I strongly suspect that this "divisive" nature of the topic is precisely the illusion being created. That's exactly what I am challenging here.
In my non-online life I've known many vaccine skeptics, climate skeptics, crypto enthusiasts, extreme right/left-wingers, people with complex view of trans issues, divisions on BLM topics, gun fanatics, gun abolitionists etc, etc.
But the opinion around what's happening in Gaza right now doesn't fit into this category. Regardless of political opinion, outside of Zionists, I have not met anyone who will not, in private of course (for the reasons mentioned previously), agree that what's happening in Gaza is genocide and is not in the interests of the United States. The strength of the opinion can vary, but the general direction of opinion is consistent.
Another reason I added "clearly" is because, compared to say climate change posts that are often filled with climate denial comments, there are typically very few commenters engaging in any controversial discussions. Nearly all the top level comments are in agreement, the majority of the replies are as well. Compared to genuinely controversial topics which often do quickly devolve into impossible arguments.
There's also the broader issue that silence is not always a neutral position. When one side benefits much, much more from silence than the other, you can't simply shrug your shoulders and say "well it's controversial so let's not talk about it". In this case, silencing conversations about the genocide in Gaza is very beneficial to the state perpetuating this genocide and likewise very harmful to the people suffering from it.
The strategy is simple: make the topic appear to be more divisive than it is, which makes it easy to silence as "divisive and emotional", which is essentially the most desirable outcome.
Do people around you think that the number of victims are manipulated? Or do they think that civilians were bombed and displaced, the infrastructure destroyed, the supplies stopped, but that's just fair game?
Well that sure seems a bit tautological.
I believe this is the main factor that tricks readers into assuming that (legit) comments and votes on a story must be manipulated. It's hard to fathom how anyone could in good faith hold views so different from one's own, views that seem not just obviously wrong but monstrous.
[editing - bear with me...]
The pro Palestine side has also given themself a pretty bad image, so it will take some very compelling evidence(which this video is not as it doesn't show anything clearly), to make this issue higher priority.
Could it actually be right?
It's hard for me to feel like these political flagfests make the rest of the site any better, while the rest of the site is what I find value in. If I want to witness mobs possessing massive standard deviations in knowledge and experience with the subject matter flamewarring each other, there are already a whole lot of places on the Internet I can go for that. It's the tech-and-genuine-curiosity-not-yelling part of HN that's the value prop for me here, and FWIW, for a sample size of one, threads like this do little to improve on that.
Of course I can hide this story and move on. But it's hard for me to believe that all the stress hormones flowing in the people reading and participating don't have some kind of negative knock-on effects on other, more peaceful threads.
On university campuses, examples include Hasbara Fellowships (training students to advocate for Israel), pro-Israel student clubs (organizing events and campaigns), social media trainings, resource support from Jewish organizations, and counter-actions against pro-Palestinian movements.
Online, Israeli ministries and affiliated organizations operate official social media teams, develop advocacy platforms and tools (like the Act.IL app), and use influencer campaigns, bots, and coordinated digital actions to shape public opinion. After October 7, 2023, civilian Hasbara initiatives on social media expanded rapidly, ranging from individual efforts to coordinated campaigns with governmental support.
So how can you say that this is a controversial topic and the dovnvotes are organic?
How is it controversial when 2mil. peope are being starved? When thousands of children have been killed by a country whose prime minister is a wanted war criminal?
Edit: Corrected "not organic" => organic
Incidentally, I was talking about downvotes and flags from every side of the conflict, not just the side you're talking about. I don't see a lot of difference there either.
It's hard to respond without specific links. From my perspective, there are throngs of comments on both sides of this getting downvoted and flagged, mostly for good reason but not always.
FWIW, I think any "$large-group-bad" comment probably should be downvoted on HN. The world doesn't work that way, so any such comment is likely to be a pretty bad one (relative to what we're trying for here).
Even if literally no one agreed, I still feel deeply that never discussing this topic at all is not an option, and I think that could be derived from the first principle of the site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), although I admit that the exact proof escapes me.
Here is a pretty reasoned take making the case for why its not a genocide: https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/im-a-war-scholar-there-is-no-gen...
I think its extreme to call anyone who disagrees racist.
It's one of the last bastions of large-scale intellectual discussion that hasn't be overrun by bots, teenagers, or trolls. Digg was destroyed, then Slashdot, and now Reddit is mostly AI spam.
Hacker News is a place where when I see spam, it looks obviously of place. And then an hour later... it's gone.
How many western allies just starve 2mil people currently? How many have killed thousands of children in two years? Detain children, women, men, without any charges, torture them, brag about raping captives on TV?
Edit: Oh, yeah, the organic downvotes begin.
Your post isn't even flagged yet as it fits the narrative.
If you can't take differing opinions, you might not wanna engage in a discussion.
China, Russia, Iran, etc would definitely benefit from pouring fuel on this topic.
Not sure why you think only one side does it.
One can be deeply sympathetic to the millenia-long suffering of the Jewish people and even want them to have a homeland, and yet believe that Israelis are largely unconcerned with the welfare of Palestinian civilians. It’s also reasonable at this point to believe that Israel - for the last year, at least - is pursuing military action without a strategic goal or a long-term plan other than “encouraging voluntary transfer” of the civilian population.
To you, does the above paragraph immediately strike you as pro- or anti-Israel?
And then extend that to believing Hamas are monsters, that whenever Palestine has--in modern times--had any power or leverage, it has used it to be a pest to its neighbors, and yet still believe that those people don't deserve to face starvation, bombing, economic ruin and forced displacement.
No, I'm saying the opposite. That you can be judgemental of Hamas and even suspicious of the motives of those claiming to speak for the Palestinian people while still condemning Netanyahu's tactics in this war.
I think the best thing you can say is that Hamas has a non-military arm that has provided enough social services that Gaza didn't collapse in economic ruin over the last two decades. The much more obvious thing to say is that Hamas has run a nihilistic campaign largely focused on the murder of Israeli civilians, and that they are Islamist in nature (and thus opposed to secular democracy). (I'll add my personal opinion that I hope many of them burn in hell for the calamity they've brought on Gaza.)
I would love to understand what you mean by my lack of understanding of Israeli perspectives. I talk to Israelis regularly. What perspectives do you believe I'm missing? If you're think I don't care about the safety and wellbeing of Israelis (and, to be specific, Israeli Jews), you'd be incorrect. I believe in Israel being a strong and prosperous state. If you think that means I should blindly ignore the fact that Israeli polls show that the Israeli public is unconcerned about the fate of Palestinians in Gaza and that this consequently leads me to believe Israelis are shortsightedly reducing their own security in the long term, then I wouldn't be able to agree with you. If you think I should similarly ignore that - under Bibi and Likud - Israel has deliberately acted against US policy to encourage the formation of a Palestinian state, and has created a defacto one-state reality which again reduces the security of the Israeli state, I wouldn't be able to agree with you either.
Polls about Israeli indifference to Palestinians is a non-sequitur.
Israel tells us all daily what its goals are and why, and how it intends to achieve those goals. Its actions then match those statements.
However, it is very difficult for most people, apparently, to listen to Israel and falsify its statements. Too much history, propaganda, false consensus, confirmation bias, and, frankly, anti-Semitism. Much easier for everyone to agree with each other that Israel bad, to attribute motives, to assume the worst, to believe Israel's enemies. Those people think it's reasonable to say something like "while I agree that Israel has the right to exist, that does not give them the right to commit war crimes and genocide."
…yes, they do.
So… why were the flags on the article covering Hulk Hogan’s (tech-irrelevant) death turned off? The article was flagged, then inexplicably came back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44672329
And it's not the first time I've seen this happen with various news fluff.
I’ll be frank: I’ve had faith in the mod team in the past, but the lack of consistency is becoming offensive to me. Celebrity gossip is OK, but not most things ICE or Musk related for example, even when there's direct involvement from SV elites? I'm finding it hard to see the throughline here. What am I missing?
Turning off the flags on a story doesn't mean we want to give it front page exposure (and in that case, we didn't give it front page exposure). It allows people who want to discuss that topic to do so whilst not taking up front page space and also not drawing complaints from people who feel strongly that they want to discuss it.
We do the same thing with some of the politics-related topics you're talking about too. The primary consideration is always whether the story contains "significant new information", and another significant consideration is whether the discussion thread is of a reasonably high standard.
There's long precedent here, going back at least to 2008 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869). Here's a memorable (to me at least) case from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426.
If you want to understand how we think about and approach moderation of political stories on HN, probably the best set of explanations is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) familiarize yourself with those explanations and then still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. But do please read some of that stuff first because the questions (and therefore the answers) are nearly always the same.
p.s. All that said, I appreciate your watching out for the quality of HN and I understand the concern.
You are presenting a false dichotomy. It could be that the posts are a reflection of the reality of the situation (i.e. one of the sides is 'more wrong').
Not sure what wrongness has to do with that either. In the first case it reflects the political preferences of the admin, in the other it reflects the preferences of HN bubble. Either could happen independently of who is wrong and who is right.
"Is it accidental or intentional that all privacy related posts are biased towards individuals having a right to privacy?"
If you think it's nice when media is biased towards what you consider to be right, and that's the point of your analogy, I disagree.
For example, more posts will be submitted that support the view that individuals have a right to privacy than the opposite ('more wrong') view.
You don't seem to be accounting for this outcome - no flagging or moderation, accidental or intentional, just a difference in the number of submissions for each view.
The sun doesn't rise by accident or design, it just rises.
Political stories are usually getting flag enough by people who don't want politics on HN, people disagreeing with it/believing it's not good content and eventual mod interventions. So if "accidental" framing bothers you, I can rephrase.
Either mods are not intervening, and HN consensus is strong enough to overcome the flagging on this specific topic. I would expect more stories on main in this case, but it is an option (what I called accidental).
Alternatively, mods do intervene, either by manually unflagging some stories, or manually demoting some, but not all of them (what I called intentional). In this case I'd want to know what's the argument [1] for it
And the sun either rises by design of whoever designed our universe or because the solar system appeared by accident out of initial conditions of the big bang.
I will freely admit my view may be too dismissive and that I should change my ways, but these kinds of threads almost never feel to me like the juice is worth the squeeze. In other words, that ratio I mentioned seems out of whack. Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead, not enough people vouch for 'em (I'm sometimes guilty of that), and the amount of invective and judgment they're met with just seems to depend on how fast they got downvoted or flagged to oblivion.
I realize I'm shouting into the wind, and you have no obligation to change any of this for me. But I really do not see how this sort of thing is good for the site long-term. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a certain set that needs to scream about something every month or they start vandalizing less controversial threads and it's net positive to let them have their moment. Maybe I'll go write something that auto-hides threads for me when there's been a certain proportion of flagging and downvoting.
Anyway, you've got a tough job and do it with grace. No reply necessary, but thanks for all you do.
I agree. The trouble is that not discussing it at all is not a solution either.
> it comes down to the ratio of "intellectually interesting" (quote from your first link) comments, and those that engage with them in good faith, versus all the yelling and condemnation, right?
I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is.
> Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead
I don't think there's a "thread mainstream" here. I think the community is deeply divided.
If you (or anyone) see good-faith comments getting mistreated in this way, we'd appreciate links so we can take a look. Sometimes we restore those comments, other times we find that the comment broke the site guidelines and thus should stay flagged. But we always look, and usually also have enough time to reply.
> I realize I'm shouting into the wind
Not at all! We're interested. We just don't necessarily have good answers.
So, sending it to page 4 quick-like has too many downsides? I am not an expert in community management, I'm interested to understand why.
> I wish it were that simple but I don't think it is.
If you have the time, I'd love to read more about this.
> we'd appreciate links so we can take a look
I didn't delve deeply, but here's one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718264 In the future should I email?
> We're interested. We just don't necessarily have good answers.
Fair enough! Thank you for your patience and perseverance!
We're not experts either. It's not as if there's any foundation for this job other than just doing it, badly.
I'll try to explain how I personally think about this. One thing is clear: the core value of HN is intellectual curiosity and that's what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). I'd refine that one bit further by saying it's broad intellectual curiosity. There's also narrow intellectual curiosity, which has its place too, but is a different thing. (And there are other forms of curiosity, e.g. social curiosity, which motivates things like celebrity news and gossip. Those also have their place. But they're less relevant here.)
What's the difference between broad and narrow intellectual curiosity? If you think of curiosity as a desire and willingness to take in new information, then I'd say "broad" means wanting to take in new information about almost anything—whatever's going on in reality, the world, etc., just because it's there; and "narrow" means wanting new information, but only about a restricted subset of things. That means there's an excluded set of topics—things about which one could take in new information, but for whatever reason, doesn't want to. Maybe it's too painful, for example.
What I'm saying is that the current topic is one of a small set of topics which are admittedly painful (and I'd say that pain shows up as anger in a lot of the comments here—on all sides of the topic) but which broad intellectual curiosity simply cannot exclude. If we exclude it, then we're failing to optimize for what we're optimizing for. In that sense, not discussing it at all would be a failure.
[editing - bear with me...]
BTW the comment I linked above[0] has been flagged and is dead again, after I thought it had been restored. Did it violate site guidelines? Or did somebody come back in and flag it again?
Emailing is the way to make sure we see something.
> I agree. The trouble is that not discussing it at all is not a solution either.
Not discussing it at all is certainly a solution. There are plenty of other fora where these issues can be discussed (Reddit and Twitter, off the top of my head). HN does not have to also take up that mantle.
> > Too many good-faith comments that don't go with the thread mainstream get flagged and dead
> I don't think there's a "thread mainstream" here. I think the community is deeply divided.
It's quite obvious that there's a thread mainstream. One perspective absolutely dominates the top level posts and replies. Top level posts with a different point of view have been flag killed very thoroughly. I would make a contrarian post (the type that HN normally loves) to try share my knowledge of the situation (which I bet is significantly deeper than 99% of the commenters here) but it's not worth it when I expect it to get instantly flag killed.
> If you (or anyone) see good-faith comments getting mistreated in this way, we'd appreciate links so we can take a look. Sometimes we restore those comments, other times we find that the comment broke the site guidelines and thus should stay flagged. But we always look, and usually also have enough time to reply.
But the discussion will have moved on by then. There are simply not enough moderator resources to moderate a discussion on this topic. That's not your fault, that's just the way it is, but it does lead to HN becoming a worse place.
I don't even want to comment on-topic because I already know nobody will seriously consider my point of view, but just downvote and attack me.
FWIW the downvotes and flags in threads like this, including this thread, do seem largely organic to me, and well within the range of what one expects from a divisive and emotional topic.
People often use words like "clearly" in making such descriptions (I don't mean to pick on you personally! countless users do this, from every side of the issue), but actually there's nothing so clear. Mostly what happens is that people have perceptions based on their strong feelings and then call those perceptions "clear" because their feelings are strong.
We do occasionally turn off flags in order to allow a discussion to happen because allowing no discussion to happen seems wrong. I've posted lots of explanations of how we approach this in the past (e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)