> in your opinion things are going exactly as you think they should I don't think that things are going "great" or "exactly as they should" on HN or in the wor

> in your opinion things are going exactly as you think they should I don't think that things are going "great" or "exactly as they should" on HN or in the world at large. It takes constant effort to keep political/ideological toxicity from both ends of the spectrum from poisoning this place. I would love it if HN could have a positive influence on politics and the broader world, but in reality we don't have much clout. My personal hope is for every person to have the greatest amount of freedom, opportunity, abundance and agency that can possibly be attained, including for the least privileged in society, and I'd happily have that be an ongoing topic of discussion on HN. But interesting new ideas about that are notably missing from the ragey politics-related discussions seem to happen here. > 1. HN needs to be interesting to the majority of users. Yes, otherwise the audience will leave and HN will die. > 2. HN is not designed to serve majority opinion. By that I mean we're not about catering to people's opinions about politics/ideology the way news media outlets cater to an ideological position (e.g., Fox News). > 3. There is no minority of people flagging stories for disingenuous reasons Dan and I have both been doing this job for years and we look at the flagging patterns every day. There are some users who do mis-use the flag feature, and when that happens we turn their flags off. > 4. There is however a minority of people complaining about things being flagged despite repeated and almost daily evidence of the opposite happening. The users complaining about "censorship" or "suppression" of a category of stories make up a relatively small cohort of people who want HN to be more focused on that category of stories, yes. But we look at their activity (submissions, comments) and see that what they want HN to be is different from what HN has always been intended to be, which is a site for curiosity, not rage. If you can frame your arguments in these terms, we'll have a better discussion. I.e., if you can point out the evidence that we're doing a bad job of optimizing HN for curiosity rather than rage.