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> clearly being abused here to suppress coverage of, at best, one of the largest security breeches in American history Worst suppression ever with several fron

• Tadpole9181 2y ago
  Yes, because Dang unflagged them manually. Those threads still sit dead for hours, as I explain in the very comment you replied to. This biases against those posts and prevents many people who check once daily from ever seeing them. Just because we have a competent moderator doesn't mean they aren't abusing forum mechanics to suppress those threads? Nobody claimed they were entirely silenced. And it is entirely disingenuous for you to sit here and say this didn't happen to the very first posts on the topic.
  • pvg 2y ago
    Yes, because Dang unflagged them manually. There's lots of manual moderation and tweakage on HN, every single day, big news or no big news. That's its completely vanilla, normal mode of operation. You might have just noticed this because of this particular outlier set of stories but it's not some sign of 'biases' or even abuse (although surely those things happen as well quite often, you can just email them in if you think you've come across something like that - that's also 'manual' moderation).
    • Tadpole9181 2y ago
      Apologies, I'm not sure what's you mean with this reply to that quote. To be clear, I don't think the moderators are biased here, just that HN naturally works against controversial topics and that there are a lot of people who are abusing the flag feature for anything that goes against their ideology / role model.
      • pvg 2y ago
        I'm saying this isn't 'abuse', much of the time and that manual intervention alone is not evidence of abuse or even of something going wrong. The assumption the flagging must be ideological itself tends to be strongly coloured by the views of the assumer.
        • Tadpole9181 2y ago
          I'm not saying the manual intervention is evidence of abuse, I'm saying HN moderation is working as intended and abuse being mitigated does not mean abuse was not attempted, or even partially successful. As a response to them saying that just because a bad actor was thwarted, they aren't a bad actor. A caught thief is a thief all the same. I personally believe the flagging of these posts is abuse, though. I don't have analytics or a need to meet a criteria of proof, but I do have common sense and an awareness of how this cult following works. The guy [Musk] did a Nazi salute on stage for God's sake, I'm not a fool as to what kind of crowd that attracts... I'm a fool in other ways, naturally!
          • pvg 2y ago
            I think 'common sense' can be deeply deceptive in high-dudgeon situations and this is is pretty high on the dudgeonmeter. There's tremendous fatigue with repetitive current events stories and their generally low-quality threads and that was there long before the latest storyburst. Here's an example: When Trump was shot, flaggers nuked pretty much every instance of the story off the front page. It wasn't corrected till the next day. Do you think it's likely Nazi sympathizers did that? Or ideologues of some kind? It's hard to imagine what kind. Much more likely, just people thinking 'oh god, not more of this shit, not here', whatever their other views. The other thing is, you're indirectly/unintentionally saying dang has been straight up lying to us about the nature of these flags (i.e. that there's no obvious evidence of brigading, etc) for days. I'm sure he makes mistakes, has biases conscious and unconscious like the rest of us but I don't think he presiding over the place perched on a throne of lies.
            • Tadpole9181 2y ago