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Why was this flagged? I found this an incredibly interesting view into this 'cancel culture' that I've heard referenced vaguely, but never described explicitly.

by marvin 7y ago

Why was this flagged? I found this an incredibly interesting view into this 'cancel culture' that I've heard referenced vaguely, but never described explicitly. With an added bonus of getting an up-to-date view on the "things you can't say" in 2019. I would love to see the smart folks of HN discuss it.

sudosteph 7y ago
I didn't flag it, but have you seen the comments on this thread? I don't blame whoever did flag it. There are many people in here not discussing this topic in good faith, and one person in particular who is flooding the comments with intentionally inflammatory and low-effort comments. I wish HN could have an adult conversation on this topic too, but it's not going that way so far. Maybe someone can re-post this on a weekday so we don't ruin Saturday for one of our mods.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  So anything a lobby doesn't want discussed requires nothing more than a few spam comments? At a minimum HN should separate blocking comments from delisting posts..
  - sudosteph 7y ago
    Unfortunately, yes. This is not the first time I've seen this pattern play out here. Any popular article where the main subject is gender typically goes the same way. If the mods are around, they can sometimes step in early enough to encourage good dialogue and nip the bad actors early on. But when that doesn't happen, these threads will usually be dominated early-on with bad content from ideologues, and end up even worse because those comments end up shaping the dialogue into a flame war. So many HN readers just flag the whole post when it's obvious that the comments have strayed too far outside of the HN guidelines for discourse. I don't do that myself or condone it, but it's not uncommon. Sometimes the article will end up being re-posted with greater mod oversight to prevent both agenda-flagging (when people really do flag on-topic articles to prevent others from seeing it) and to fix the problem caused by lousy comments where the good replies need to be de-coupled from low-effort parent comments. This thread clearly needs moderation for both of those issues, but it may not happen today.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    There are a couple ways in which HN's comment, scoring, flagging, and moderation model are broken. This is one of them.
- blub 7y ago
  Poor comments should lead to flagging the comments, flagging the article makes no sense.
zzleeper 7y ago
It's quite tiring to see people abusing the Flag link when they don't want some news seen by others. I wonder if it's the same group of people doing so over and over.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  I flagged it instantly, because it is not a tech article, and it is not a matter of life and death of many people.
  - marvin 7y ago
    It's of interest to hackers, and it's a subject that many tech people are clearly passionately interested in. It explicitly sheds light on a cultural trend that exists and has a lot of influence, but is not obviously visible unless you are active in certain social circles. It's obviously within the HN guidelines. Quoting from the guidelines, what to submit: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
smitty1e 7y ago
For the same reason the subjects of the article are ostracized: Marcuse' Repressive Tolerance[1] is in full bloom. [1] https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...

by marvin 7y ago

sudosteph 7y ago

I didn't flag it, but have you seen the comments on this thread? I don't blame whoever did flag it. There are many people in here not discussing this topic in good faith, and one person in particular who is flooding the comments with intentionally inflammatory and low-effort comments. I wish HN could have an adult conversation on this topic too, but it's not going that way so far. Maybe someone can re-post this on a weekday so we don't ruin Saturday for one of our mods.

yabadabadoes 7y ago
So anything a lobby doesn't want discussed requires nothing more than a few spam comments? At a minimum HN should separate blocking comments from delisting posts..
- sudosteph 7y ago
  Unfortunately, yes. This is not the first time I've seen this pattern play out here. Any popular article where the main subject is gender typically goes the same way. If the mods are around, they can sometimes step in early enough to encourage good dialogue and nip the bad actors early on. But when that doesn't happen, these threads will usually be dominated early-on with bad content from ideologues, and end up even worse because those comments end up shaping the dialogue into a flame war. So many HN readers just flag the whole post when it's obvious that the comments have strayed too far outside of the HN guidelines for discourse. I don't do that myself or condone it, but it's not uncommon. Sometimes the article will end up being re-posted with greater mod oversight to prevent both agenda-flagging (when people really do flag on-topic articles to prevent others from seeing it) and to fix the problem caused by lousy comments where the good replies need to be de-coupled from low-effort parent comments. This thread clearly needs moderation for both of those issues, but it may not happen today.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  There are a couple ways in which HN's comment, scoring, flagging, and moderation model are broken. This is one of them.
blub 7y ago
Poor comments should lead to flagging the comments, flagging the article makes no sense.

zzleeper 7y ago

It's quite tiring to see people abusing the Flag link when they don't want some news seen by others. I wonder if it's the same group of people doing so over and over.

lostmsu 7y ago
I flagged it instantly, because it is not a tech article, and it is not a matter of life and death of many people.
- marvin 7y ago
  It's of interest to hackers, and it's a subject that many tech people are clearly passionately interested in. It explicitly sheds light on a cultural trend that exists and has a lot of influence, but is not obviously visible unless you are active in certain social circles. It's obviously within the HN guidelines. Quoting from the guidelines, what to submit: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

smitty1e 7y ago

For the same reason the subjects of the article are ostracized: Marcuse' Repressive Tolerance[1] is in full bloom. [1] https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr...