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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

My sense is that HN's benevolent dictators really prefer to avoid anything as heavy-handed as your suggestions. If enough users here just don't want certain topics in their HN experience, then posts on those topics will get flagged.

HN is not the whole internet. If you have strong feelings about the current NCAA football rankings, or stupid policies of NYC's Dept. of Homeless Services, or the horrible ethical issues raised by Scorsese's new movie Killers of the Flower Moon - there are a zillion other sites where you can raise and discuss those.

And if the managers or users on those other sites are quick to flag and ban posts about the relative merits of MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, or awesome CSS tricks - that's okay, too.

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Do you think doxxing, privacy, and free speech is not of interest to HN readers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852784

I see that the post is not flagged anymore, but it was for a couple of days after it was submitted and the damage is already done as far as visibility goes.

It was unflagged for several hours when fresh, 80 people commented, myself included.

It got the regular amount of visibily and then was hit with meconium accounts doing wall of text dumps about nazis and kill, kill, kill, etc - leading to the flagging.

The topic itself was discussed in multiple threads, so there was no undue lack of coverage given it's all related to a very topical, political, non tech, tangental to HN subject.

> and then was hit with meconium accounts doing wall of text dumps about nazis and kill, kill, kill, etc - leading to the flagging.

So, it was okay to flag it because some users were writing unreasonably vile comments? If this tactic works, then it would be a good way to get something flagged.

It's OK to flag anything - that's free will at play.

It's especially OK to flag things that are off-topic as per the guidelines:

    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

as opposed to:

    On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

There was very little in the linked thread that gratified intellectual curiosity.

> It's OK to flag anything - that's free will at play.

If it was organic and from regular users, I would agree with you. However, I don't think it is, considering how targeted the flagging is.

If you don't agree with me, then at least consider the possibility. Wouldn't you want to make it harder for people to do that?

There are already barriers to flagging, many threads get flagged by people who have passsed those barriers and are deemed entitled to flag.

A number of flagged posts are vouched for, leading to posts being unflagged - such as the linked post which is no longer flagged.

You appear to be arguing that the ocean should be wetter.

I have provided a link that was flagged, but it's not flagged anymore. So, it was both deemed to be a valid submission and for the most part it was invisible to users - ergo, the damage was done.

What you are describing obviously doesn't work.

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