5 ms·
why is this flagged ?
by forvelin 7mo ago
why is this flagged ?
- appreciatorBus 7mo ago> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ycombinatrix 7mo agoThis is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me.
- glenstein 7mo agoI think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible. I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
- appreciatorBus 7mo agoIsrael and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective. Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
- glenstein 7mo agoI agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here. Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention. I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
- anigbrowl 7mo agoThe forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
- blitzar 7mo ago[flagged]
- ivan_gammel 7mo agoNo. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context. It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
- ycombinatrix 7mo agoI think GP was making a joke - since zionists claim any anti-zionist behavior is anti-semitic.
- ivan_gammel 7mo agoThen I apologize without retraction.
- SauciestGNU 7mo agoGood instinct to fight against antisemitism, because there is a lot of it. Unfortunately the Israeli government lobs accusations of antisemitism at its (legitimate) critics frequently, enough so to muddy the waters between actual antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state.
- ivan_gammel 7mo agoNah, let’s not let them to set the narrative. It is not antisemitism to criticize Israel and I do not care what Israeli or my (German) government says about it.
- ycombinatrix 7mo ago[flagged]
- mhb 7mo ago[flagged]
- ycombinatrix 7mo ago[flagged]
- mhb 7mo ago[flagged]
- ycombinatrix 7mo ago[flagged]
- mhb 7mo ago[flagged]
- simonjanssen 7mo agoI think the solution which will lead to the best quality of life for people in and around the levant is a single, secular state. Two states that are both ethnonationalist is unsustainable, and any single state which isn't secular can only be achieved through genocide. Freedom to practice whatever religion, seperation of church and state, and no apartheid for a certain group of people.
- jLaForest 7mo ago@dang any explanation for this being flagged? Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
- glenstein 7mo agoI also would appreciate knowing if the mods see this. I'm worried that flagging is possibly automated and vulnerable to campaigning.
- dang 7mo agoWe eventually saw it, but only randomly. In case you didn't see them yet, here are some of my other comments in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141517 Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20coalition%20flags&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users. Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look. I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
- dang 7mo agoHere are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment. The rise and fall of peer review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123133 - Feb 2026 (0 comments) Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899 - Feb 2026 (692 comments) Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119210 - Feb 2026 (440 comments) Music Discovery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114672 - Feb 2026 (56 comments) The 7-Year Bug That Took 3 Minutes to Fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090261 - Feb 2026 (1 comment) AI made coding more enjoyable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075400 - Feb 2026 (97 comments) RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934499 - Feb 2026 (52 comments) Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845567 - Feb 2026 (9 comments) There is an AI code review bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766961 - Jan 2026 (249 comments) Proof of Corn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511 - Jan 2026 (307 comments) XLibre XServer 25.1 Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474846 - Jan 2026 (4 comments) Python Data Science Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120611 - Dec 2025 (61 comments) NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995834 - Nov 2025 (228 comments) Best shipping logistic aggregator in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 - Nov 2025 (0 comments) WebDAV isn't dead yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698070 - Oct 2025 (128 comments) Unicode Footguns in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689443 - Oct 2025 (20 comments) AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627171 - Oct 2025 (124 comments) Super Ace: Your PH Home for Jili Slots and a 300% Welcome Bonus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939 - Oct 2025 (0 comments) Pkgbase Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 - July 2025 (42 comments)
- myrmidon 7mo agoI'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged: 1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful 2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics) 3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
- dang 7mo agoYou left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=political%20overlap%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang... We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this. In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
- asdfss674564 7mo ago[flagged]