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Comment by tertiary | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't matter that there could be useful discussion here. People see stuff like this as an attack on Trump (and on their politics) and flag it for ideological reasons.

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Yes, normally this type of post would be #1 on the front page, but there's too much partisanship and the probability of a flamewar is a bit too high. Not a big fan of this kind of heavy-handed moderation sometimes, but I guess I understand it

My assumption was that this is user generated flagging. It's not moderation. It's people saying "we don't want to see this stuff". Same reason people are down voting our comments right now :)

Ah, yes, I see. For some reason, I always assumed HNews users leaned a bit more left than the general internet population

Probably depends a lot on where you hang out. For me, it's more conservative than most of the internet I see (outside of Facebook). Probably has a good mix which is why you can get a lot of decent discussion here.

There's a big contingent of right-leaning libertarians, and there are a decent number of conservatives and centrists present too. Even more than a few Trump fans! I'm often surprised by the variety, in a positive way.

No, they flag it because it is against the rules.

True, but articles about Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange would also be against those same rules.

Stories about those topics often tick the box of things that "good hackers would find interesting" – i.e., Wikileaks is an emergent phenomenon of the internet age, and NSA tracking of people via the major tech platforms is relevant to everyone who works in or cares about tech and is the kind of thing good hackers can have interesting discussions about.

Which rules is this post against?

Seems like a clear match to

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

politics

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