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Ask HN: How many politics threads are flagged, and by who? is NH being censored?

5 points by casenmgreen ↗ HN
Every now and then in "New" I see a political thread, relating to ongoing Government misconduct, flagged but not yet gone.

I have formed the impression political threads in general are being flagged, and rapidly.

I'm concerned about potential misuse of the flagging mechanism.

Does any data or insight exist into the who/what/where/when of thread suppression via flagging?

Is it reasonably known that what seems to be happening the genuine will of the mass of readers? or it there potential for misuse, to suppress discussion?

7 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 22.0 ms ] thread
toomuchtodo
https://news.ycombinator.com/active to browse without the community moderation ("flagging")

https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals for thread removal tracking

political moderation methodology by:dang - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44718396 is helpful context

HN Search: political overlap by:dang - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

HN Search: turn off flags by:dang - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

mikece
I think the general idea is that this isn't a forum for political debate so anything off-topic would get flagged (and the criteria for what is political seems to error on the side of preferring to ban something questionable than to let it go). I realize this can be annoying if the story in question is 95%+ about technology or HN topics but if certain names like Musk or Trump are in the title then it will be flagged. You can call it censorship if you want, but I see it as just keeping the conversations on theme with what HN is.
p_ing
/r/politics or similar if you want political-only threads. Many of us want HN for technology/finance, which sometimes are government-related.

Otherwise I flag all non-technical/finance government-related threads (i.e., ICE raids on XYZ city), even as a left-wing anti-capitalist socialist. This just isn't the place for those threads. They never lead to a good discussion, and most people discussing those topics are simply farting into the wind.

There's no mis-use or "suppression" with the flag, flagging is an individual choice with individual determination. Just like the American government taught me to be!

(And I flagged this thread, too. Email the admins like you're supposed to if you have complaints about HN.)

Bender
People have already mentioned the guidelines but I will only add it just takes 4 people to click flag to get something flagged. No site moderator required. The site is community moderated by anyone with a karma higher than 499. Someone can click vouch for a period of time and it may conditionally be un-flagged, but then it can get flagged again. Either way if it was flagged even once it will fall off the main page. A site moderator can bump it back to the main page. There is no way to definitively answer your question because flags do not require a "reason". Some take off and some do not. Political leanings play a big part of which direction they go based on my experience. Political discussions would be better served on a site or forum dedicated to such things and I say that having submitted articles that are both technical and political.

Some externally documented HN features: [1] not my repo

[1] - https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

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

HN is not a forum for every topic of speech. It is a very openly a heavily moderated community board.

In general the moderation is very excellent and the range of allowable speech is very open. But topics that are wildly unrelated probably belong on other sites.

dcminter
I usually flag such stories when I see them. Per the Site guidelines:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

It's rare that I see something political that passes the "interesting new" test. The political stories almost always turn into partisan shouting and no real conversation. In my very subjective opinion the vitriolic tone then leaks into other more interesting threads.

For better or for worse the moderators will in fact occasionally disable the flagging for threads.