13 ms·

> All: please don't post the sort of low-information / high-indignation comment that could just as easily appear in any semi-related thread. Such generic commen

> All: please don't post the sort of low-information / high-indignation comment that could just as easily appear in any semi-related thread. Such generic comments make the discussion less interesting and more activating. That's not what we're trying for here. We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for, but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk. We're being censored.

Bancakes 2y ago
Not everyone is censoring you. Some of us want to learn about cool technology, not read politics irrelevant to daily life.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
  Fine, you're welcome to skip the political posts. I've felt the same frustration. But when any new post that has Musk in the title is flagged within a minute or two entering the 'new' queue, then we have a problem. We are indeed being censored by any meaningful definition of the term.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    One one hand, I'm not flagging anything because I'm happy to let these discussions take place. If nothing else they are entertaining. On the other hand, I see where the flaggers are coming from. If there isn't any gate keeping, other topics can be drowned out by a single highly contentious topic if enough people believe it is their civil duty to bring up that topic at every conceivable opportunity. This has happened on much of reddit, and on smaller scales in many social spheres across the country. Reddit demonstrates that almost any conversation could be steered into the direction of partisan politics if there are enough participants who think it's important to do that.
- lawn 2y ago
  [flagged]
- thrance 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Bancakes 2y ago
    No I live in Europe. And if I didn’t I wouldn’t worry about it until there’s armed men in uniforms and red armbands walking the streets. I’ve found the best coping mechanism to the overabundance and inflation of information due to the internet, is to simply live within your horizon. I see no musk/trump, I fear no musk/trump. Have a great day, hope your cortisol levels are good.
    - labster 2y ago
      I agree, don’t look up!
    - ModernMech 2y ago
      "Local residents confronted and drove off neo-Nazi demonstrators waving large swastika-emblazoned flags along a highway overpass on Friday between Lincoln Heights and Evendale, Ohio, home to a historically Black community that has endured a long history of racism... As they approached the neo-Nazis, the demonstrators, which Talbert said were carrying guns, called them the N-word." https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/08/us/cincinnati-ohio-nazi-flags/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/08/us/cincinnati-ohio-nazi-flags... This seems to fit your criteria of "armed men in uniforms and red armbands walking the streets". Time to be worried or no?
    - thrance 2y ago
      When they start marching down the streets it will already be far too late. And if you think we're safe just because we live across the pond, well... remember that there is no European army, and that so far our leaders have been extremely passive in the face of obvious political interferences, in e.g. Germany.
    - basementcat 2y ago
      This is a common type of argument that my friends and colleagues have offered me. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to help with wildfire relief because my house didn't burn down. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to have concerns about systemd because I use BSD. Perhaps it is a waste of resources to ensure HIV positive people have access to medicine because I don't have HIV.
slg 2y ago
At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but there has been an onslaught of stories about the damage Musk and DOGE is doing to the US government including lots of tech specific stories. This is an important ongoing story that is relevant to the community here and every post about it shoots up the front page of HN only to disappear minutes later because of mass flagging.
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
  One solution might be to limit how many new discussions a user can flag within a certain period.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
    I suspect the curation mentioned above[0] is crowd-sourced to a relatively small handful of “power” users with an outsized amount of flags in general. Probably not much of a solution to limit that. 0: Slightly confused; I’m referring to dang’s comment, which I thought was the GP comment.
    - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
      I don't think it's very high, like 1500 upvotes or something, there is a large population of people who can flag. Another idea is to make flags fractional, so the more upvotes you have the more weight your flags have. So those newly empowered get say 0.1 of a flag while more highly rated users get progressively closer to 1 flag.
- dang 2y ago
  > At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? I'm not sure "big" is the right word because we're not optimizing HN for topic importance - that would make for a current affairs site, which HN is not [1, 2]. But maybe that's hair-splitting in this case. The short answer to your question is that when there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT), moderators turn off flags on stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI) that is interesting in HN's sense of the word (i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) and there is a fair chance of the article supporting a substantively different discussion than the ones which have already recently appeared on the same topic. If you want more information, I'd start with my other post in this subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092) and go on to the other links there. That should give a pretty complete explanation. If, after that, there's still a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20current%20affairs%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
dang 2y ago
> We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for, Alas, that is not true for all values of "we". Let's see how we do in the current thread. (Edit: so far it does seem to be a little better.) > but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged Yes, and at the same time we've turned off the flags on quite a few of them—enough that this continues to be by far the most-discussed topic on HN right now. I realize that's not enough for those who want more, but this is always the case whenever there is a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20major%20ongoing%20topic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) > by apparent supporters of Musk But also by users who just care about protecting HN for its intended purpose, which is vulnerable to getting consumed by political flames. The pattern we've observed over the years is that when a MOT keeps getting flagkilled, the flags are coming from a coalition of these two groups (i.e. users who oppose it politically and users who are trying to protect HN), neither of which would have enough oomph to do this on their own. > We're being censored. That word has so many different meanings nowadays that nearly all sentences including it are both true and false. In one sense, sure, any story getting removed from HN's front page could be called censorship—but it's maybe not the most helpful description on a site where frontpage space is the scarcest resource and some kind of curation/selection is essential. In another sense, the fact that this MOT is the most discussed topic on HN of the past few weeks means that no, it is not being censored—there have been thousands of posts about it. Using the word 'censored' ultimately just means you'd like to see more of this topic on HN. I certainly respect that, but there are also a lot of other users who would like to see less of it. Our job is to serve the community as a whole, which is not easy when the community is so divided. Ultimately, whatever solution we come up ends up feeling unsatisfactory to nearly everyone. That is probably my least favorite square on the Cycle of Life of HN, but it comes up once or twice in every go-round. Here are links to some other comments I've posted in the last few days about this specific issue. If you (or anyone) are willing to read them, take in the explanations, and then have a question that I haven't answered, I'd be curious to know what it is* and happy to take a crack at it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 * (because as far as I know, all the important questions have already been answered, which is not to say everyone is happy!)
Quarrelsome 2y ago
its not censorship. There's several comments on here that have no relevance to the source article and are hand wringing which is unproductive and often is eager to descend into flaming. Lets talk about the article and its content and the potential cybersecurity risks to government data please.
yodsanklai 2y ago
> all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk. I'm not a Musk supporter at all, but I flag these discussions for several reasons. 1. To keep my sanity. These stories are pretty much everywhere and will be all over for the next 4 years at least. I don't want to engage in them and lose even more time and get even more anxious. 2. The comments aren't useful and don't bring new information. It's pretty clear what Elon and the oligarchs are trying to do. Those who don't see it won't change their mind at that point. HN is one of the rare forum to avoid flame war, let's keep it that way.
- fragmede 2y ago
  But where this particular article is from Brian Krebs, a niche reporter on hacker news, and bringing SNI, significant new information to the table, why flag this one? The broader strokes of what's going on is obvious, but this particular article is a specific detail of a detail, from a source that is relevant to tits community, and not a generic breathless CNN or Fox News "something happened today"
  - Natsu 2y ago
    I wouldn't exactly call Krebs "niche", he's quite well known on his own.
- NeutralCrane 2y ago
  If your objection is that "I don't want to engage with it" and "I don't find them useful", it seems obvious to me that the solution is to simply not click on the thread and move on, rather than to attempt to stifle everyone else from engaging with it.
  - yodsanklai 2y ago
    Well, as a member of this community, it's my right and duty to cast a vote for flagging. If I'm an outlier, it won't have any effect. I believe this post is off-topic as it's political and doesn't satisfy my "hacker curiosity". There are other venues to discuss these topics.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lupusreal 2y ago
It's only censorship when the government does it, or so I've been told.

Bancakes 2y ago

Not everyone is censoring you. Some of us want to learn about cool technology, not read politics irrelevant to daily life.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
Fine, you're welcome to skip the political posts. I've felt the same frustration. But when any new post that has Musk in the title is flagged within a minute or two entering the 'new' queue, then we have a problem. We are indeed being censored by any meaningful definition of the term.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  One one hand, I'm not flagging anything because I'm happy to let these discussions take place. If nothing else they are entertaining. On the other hand, I see where the flaggers are coming from. If there isn't any gate keeping, other topics can be drowned out by a single highly contentious topic if enough people believe it is their civil duty to bring up that topic at every conceivable opportunity. This has happened on much of reddit, and on smaller scales in many social spheres across the country. Reddit demonstrates that almost any conversation could be steered into the direction of partisan politics if there are enough participants who think it's important to do that.
lawn 2y ago
[flagged]
thrance 2y ago
[flagged]
- Bancakes 2y ago
  No I live in Europe. And if I didn’t I wouldn’t worry about it until there’s armed men in uniforms and red armbands walking the streets. I’ve found the best coping mechanism to the overabundance and inflation of information due to the internet, is to simply live within your horizon. I see no musk/trump, I fear no musk/trump. Have a great day, hope your cortisol levels are good.
  - labster 2y ago
    I agree, don’t look up!
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    "Local residents confronted and drove off neo-Nazi demonstrators waving large swastika-emblazoned flags along a highway overpass on Friday between Lincoln Heights and Evendale, Ohio, home to a historically Black community that has endured a long history of racism... As they approached the neo-Nazis, the demonstrators, which Talbert said were carrying guns, called them the N-word." https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/08/us/cincinnati-ohio-nazi-flags/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/08/us/cincinnati-ohio-nazi-flags... This seems to fit your criteria of "armed men in uniforms and red armbands walking the streets". Time to be worried or no?
  - thrance 2y ago
    When they start marching down the streets it will already be far too late. And if you think we're safe just because we live across the pond, well... remember that there is no European army, and that so far our leaders have been extremely passive in the face of obvious political interferences, in e.g. Germany.
  - basementcat 2y ago
    This is a common type of argument that my friends and colleagues have offered me. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to help with wildfire relief because my house didn't burn down. Perhaps it doesn't make sense to have concerns about systemd because I use BSD. Perhaps it is a waste of resources to ensure HIV positive people have access to medicine because I don't have HIV.

slg 2y ago

At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but there has been an onslaught of stories about the damage Musk and DOGE is doing to the US government including lots of tech specific stories. This is an important ongoing story that is relevant to the community here and every post about it shoots up the front page of HN only to disappear minutes later because of mass flagging.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
One solution might be to limit how many new discussions a user can flag within a certain period.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  I suspect the curation mentioned above[0] is crowd-sourced to a relatively small handful of “power” users with an outsized amount of flags in general. Probably not much of a solution to limit that. 0: Slightly confused; I’m referring to dang’s comment, which I thought was the GP comment.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
    I don't think it's very high, like 1500 upvotes or something, there is a large population of people who can flag. Another idea is to make flags fractional, so the more upvotes you have the more weight your flags have. So those newly empowered get say 0.1 of a flag while more highly rated users get progressively closer to 1 flag.
dang 2y ago
> At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? I'm not sure "big" is the right word because we're not optimizing HN for topic importance - that would make for a current affairs site, which HN is not [1, 2]. But maybe that's hair-splitting in this case. The short answer to your question is that when there's a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT), moderators turn off flags on stories that contain Significant New Information (SNI) that is interesting in HN's sense of the word (i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) and there is a fair chance of the article supporting a substantively different discussion than the ones which have already recently appeared on the same topic. If you want more information, I'd start with my other post in this subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092) and go on to the other links there. That should give a pretty complete explanation. If, after that, there's still a question I haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20current%20affairs%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

dang 2y ago

> We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for, Alas, that is not true for all values of "we". Let's see how we do in the current thread. (Edit: so far it does seem to be a little better.) > but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged Yes, and at the same time we've turned off the flags on quite a few of them—enough that this continues to be by far the most-discussed topic on HN right now. I realize that's not enough for those who want more, but this is always the case whenever there is a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20major%20ongoing%20topic&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) > by apparent supporters of Musk But also by users who just care about protecting HN for its intended purpose, which is vulnerable to getting consumed by political flames. The pattern we've observed over the years is that when a MOT keeps getting flagkilled, the flags are coming from a coalition of these two groups (i.e. users who oppose it politically and users who are trying to protect HN), neither of which would have enough oomph to do this on their own. > We're being censored. That word has so many different meanings nowadays that nearly all sentences including it are both true and false. In one sense, sure, any story getting removed from HN's front page could be called censorship—but it's maybe not the most helpful description on a site where frontpage space is the scarcest resource and some kind of curation/selection is essential. In another sense, the fact that this MOT is the most discussed topic on HN of the past few weeks means that no, it is not being censored—there have been thousands of posts about it. Using the word 'censored' ultimately just means you'd like to see more of this topic on HN. I certainly respect that, but there are also a lot of other users who would like to see less of it. Our job is to serve the community as a whole, which is not easy when the community is so divided. Ultimately, whatever solution we come up ends up feeling unsatisfactory to nearly everyone. That is probably my least favorite square on the Cycle of Life of HN, but it comes up once or twice in every go-round. Here are links to some other comments I've posted in the last few days about this specific issue. If you (or anyone) are willing to read them, take in the explanations, and then have a question that I haven't answered, I'd be curious to know what it is* and happy to take a crack at it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 * (because as far as I know, all the important questions have already been answered, which is not to say everyone is happy!)

Quarrelsome 2y ago

its not censorship. There's several comments on here that have no relevance to the source article and are hand wringing which is unproductive and often is eager to descend into flaming. Lets talk about the article and its content and the potential cybersecurity risks to government data please.

yodsanklai 2y ago

> all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk. I'm not a Musk supporter at all, but I flag these discussions for several reasons. 1. To keep my sanity. These stories are pretty much everywhere and will be all over for the next 4 years at least. I don't want to engage in them and lose even more time and get even more anxious. 2. The comments aren't useful and don't bring new information. It's pretty clear what Elon and the oligarchs are trying to do. Those who don't see it won't change their mind at that point. HN is one of the rare forum to avoid flame war, let's keep it that way.

fragmede 2y ago
But where this particular article is from Brian Krebs, a niche reporter on hacker news, and bringing SNI, significant new information to the table, why flag this one? The broader strokes of what's going on is obvious, but this particular article is a specific detail of a detail, from a source that is relevant to tits community, and not a generic breathless CNN or Fox News "something happened today"
- Natsu 2y ago
  I wouldn't exactly call Krebs "niche", he's quite well known on his own.
NeutralCrane 2y ago
If your objection is that "I don't want to engage with it" and "I don't find them useful", it seems obvious to me that the solution is to simply not click on the thread and move on, rather than to attempt to stifle everyone else from engaging with it.
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  Well, as a member of this community, it's my right and duty to cast a vote for flagging. If I'm an outlier, it won't have any effect. I believe this post is off-topic as it's political and doesn't satisfy my "hacker curiosity". There are other venues to discuss these topics.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lupusreal 2y ago

It's only censorship when the government does it, or so I've been told.