I'd add: (1) the community doesn't necessarily agree about what's legitimate. I don't see any evidence that the flags on this one are less in good faith than the upvotes; (2) upvotes can't be the only factor determining HN's front page; that would make it consist of controversy, gossip, and fashion, and undermine the reason why readers come here in the first place.
There are also other mechanisms, such as vote-ring-detection, that can kill a topic as well.
(That is my current understanding anyway, I am not HN staff, and I am not saying whether I agree/disagree with any of these mechanisms, just stating them to help alleviate your confusion about why some topics may be doing very well and then suddenly die -- it's not always because of flagging)
I've heard about this before and it still sounds crazy to me. I comment quite a bit, and almost never upvote topics. Using the standard "other people are like me" heuristic, I deduce that the normal operation of HN involves automatically killing all the topics.
It's more likely that other people are in fact nothing like me, but I'd like to understand this a bit better.
That seems like an awfully low expectation of the average HN reader IQ.
OT: I agree there is a lot of downvoting of submissions and comments with a political slant. Anything that's phrased as being slightly partisan seems to be immediately downvoted by people from the other side of the political spectrum because they don't agree with it.
In this case, I think this article is relevant for the HN audience, because of the massive technology-related threat involved here.
Whlie this may not be a huge story, it will likely be the talk of the day tomorrow.
However, this is a politically charged thread clearly aimed at drawing interest/support for an individual candidate. This is not supposed to be permitted on HN.
A thread discussing the potential issues caused by the Patriot Act is much more suitable for the front page than this.
It would be wise, I believe, if a discussion here on HN about this were to be informed by what the actual policy makers are saying/thinking.
I've got no political interest in this either way, since I'm not American. So consider it an outsiders view when I say that I think it's not unreasonable to mention the person who's taking the action.
edit: I didn't downvote you
The applicable "rules" (actually, they are labeled "guidelines" [0] for good reason) can be viewed as either supporting or opposing it.
Specifically, one could view it as on-topic as falling within "anything that good hackers would find interesting." (Section 215 surveillance clearly has a special interest within the "hacker" culture, which is more plugged into it than the general population), or as probably off-topic because "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
> I'm not positing an opinion, I'm arguing for a fact.
You are positing your interpretation of the application of rules which are fuzzy and inherently subjective as "fact", and where the only things in the rules that would support your conclusion are hedged with "most" or "probably". Your suggestion that the HN guidelines can reasonably be read in a way in which the topic here would be unequivocally, factually off-topic is an untenable argument.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html -- under "What to Submit".
You're conflating opinion and fact. Please stop. Majority vote does not dictate fact. HN is not a "anything and everything can be on the front page of the community votes it as such" site like Reddit is.
Meanwhile, you're definitely breaking the "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site." rule.
I'm actually replying to a discussion started about flagging.
GlickWick: I'm unclear as to how this thread is legitimate, personally. Doesn't seem to really fit with HN. I'm no fan of the Patriot Act either, but this belongs somewhere like Reddit.
You don't like the fact that I'm criticizing this thread, which is fine, but stop trying to cherry-pick silly reasons to discredit what I'm saying. It's having the opposite effect of what you intended anyways.
That is just your opinion. Rules are clear on this:
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.
As you can see, no additional caveats are listed. Therefore you, by responding to a comment which was about incorrect flagging, complained about inappropriate submissions, directly violated the rules.
Your last paragraph is basically just ad-hominem.
I'm ending this "discussion" here and will not be reading your inevitable further comments.
Please don't be personally rude on HN.
You're right that the rules do not exclude all politics, only most. GlickWick is right that upvotes alone do not determine HN's front page and about the weakness of the voting mechanism in general.
I don't support either political party, and the odds are great that I will not vote for Rand Paul.
However, as a technical person living in a democratic society I _am_ interested in the factors that change public policy, whether it's a RP filibuster, a Snowden leak, or a public move on policy by Wyden.
Perhaps if the tech community pulled together, somebody like Wyden could cross the aisle and make it a bipartisan filibuster. Whether you like either guy or either party or not is immaterial. The important thing is to try to get a little momentum here. The system is totally hosed, and we've got a long way to go to get it functioning again.
I don't think that's accurate. Fewer than ten Ron Paul stories got much traction here in eight years, and most were either tied to more popular topics (SOPA, Snowden) or skeptical: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ron%20paul&sort=byPopularity&p...
Similarly, I doubt that the interest in the current post has much to do with partisan support for a candidate. Given the community's interests, it is more likely because of what he's talking about.
It certainly felt to me like during the 2008 election that there were RP stories all over HN. Wasn't the case though. Odd.
A thread about the cons of the renewal of the Patriot Act without the obvious Libertarian political candidate undertones would be much more fitting for the front page of HN.