[Freedom2]

I spoke to a few HNers who I know flagged this post. They mentioned that they flagged it because it goes against the HN guidelines - a holy grail of sorts - and that the post does not invite "curious discussion". When prompted, they mentioned they would much rather read about pro-Musk technological exploits than anything against the US.

[GJim]

Unfortunately, flagging is heavily abused here on HN. Criticism of adtech and attempts to defend privacy laws will bring out flagging in droves; almost as if some HN'ers salaries are dependent on opposing such laws!

Some sort of meta-moderation system to prevent abuse of flagging would be welcome.

[xingped]

Unfortunately HN is likely astroturfed just as much as any other forum, despite the otherwise seemingly substantiveness of HN compared to sites like Reddit. And unfortunately there's no way to cancel out bad faith flagging and downvoting the same way you can reply to bad faith commenting. It's more invisible and easier to abuse (once the karma thresholds have been reached, which isn't hard).

[igneo676]

The mitigation mechanism is moderators like dang who manually intervene

It's not perfect, but it ain't nothing

[insane_dreamer]

there are tons of posts on HN that don't invite "curious discussion"

this is one that would actually invite curious discussion if some people weren't clutching onto their "God Bless America (We're #1!)" pearls quite so tightly

[Teever]

More and more I'm finding that the most interesting conversation about America isn't coming from Americans anymore.

There was a time where I was quite interested in listening to people from America talk about their fascinating and crazy sounding country, but as time goes on I find that to be much more repetitive and not insightful.

Now I'm more interested in what people from other countries have to say about America, and I find it fascinating how Americans online find this unsettling and sometimes get snippy about it really weird ways.

Sometimes I wonder what political threads on HN would be like if Americans weren't allowed to participate in them. For the people in the crowd who take things more literally in know this isn't possible, it's just an interesting thought experiment.

Would that result in more 'creative' conversation?

Maybe for a while until new patterns/tropes/memes were built up by the users that could comment on them. Maybe the issue with the political discussions that too often the people talking about them are too close to them, too immersed in them?