Some people, but not all. This story would be off the front page right now if we hadn't just turned flagging off on it, because we asked users to flag political stories (and err on the side of flagging) for a week. So it's clear that many people think of this story as 'politics'. Even if you don't classify it that way, it's clear that the story has political dimensions, as your comment indicates. (Also, it was day 3, not day 2, but yes, earlier than planned.)

A possible lesson is that any anonymous ranking/suppression mechanism can be used for reasons unrelated to the original motivation for the mechanism.

E.g. the many shades of SEO in an attention economy, or downvoting for quality vs disagreement. Once a mechanism exists, it acquires multiple identities through use.

Useful concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

That's great, thanks. Have you seen contemporary academics who are applying elements of cybernetics and systems thinking to social media and IoT feedback loops?

I haven't, but it sounds like it would be great research. I think systems thinking provides a powerful epistemology for scientific and mathematical inquiry.

A useful, if unpopular, corollary to that observation, in politics, is that there is no such thing as a "loophole"...

It's more complicated than that. If a judge under common law thinks you're trying to abuse the letter of the law to violate its spirit, they could very well deem it a loophole and reject the reasoning. In civil law a judge is expected to uphold the law as close to how it's written as possible. In both cases we have the corollary which many don't acknowledge that the law is not what's written on paper, it is a system that includes human components.

Yup, in a time when "should the US federal government actually do anything at all regarding X ∀ X" is so controversial, it swallows up anything having to do with IP law, and I don't believe it was the intent of the moderators to remove IP case law from the scope of permitted discussions on this site. Fully agree with the decision to roll back the experiment.

I submitted this story yesterday and it doesn't show as flagged. At least not for me. Maybe randomly different audience didn't think it political then?