech/science does not exist in a vacuum.

[dang]

Yes, both of those positions are ones that one hears in the comments, among others.

The 'official', if I have to call it that, position of HN is closer to the second than the first, although I wouldn't say identical.

[zahlman]

[flagged]

[johnnyanmac]

>I flag them because they're trying to establish the use of a highly subjective and derogatory term as fact.

Fascism isn't a subjective matter. We have loads of definition and the article makes a serious argument. If the quality of the article matches the subject matter, it's not flag worthy.

That's why I don't flag on ideology. I flag based on if 1) this inspires curiosity and 2) does not inspire hate (which is usually built into 1. You can't be curious of your biases are clouded by prejudice).

>or because I point out the legal basis for justifying an LEO's use of lethal force, etc.

There's a time and place. I'm very critical of Charlie Kirk, bit I gave it a week before o really went full hog on my tjoughts and actions. I have to look it back up, but I believe here I left it at "no one should be assassinated for their thoughts, even if those thoughts don't follow the golden rule" and left it at that.

Now, months later I will happily say that it quite the coincidence that so many Kirk articles here weren't flag while calling the situation what it is still gets flagged.

[zahlman]

> Fascism isn't a subjective matter. We have loads of definition and the article makes a serious argument.

The article makes an argument because it cannot follow a consensus-accepted decision tree. We have many conflicting definitions from multiple sources, and there is all sorts of room to debate whether any given incident actually evidences some point of some definition. It is dictionary-definition subjective.

But more importantly, trying to fit something under a definition doesn't change what the thing actually is. Labelling things as "fascism" encourages lazy argumentation, and makes one prone to motte-and-bailey fallacy and the noncentral fallacy. For one example, people are now going around referring to ICE as "gestapo", prompted by this "fascist regime" framing. The central defining feature of the actual Gestapo is that they were secret. ICE agents are not hiding themselves in general, and even on the relatively unusual occasions that they are in plain clothes on video footage, they are not thereby doing anything that would be out of order for, say, local law enforcement.

This rhetoric also primes people to perceive "1A violations" when people are arrested for reasons clearly other than what they were saying, or "4A violations" in cases where a warrant is not legally required, or "10A violations" when federal law enforcement officers attempt to enforce federal law and happen to be within a state (or DC or Guam or whatever, you know what I mean) when they do so (as if there were any alternative). And it primes people to perceive ordinary law enforcement actions that have always happened and were always expected to happen in similar circumstances, in other developed countries like Canada as well, as some kind of fascist oppression. Most importantly, it has always been a federal crime to obstruct federal law enforcement; and 1A clearly does not and never did empower people to physically block the path of LEO to wave a sign in their face; and nothing ever legally empowered people to resist arrest.

> I flag based on if 1) this inspires curiosity and 2) does not inspire hate (which is usually built into 1. You can't be curious of your biases are clouded by prejudice).

I am not flagging based on ideology when I flag submissions like this one. I am flagging because they do not inspire curiousity and do inspire hate. Labelling people with terms like "fascist" (including vague political outgroups) is hateful. The fact that I can get responses like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768495 and (in another thread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754655, and the fact that I can get flagged on comments like (in another thread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46749406, makes the lack of curiousity-inspiration clear. As does the fact that every attempt I make to point at legal code and case law goes ignored in favour of people telling me that I'm out of line for daring to contradict their assessment of who is or isn't a fascist. Cogent arguments against the article's point of view are summarily rejected; threads fill with propaganda about "summary executions" (in ignorance of what self-defense law actually says) and pithy statements that don't seem to require any clear argumentation as long as they come to the right conclusion; and the ingroup gets more and more worked up.

>There's a time and place. I'm very critical of Charlie Kirk, but

People were openly celebrating the assassination; and they were spreading propaganda that blatantly misrepresented many different things he said, in many cases coming across as if they had had talking points prepared. And they also baselessly tried to associate the shooter with their political outgroup, despite that narrative barely making any sense.

Outside of HN, I saw all sorts of people call for more political violence, say that certain people "were next", etc. It was the first time in nearly a decade of being on Discord that I ever felt compelled to report anyone's messages to Discord Trust & Safety.

None of that should be accepted in the first place. To say that "there's a time and place" to call out such egregious behaviour is appalling.

You may notice that neither I nor anyone else justifying the shooting of Renee Good here on HN have been speaking ill of her. I have in fact been careful and explicit in not ascribing malice to her (because any resulting case is about Ross' perspective, and Good's mens rea is not relevant to an LEO's self-defense claim.)

(May I please also just say that it's especially galling to hear current appeals to 1A used to defend protesters who were impeding officers and resisting arrest, from the same political direction as the people who were happy that someone engaged in an act of protected speech was shot and killed by a sniper who politically disagreed with that speech? I didn't record any instances of the same person making both arguments, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it happened, either.)

I don't at all mean to come across as angry or belligerent. I simply want to explain why it hurts to read these things, and why I think they aren't in keeping with the intended spirit of political discussion on HN.

> quite the coincidence that so many Kirk articles here weren't flag while calling the situation what it is still gets flagged.

This is not about sides. This is about the tenor of rhetoric in submissions and comment sections (and the reasonable expectation of how comment sections will play out based on the submission).

[nicbou]

They flag what goes against the topic of the website, and the HN guidelines. Not everyone wants every website to be about US politics, and that is not a right wing conspiracy.