HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why are Israel war submissions being flagged?

32 points by prakhar897 ↗ HN
Seems like THE most important news to me right now. This is not just a tech board but for discussion of major current events as well.

Also, why weren’t Russia-Ukraine war threads being banned in the same way?

Proof:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30450336

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549116

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30429192

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=Ukraine&sort=byPopularity&type=story

28 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] thread
entuno
Most likely because they're off topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

It's important news, and many of people on this site will care deeply about it - but there are plenty of other places that are more suited to discuss it than here.

prakhar897
Russia-Ukraine wasn't offtopic?
smoldesu
Users are the ones who flag things. If they decide something is far-enough off topic, then it will get flagged. It doesn't necessarily follow any deterministic pattern.
entuno
Did you flag those stories as off topic when they were posted? Volunteer based moderation is never going to be perfectly consistent or reliable - but that fact that it wasn't perfect before doesn't change the posting guidelines.

There was an interesting article from Cloudflare posted earlier - but that has a technical angle rather than just being general current affairs.

bell-cot
Doing a quick HN search for "ukraine", then sorting by Date - stories are actually rather scarce (especially if you ignore ones with an obvious "drone" / "robot" / "cyber" in the title), and upvotes for stories are scarce too. I'll guess that darn few of 'em ever made it to HN's front page.

Also noteworthy - the Russia/Ukraine thing is pretty darn new, novel, and has major economic impacts on billions of people (thanks to food & energy prices).

Vs. "Israel war" was an ancient trope back when the Fall of Babylon and Edict of Cyrus ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Cyrus ) were breaking news.

mlindner
Russia-Ukraine stories were almost always removed.
melling
It’s not really supposed to be a forum to discuss current events.

Reddit is probably a better forum.

Ukraine/Russia usually doesn’t gather much traction.

lr1970
> Ukraine/Russia usually doesn’t gather much traction.

Plain wrong. The story of Russia attacking Ukraine on 2022.02.14 has 1894 comments [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30450336

melling
I see that it was discussed at the time. I was referring to the many posts that I see about Ukraine with few upvotes. The ones that seem to get upvoted are about Elon Musk or Starlink.

At any rate, I suppose if someone says something that gains the interest of the community, it will get traction. The first few comments might be important.

The one in your link was interesting because it was a 20 year old prediction:

“In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard Zbigniew Brzezinski did say that if Europe went to war again it would start in Ukraine.”

This post, for example, didn’t develop an interesting discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37800508

hindsightbias
That was new and unique. It had huge economic and strategic implications.

This is the same old tiresome story. No more relevant to our daily lives than war in Sudan, Libya, Syria, quakes in Afghanistan etc.

reducesuffering
This is actually a major historical development in world geopolitics. Israel and Saudi Arabia were planning on normalizing relations, with deal implications like a US security guarantee bringing Saudi closer into the western fold. With Saudi’s statement blaming Israel, those plans are effectively nixed and the future world stage will look different because of how much middle eastern alliances still matter.
hindsightbias
Bringing MBS closer to the western fold. The Saudi’s don’t need a US security guarantee. They’ve had one since the 40’s. We literally fight their wars for them and they strangle us whenever they like raising oil prices.

I guess it will bring another round for Jared to rake in a few more billion, so good.

reducesuffering
Not quite because the US actually strongly opposes the security guarantee in the negotiations. Saudi wants it.

Agree that they raise oil prices to suit themselves, and are generally a shite ally. Jared getting $2b by abusing the White House positions is very sad too.

rocknor
You are not as important as you think you are.

Not all HN users are in America/Europe, stupidly ignorant about the rest of the world.

To us, Ukraine/Russia is the same old tiresome story.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
rolph
the use of drones, and 'just in time' sattelite service, lent some relevance to Russia-Ukraine.

> israel and hamas have been using drones, electronics, and cyber campaigns for a while now, those angles to the war might have good reads

injb
>> Seems like THE most important news to me right now. This is not just a tech board but for discussion of major current events as well.

The usual explanation when this happens is that, no, it's not for discussion of current events, at least not that current. It was the same when the Wagner group launched their attempted coup in Russia. While it was unfolding threads were being flagged here at the rate of a dozen or so every hour.

IAmGraydon
If you want to discuss major current events, this is not the place for it. It's for discussing stories that stir one's intellectual curiosity, and politics are mostly a no-go here. I and others who have been here for a while take the content of this site pretty seriously, as it's really one of the last bastions of intellectual discourse on the internet and we're a bit protective of that. HN attracts some of the most talented people in the world because of that very fact. It's been getting harder and harder in recent years to keep the politics out. If you want to talk politics (which a war certainly is), there are places for that, like Reddit. This is not a general use forum.
xchip
>This is not a general use forum.

Really, then why are these your lasts posts?

- End of an Era: Legendary Voice Behind Mario Exits After 27 Iconic Years

- Porphyrios: The whale that sank ships of the Byzantine Empire for 50 years

- Is America experiencing mass psychosis? (2021)

- Russian fossil fuel export data 09 to 15 January 2023

These ones are spot on for HN:

- The strangely successful history of people mailing themselves in boxes (2015)

- Axis of Evil

xchip
Thanks for this.