Also, my second submission was a link to a specific page on the site where I copied/pasted the title verbatim, and it was flagged immediately.
This leads me to believe that my post wasn’t flagged because of an inaccurate title, but because someone really didn’t want (and didn’t want others) to see the post.
If it’s content a submitter’s come across for the first time, and they don’t see it discussed here on HN, so they post it, and it immediately gets suppressed without any explanation, how does that help the submitter? (e.g. if it’s been autoflagged, it’d be helpful to see a reason for that, and perhaps a link to past discussion the submitter might have missed).
It just concerns me that this mechanism could be prematurely filtering out many valuable conversations that I’d like to be aware of.
I’d recommend searching a bit first but also avoid the sources like that who are trying to use your credibility on behalf of their clients. They will shed no tears for the cost to your reputation, which is deplorable but also predictable.
To me this whole thread looks like a way to social engineer your way around getting your articles flagged in spite of that being the most democratic mechanism to keep HN on track.
It seems like everyone commenting here is totally missing the point of why I submitted this question in the first place and is so fixated on the content of the links I originally submitted that they just can’t see the actual questions I’m asking.
I’m tired of engaging with people who refuse to engage with the actual questions I asked.
Also, those links I posted are of far less importance to me than my actual concern in terms of how HN and other sites shape my perception of the world based on their UX design. That is the reason I posed this question. Not to complain about my posts getting flagged.
Instead of contributing to the repetition of discussions on this topic, it may be more productive to seek out information and consider the possibility that the issue may lie with your own understanding and usage of the site. Additionally, making false claims about search results on a particular search engine only serves to undermine the credibility of your perspective. Alone because of the duckduckgo fib the discussion for me is over. I hope you have a pleasant day.
> Here you go, my first page of hits on mobile: https://imgur.com/a/zSL5fVX
> Only when I got to my laptop now did the set of links differ: https://imgur.com/a/EuUt7U5
> Clearly not the same set of results for the same search.
Re: this site's guidelines, I find your comment here a little disingenuous and far too generous towards HN's "guidelines". The mere fact that such content as this exists suggests that HN's guidelines are quite opaque: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
> See that's another you problem you changed something and now your search results are distorted. Here are screenshots from 5 different VPN locations with different browsers and different user agents... https://imgur.com/a/P4zoAzf
For what it's worth, I'd most strongly disagree with your use of the phrase "there is most certainly" there. There's nothing objective in science that declares what an "emergency" is. Deciding whether or not any situation is an emergency can never be the result of any science experiment.
IMO, most disagreements about "science" that crop up about contentious topics aren't really science disagreements, they're subjective risk-management disagreements.
Two people can look at the objective statistics about a situation and one person might see it as an emergency and one might not. They're technically both right because this is subjective in nature.
To me, there’s nothing more powerful than someone posting a contrarian perspective and there being a highly upvoted, well-reasoned/cited response as to why the contrarian perspective isn’t valid. This I would prefer over having those contrarian perspectives suppressed, and I never get to see or engage with them.