Articles get flagged if users perceive it to not be desired content and not necessarily because it violates a specific rule.

No, it’s almost certainly action by hasbara accounts, since virtually all tech relevant stories involving Israel get insta flagged. It’s not natural.

You'd be surprised by how many HN users would prefer to keep politics-first-tech-second news off the site.

This issue goes back as far as the site itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

and the way we handle it has was worked out over a decade ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

If anyone has questions about this, take a look at those links and if there's something unanswered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

I’m actually not surprised, but I reserve the right to be extremely judgmental about people who think that. That is to say, this preference is extremely lame.

Technology is political (as this article is a testament to). Technology is used to commit humanities worst horrors. Us tech workers do commit our work which enables these horrors. It is hard to admit that we are partially to blame, and that our industry is part of the problem. It is much easier to simply close our eyes and claim: This is just politics, and hence, none of my business.

EDIT: To clarify, I don’t agree with your parent that there is some astroturfing campaign going on on HN where state agent propagandists are mass flagging stories. I do however believe a lot of HN users are this lame, and don’t want to admit problems in our industry.

Everytime I submit a github project it becomes [dead] immediately.

You expect political drama submissions not to be flagged as offtopic?

Since there are no examples of that at https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ipaddr, I assume you're talking about a different account.

It's possible that account is banned, but more likely your self-posts might be getting filtered by HN's software which tries to apply this guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.:.

There's reddit.com if you need to vent your outrage about technology and politics. We don't need to turn every website on the internet into reddit, it's okay to have some websites focus on other things.

I specifically made sure not to claim that "tech is not political", because that would be wrong.

The issue is that "X used fake accounts to push political agenda on social media" might be interesting political news, but it's incredibly boring technical news.

Everyone knows that this is possible, and the only novel information here is political.

I'd say that if you posted news which are interesting in how they relate to tech, and also political, you're going to (or at least should have) more success than this article. Even just a proper analysis of how widespread fake political social media accounts area, deeper statistics, more novel processes of this happening, etc. would all be interesting, and would not fall in the politics-first-tech-second bucket.

Posts on all sides of this topic get flagged quickly (by users), and mods turn off the flags on limited occasions—mostly when some significant new information arises and there's at least some chance of a substantive discussion about it.

It's pretty important that most stories about this conflict and similar current affairs get flagged, because otherwise HN's front page would consist of little else, and that's not the purpose of the site. But it's also important that the topics not be ignored completely, even though they're painful. There's no happy medium here, unfortunately.

Here are some links to previous explanations. If you (or anyone, of course) have a look at these and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418881 (May 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 (April 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973 (March 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237176 (Feb 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39161344 (Jan 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947003 (Jan 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749162 (Dec 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527 (Dec 2023)

Reasonable approach and I applaud your effort to maintain the site's purpose while also not ignoring these issues (that do have some relation to the tech industry, as we've seen). Thank you.

Appreciate the case by case basis approach to moderation here. There are quite a few topics where discussion becomes suppressed when blanket bans are enforced.

Thank you dang. Doing the lords work.

Lord Sauron, obviously :P

Thank you for the explanation.

Thanks Dang this is much better than previously.

The problem is that we've already solved these issues many times over on other sites that are decades old. HN simply refuses to implement 21st-century forum enhancements.

Brigaded reports? 4chan solved it by adding a mandatory enum to reports to specify what the report is reporting for. Identifying bad reports and banning users as a result becomes trivial.

Flooding with stories about a particular topic? That's what stickies are for and they work particularly well so that mods can auto-delete any non-sticky stories pertaining to the MOT.

Flamewar on a MOT? Add a sticky to the top of the thread like reddit does saying moderation will be minimal and to enter the thread at your own risk.

> HN simply refuses to implement 21st-century forum enhancements.

I'd argue that the reason most of us are on HN is that it doesn't use 21st century forum enhancements.

I think I prefer dang's approach, at least at the scale that HN operates.

Use the appropriate forum to debate topics in the manner you prefer instead of trying to force others to conform to your standards.

There is no planet where the opinion above represents "force." Stop telling people who disagree with you to shut up.

> There is no planet where the opinion above represents "force."

How about one of the standard Merriam Webster definitions of force: (verb) "to compel by physical, moral, or intellectual means" i.e. by framing their argument to compel by convincing it's from an intellectual standpoint. Not too interested on your hangups for definitions of basic words to be honest here though.

Throwing a tantrum about being unable to redirect outrage freely onto others while masquerading adding functionality to enable that discourse as an "already solved problem implemented by others" with lack of complying to their personal standards being perceived as refusing "enhancements" isn't a discussion, its an emotion driven stance attempting to make the other party look unreasonable.

Gentle reminder that this is against the guidelines, it comes across somewhat as sneering and dismissive (which i don’t think was the intent, but is there none the less).

Where I can view all of the posts that had flags turned off?

We don't publish lists like that, for reasons I've outlined over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... But we do answer questions about specific threads.