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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Likely it got flagged too much too quickly.

I have no clue how it went down, I'm just a rando HN commenter, but don't ascribe to careless human moderation that which can be adequately explained by automated moderation.

There's definitely a sizable crowd that prefers HN to be more about hacking and less about politics, let alone divisive discussions about intelligence services, the person of Glenn Greenwald and so on. Also I wouldn't be surprised if HN has a lower flag->dead threshold for video links.

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So when posts get flagged to much they get auto-removed? If true that seems like a questionable policy. It puts the judgement over right or wrong in the hands of the majority mob, while it's very important for a mind or community to get exposed to contrarian points of view.

I'm newish to HN so it's a genuine question, I've not observed enough moderation here to really know how it works. It's the first time I've seen a post disappear and since this is the kind of topic that gets censored on other social media sites it made me suspicious.

It puts the judgment over right or wrong for Hacker News in the hands of the majority of people on Hacker News.

I'm pretty sure being-on-the-front-page-of-HN is not a measure of moral judgment.

Think might be a misunderstanding. I'm referring to a post that got removed, not one that was simply unpopular. There is no issue with the voting mechanism.

Flagging of articles is done by users, not moderators, and it takes very little effort to flag an article, by design.

Many people here consider politics categorically off topic (which it really isn't) and will flag such articles on principle.

Ok, apparently flagging can lead to automatic removal, I understand that now. But how exactly? It's not explained anywhere. How many flags are needed for a submission to get auto-removed?

>and it takes very little effort to flag an article, by design.

I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone on HN how such a design can be easily abused. A single entity could get undesirable submissions removed by running multiple accounts.

>But how exactly? It's not explained anywhere. How many flags are needed for a submission to get auto-removed?

Nothing is really removed from HN, only marked invisible. You can see it if you turn the showdead option on in your profile.

And you can contact the mods in the email field below but they tend not to give specific details.

>A single entity could get undesirable submissions removed by running multiple accounts.

Sure, but this forum is so aggressively moderated that it really wouldn't matter. If the mods feel a story doesn't deserve to be flagged, they'll unflag it. If they feel it doesn't deserve to be as popular as it is, they'll sink it. Users will flag and downvote for any number of reasons (since there are no guidelines for voting here.) There are so many invisible strings being pulled on these threads that it's impossible to read any specific motive into anything.

why was this story flagged? Does anyone know?

Not sure and I did not flag, but I surely don't come to HN to see some Fox News videos.

even if Glenn Greenwald is doing the talking? He broke the story on Edward Snowden, he even got the Pulitzer price for that.

I almost flagged it. My reason was simple: Tucker Carlson

He does not do news, he does biased opinion pieces. And in my experience he often does them dishonestly. He also has a tedency to hint at conspiracy.

Hence I generally do not trust what he says. And I think that Tucker Carlson saying that the CIA is spying on politicians actually weakens the message. Even though in this case the message is true.

HN is pretty selective with what gets scored high and not flagged. Guidelines explain most of it for starters (read links at bottom of HN page):

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

3 letter agencies can be interesting, though spying is not news in general.

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