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Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551

• mbel 9y ago
  And also this one, which was flagged to death: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500834
  • to3m 9y ago
    Yep. I posted a link in that one too, so, fingers crossed, the people interested in discussing this will be able to find one another.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  This one has been flagged out also. It’s beginning to look like HN really doesn’t like this story, since it’s the third time in the last 24 hours they’ve blown it off the front page.
  • throwaway1584 9y ago
    Personally I wanted to discuss the article yesterday, but it was moved off the front-page too fast despite high interest. It is very common on HN for articles that does not agree with or points out problems in the prevailing viewpoint to be blown off the front page. I think this is emblematic of how tyrannical some of the people subscribing to the prevailing Silicon Valley viewpoint are.
    • commandlinefan 9y ago
      When I searched "google", this story didn't even show up in the first page of "popular". I had to sort by date to even find it.
      • throwaway1584 9y ago
        At this point I expect actions like this from people holding the prevailing viewpoints in Silicon Valley whenever someone with a different viewpoint dare speak.
        • sol_remmy 9y ago
          Do you know of an uncensored forum that is better for discussing these issues? Is Slashdot better?
          • throwaway1584 9y ago
            Unfortunately no. However, I do not personally use reddit etc. I think we need to do everything we can to highlight injustices in the power applied to force only one viewpoint to be heard. In addition to this social justice warriors need to receive negative social and life repercussions for their tyrannical actions.
            • 13years 9y ago
              > In addition to this social justice warriors need to receive negative social and life repercussions for their tyrannical actions. You realize this is exactly a description of 'social justice' and it is exactly this that is the problem
              • throwaway1584 9y ago
                We as a society agree to state sanctioned consequences that are similar to actions unacceptable to individuals. The difference is that there need to be a sense of justice and recourse, which social justice warriors don’t think should apply to their actions. Acting like a social justice warrior in the workplace should for instance be a firable offence, and things like doxxing should receive severe punishment.
                • to3m 9y ago
    • 13years 9y ago
      Issues that can't be discussed can't be solved, they only grow larger. I once would have thought that this would have been somewhat obvious.
      • hncensorship 9y ago
        I used to think HN was one of the better forums, but after recently trying to post a rebuttal to this [0] with multiple experiences from my workplace, and seeing my response vanish moments later, alongside the speed to which these threads have been flagged out of visibility (whilst anecdotal stories concerning women still rank very highly despite having far less age and far higher votes), I've lost faith both in the moderating abilities and the community to self-regulate. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16502359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16502359
        • forgottenpass 9y ago
          I vouched that one (and this) for ya, buddy. I don't think either were particularly strong positions or poorly spoken. It probably doesn't help that the automated rulesets here aren't kind to downvoted first posts by new users.
          • grzm 9y ago
            There are some anti-abuse features on HN which cause some new accounts to be banned when they're created. Such comments will be marked [dead], not [flagged][dead]. I suspect that's what's happened with both 'hncensorship and 'throwaway12395 (though I didn't see the status of the latter's comment before it was vouched). Some people get caught by this feature unintentionally: if they suspect this is the case, the mods have been very open about whitelisting such accounts. You can email them via the Contact link in the footer. Note that this is different from people being flagged or down voted by members because of content. I can imagine it's very frustrating, but they are different behaviors. In one, specific action has been taken by members; in another, one has been caught by automated anti-abuse measures.
      • throwaway1584 9y ago
    • to3m 9y ago
      Awesome, thanks - I just got bingo! I don't know if you're aware but articles can move off the front page because people (like me) flag them (as I did). If enough people flag it, off it goes. Sometimes the article sticks around, and obviously mine was a minority voice. Sometimes it disappears, probably because, I expect, most people are like me: we've seen this stuff discussed before, and the discussions are, on average, poison - or, worse, repetitive and dull. So, flag. Flag, flag, flag. (That's what I think to myself, anyway. Actually, I only get the option of flagging it the once.) I make no bones about this, and I won't apologize for my actions, because I have nothing to apologize for. I vote according to my principles and mine alone. If these principles happen to be shared by others, great. If not, that's fine too. Democracy in action. (Well... I do admit that I give the discussions a quick skim, just on the off-chance I might see tptacek in action. My guilty pleasure! There's also the chance that somebody might actually, you know, make a good point, but I don't worry too much about that because my experience is that the risk is very low...)
      • throwaway1584 9y ago
        So what you are saying is that you are the kind of person that would have send people to the Gulag for having a different viewpoint. Good job. I am sure this feels pleasant as long as your viewpoint is in power. Tyrannies rarely stay that way though, so good luck.
        • to3m 9y ago
          My understanding is that the flag button merely makes it more likely the discussion will vanish off the front page, and there is no punishment for the participants.
          • throwaway1584 9y ago
            Even if that is correct it does not make it a just way of fighting for your cause. Voting for articles on the front-page of HN is equivalent to a vote in a democracy. If you removed the opposing party candidate from the ballot you might reach your short-term goal, but at the cost of a functioning democracy. In this case the article was marked as a dupe, but this specific article was not posted twice and previous articles on the subject was quickly voted off the frontpage by people like you despite high interest. This didn't happen to articles critical of Damore, so this seems to be exclusively a social justice tactic. Edit: explained better why talking about voting is relevant as an analogy
    • root_axis 9y ago
      > I think this is emblematic of how tyrannical some of the people subscribing to the prevailing Silicon Valley viewpoint are. Why invoke the "tyrannical" rhetoric in respect to clicking a "flag" link on a website? It's not that big of a deal. Not everything is an attack by the Silicon Valley elite, all sorts of interesting topics get booted off the front page and there is always someone with a particularly strong opinion in the comments who has to exclaim why their personal issue is the bane of the HN hivemind (a hivemind that underpins a decentralized conspiracy to destroy free speech in order to avoid confronting the unavoidable conclusions of your air-tight argument). Sometimes stuff just gets flagged, it happens on both sides of every controversial topic ranging from blockchains to booth babes.
      • throwaway1584 9y ago
        HN policy states that topics should be relevant to tech and startups. This topic in particular clearly is and also garnered a lot of interest. Arguably a majority might actually be interested in discussing this topic as they might be perceived as a majority and be potential targets of this kind of discrimination. When an ideologically possessed social justice minority then in violation of HN policy and the interest of the audience remove it from the frontpage that is problematic. It is also disingenuous to say this happens to articles on the prevailing viewpoint to the same degree. Articles on Damore and Fowler was plentiful, and they were not voted off the frontpage. The sin of oppressing critical viewpoints in the valley falls squarely on the social justice warriors.
        • root_axis 9y ago
          You sound exactly like the "ideologically possessed social justice minority" you're castigating. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14946450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14946450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868884 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14682604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14682604
          • throwaway1584 9y ago
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Personally I wanted to discuss the article yesterday, but it was moved off the front-page too fast despite high interest. You can discuss things that aren't on the front page. You aren't entitled to have what you want to discuss features on the front page, OTOH.
      • hokkos 9y ago
        The frontpage of HN is quite useless, I go directly to /active it shows the most discussed thread, a better metric than upvote in my opinion.
        • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
          I didn't know that existed, /active sounds very useful!
    • hsod 9y ago
      You think the prevailing viewpoint around here is pro-diversity efforts? I must be reading a different HN.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • dang 9y ago
    We actually turned the flags off on that story at one point to allow the thread to stay on the front page. Eventually the flamewar detector demoted it; we sometimes turn that off, too, and am not sure why we didn't do it there. Still, once a story has 300+ points and 300+ comments, reposts that contain no significant new information are obviously duplicates. If we didn't moderate them that way, the front page would be mostly dupes. If you think HN gets mad about politics, imagine how mad they'd get about that. The HN community is divided on divisive topics. It would be surprising if it weren't; any large-enough population sample is going to reflect divisions in the society at large. (Societies, actually; HN is mostly international, and the people posting here are coming from wildly different assumption sets.) People tend to underestimate how many opposing views there are and how many people in the world sincerely hold them. Unfortunately, each side seems to think the community is dominated by their enemies and that the moderators are secretly suppressing theirs, as you can see in the subthread below. One side is sure that we're politically correct thought police; the other side that we're misogyny- and white supremacy-enablers. The irony is how united they both are in that sort of logic. None of it is related to what we actually think or do.
    • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Sorry, it just felt like the story was being buried when I could see no good reason to. I personally didn’t want to get involved in the conversation (which is like walking on eggshells for me), but was interested in reading the comments. Raising a dupe flag of an article that has been demoted for any reason doesn’t make sense to me. That means each story has only one chance, no matter the source, rather than seeing it through. If someone comes in, doesn’t see the article on the front page when they think it shouldn’t be there, they will naturally resubmit because they can’t see the conversation occurring.
      • dang 9y ago
        That's the way a popular site with 30 slots on its front page has to work. For any hot story, there are a zillion me-too follow-up articles like the arstechnica one above. Since the story is hot, they'll all get upvoted. If we don't mark them as dupes, they take over. I guarantee you the community doesn't want that. In fact, almost everything we do is determined by the community pressure that happens if we don't do it. This does mean that a hot story will get a big discussion yet many readers never see the thread. But that's true of every thread; it follows from the structure of the site. The way around this is to use HN search to find the discussion, or links like https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active and https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists. Edit: or just look at the second page!
• Slansitartop 9y ago
  That one is paywalled and was flagged to death, and now this one is a "dupe."