Ask HN: What's with flagging articles criticizing Musk? Can someone explain what is going on with this? Some recent examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904200
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42903336
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42895453 |
The reason such things get flagged has less to do with Musk but with the fact that HN isn't really a current events/news discussion site. It's porous - some things are big and/or interesting enough to get front page coverage but the tick tock of everyday news stories is mostly offtopic and people tend to enforce that with their flags.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42901248
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42901317
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."
Hacker News cannot be afraid to look at it, cannot run away from it, and, if you're part of the tech industry, must take responsibility for it.
I guess the second coming of Nazism to an unprecedented scale and without any serious opposition anywhere is 1/ uninteresting and 2/ absolutely irrelevant to tech.
2. There are a few additional automated adjustments, most notably site penalties and "Major Ongoing Topics" (MOCs) which attract a large number of submission may also have a penalty applied. Frequently dang will make mention of this, though you can email queries as well. See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011>.
3. Where mods do get actively involved, it's generally to reverse or disable such automated actions, or user-applied flags. The automated systems work well most but not all of the time. (It's taken me some time, and a fair bit of analysis of HN, to reach this conclusion. The system's not perfect, but it's pretty good.)
4. On account of 1) above, there are topics which HN has difficulty discussing reasonably, and many of those are political. Generally, if a topic strongly divides a large fraction of readers, you'll find that posts and many comments tend to get flagged and/or downvoted (comments only). If you suspect this is abusive or is preventing cogent points from getting made, email mods.
Keep in mind too that there may be people who find any discussion of Musk on HN to be tedious and flag on that basis. Reading intent on flagging is at best a highly approximate pastime.
"Elon Musk staff has been caught installing drives inside the OPM office":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42903499
"Elon Musk's DOGE reportedly gained "full access" to the federal payment system":
I also understand that the HN algo has a feature where flamewar-esque threads can trigger flagging of the entire article.
It doesn't but there's automatic downweighting which is not flagging. Flagging is something people do.
You can't look the other way anymore.
That kind of apathy is exactly what you can't afford to look away from.
Politics may be destroying a large number of things right now; I don't want it to destroy this site too.
But you repeatedly do...
Building any kind of ethical framework for hardware and software engineering necessitates looking at the ugly side.
If Hacker News is genuinely not up to that then it's falling short.
You may feel strongly about what you think we should do, but you don't get to tell the rest of us what the site should be about. You don't get to tear up the community guidelines and write your own.
Let HN be what it is. If that doesn't match what you want, go find somewhere else that does.
I will not let it be dishonest.
It may not be falling short of what you think it should be.
> A bunch of the rest of us don't think that, though.
And if a bunch of us do think that, what then?
> You may feel strongly about what you think we should do, but you don't get to tell the rest of us what the site should be about.
Sure, but neither does anyone else. Like, ehm, you.
> You don't get to tear up the community guidelines and write your own.
What if many of us think they might need a few changes? What if most of us do? I mean, you seem to be arguing on the assumption that nobody, or at least almost nobody, does. Do you have any statistics to back that up?
> Let HN be what it is.
(At the risk of sounding somewhat Clintonian:) So what "is" HN?
If you're going to say "What it's always been!", then... No. It already isn't. Becasuse nothing ever is "what it's always been". Eternal constants don't exist; everything changes all the time. (Guy I used to know back in Ephesus used to say that.) HN now is already something very different than what we got user IDs on back in 2013, and it ain't gonna stop changing. So where were you with your resistance to change for the last dozen years or so?
> If that doesn't match what you want, go find somewhere else that does.
"Just because the Democratic Party is actually advocating labour camps for capitalists and mandatory sex change operations for everybody now is no reason for you to demand it should change! Let it be what it is, and if that doesn't match what you want, go find somewhere else that does!"
"Just because the Republican Party is actually advocating concentration camps for immigrants and mandatory megachurch membership for everybody now is no reason for you to demand it should change! Let it be what it is, and if that doesn't match what you want, go find somewhere else that does!"
See how ridiculous that is? So no, that's not how any of this works.
The problem is that so much of the tech industry is now precisely about politics and power. The problem is that so much of the tech industry it is now explicitly and directly connected to it.
If Hacker News doesn't have the wherewithal to face up the these realities then it really should think about a name change.
Maybe "Happy Fun News" or something.
There's links to literally years of explanations of this stuff in my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907475