Hacker News Reader

Comment by GolDDranks | Hacker News Reader

> Typically, stuff like this gets flagged off the front page within minutes.

Why would that be, because it's too "political" for tech news? Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?

View on HN

> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?

I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.

Switching to https://news.ycombinator.com/active (/active) with showdead is a better HN experience, nowadays.

> I wouldn't mind that so much, except they're minimally-active in the comment section and instead use flagging. At least defend your beliefs.

From what I see, even good comments with facts and sources that go against the prevalent narrative are either downvoted or flagged a good chunk of the time, which discourages people from commenting(as it's meant to be) because of lack of visibility. It can also make the commenters unable to post comments for hours because HN's rate limiter kicks in, so they are effectively silenced.

Also, many times they're attacked personally and those comments violating HN's etiquette are not downvoted or flagged. Not to mention very low quality Redditesque are also not downvoted or flagged, but are upvoted, which lowers the quality of HN as a whole.

"People don't like my opinions therefore I am going to sabotage the discussion from obscurity."

A good chunk of the time, it's sourced and documented facts that are flagged and downvoted, to reduce visibility.

I stand corrected. Please flag anything you disagree with.

Are you sure? There can be absolutely be voting and flagging biases, but the majority if the time it happens it is due to issues of tone for comments that are picking fights rather then prompting interesting discourse. When you get flagged or down voted, the most productive response is to look at how you were presenting your information or opinion and if there was a way to do so that would be more inclined to produce a productive conversation. Even when it's borderline, there's usually something you could have changed that wouldn't have drawn as much partisan ire and it is valuable to consider this, as partisan ire turns off brains.

I'll give you one example that I saw just now of someone else's comment that was downvoted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710265

It happens all the time.

Here's an example of my comment on the same topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43256114

The tone policing one has to do has to be done only by one side, the other "side" can write very low quality comments with personal attacks and not get downvoted or flagged as frequently. It's same on Reddit too. Absolute misinformation and FUD gets voted up if they favor the prevalent side and countering comments are downvoted creating a chilling effect to reduce visibility and discourage participation of folks that don't agree 100% with the political narrative.

That is exactly how Reddit became more and more extreme leading to popular subs becoming full of death threats at one point. And HN is on it's way there.

The /active page is helpful, thanks! I also just recently realized that the 'hckr news'[0] interface doesn't hide or remove flagged stories if you're using the Top 10/20/50 view options, so if something is getting discussed/upvoted it will be there.

[0]https://hckrnews.com/

I used to discuss my different views and presented data or facts that I gathered The facts, of course, could be wrong, as I have limited faulty to verify everything. Yet, instead of pointing out what I said was wrong, I got angry posts attacking my motives and my posts were flagged. So, now I know the game, and for such politically charged posts, I know what I can do easily: flag it away.

You flag posts with politics because you don't like having been flagged?

The Iron Rule, right? The benefit of the Iron Rule is that those who break rules face consequences, preventing them from escalating their behavior. So you cancel me, I cancel you, only harder. You play law fare, I do the same to you, only more legally but in a harsher way. Hada yada yada. It’s the only way to keep the society civil, eventually.

You post something and based on its content you assume someone from an ideological group flagged it. And for that reason you flag and opinion of someone you assume is from that group?

What a way to live.

Actually, good point. Thanks for pointing that out.

I can't fathom the thought process that claims the goal is "preventing escalation" and immediately decides the only method is escalation.

110%, people can be braindead assholes in their replies, and fail to substantially engage with comments.

Or just drive-by up/down according to if they agree with you or not.

Sorry that was your experience, and hopefully we can all be less... that... together.

It's true that HN has shown itself _mostly_ incapable of having a useful discussion on topics that involve the current US president. (But sometimes a useful thread of conversation emerges!) Users that are frustrated by a flagged topic will retaliate by flagging comments they disagree with. And vice versa.

I think retaliating like this just makes HN worse. If you stop flagging perfectly good stories, HN will be a marginally nicer place for discussion. I'll say the same to anyone here who admits to blanket flagging of comments.

Please keep trying to discuss your views. Sometimes they'll get smacked down unfairly, but other times they'll stick around. The more you try, the more they'll stick, and hopefully it can shift the tone of discussion here.

It seems to me like people were mostly receptive to your facts and data. You got angry posts attacking your motives when you wrote angry posts such as this:

> Yeah, we elected Trump to fuck up the ball of worms that your left cherished so much, and Trump is following through.

Perhaps you ought to look in the mirror.

Interestingly, that one was not flagged. The ones that gave simple data points were. That said, was that comment angry? I was happy because I finally saw a president deliver his campaign promises. Or maybe I was angry but angry as a liberal: we are supposed to keep government in check, yet when doge found out so much potential issues of the government and ngos, the first reaction of the left was to attack the motives of doge and to protect the institution? Where was the liberalism?

I don't need to defend it. I flag this stuff because I don't care. I'm not American and I'm tired of seeing American politics on this site. It's not what I come here for.

> Or are there actual DOGE sympathies within the HN population?

AFAIK a small number of them is enough to hide stuff from the front page. I don't know why is this the case, honestly I don't see any benefit over full time-moderators hiding problematic stuff, only negatives. Like why should a small political group be able to distort the news on the front page?

> too "political" for tech news?

Politics are everywhere. It’s how we negotiate consensus and make collective decisions. From what a government should do down to what features will be worked on this sprint and where are we having lunch today.

Tech being apolitical is an illusion, and a very dangerous one.

Sahil Lavingia founder of Gumroad is DOGE. Joe Gebbia co-founder of Airbnb is DOGE. Not sympathetic to, they are DOGE. Those are just the ones I know off the top of my head from listening to basic reporting. The All In podcast is super pro-Trump/DOGE, with Sacks being the Trump regime's crypto czar (bringing that cohort on board). Peter Thiel. Musk. That's a lot of pro-DOGE headspace in HN related circles. A lot of people that HN related circles look up to and aspire to emulate. A lot of people that HN circles network with/have perverse incentives to support.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

That's chilling. I always thought HN as a kinda level-headed corner of the internet.

Easy to think that until you start viewing /active and see all the stuff that's flagged and doesn't appear on the front page. Any article, even those explicitly about tech, science and academia are flagged if they have even the gentlest suggestion that this administration is flawed.

It pretends to be. But in reality it's always been a VC honey pot.

I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.

This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.

I wish there was a similarly active community for hackers in the traditional sense.

I very much enjoy https://lobste.rs

The very non-inclusive place

I think that Tony Stark legend is dead for a while. The few remaining believers are running on copium.

The name is ironic given that the site was founded by a venture capitalist.

Founders are (generally) not hackers and not your friends. They are money men and will always follow the money.

Been here since '09.

There are worse places on the internet, but HN's role first and foremost is to serve as advertising and a job board for YC. There's a structural bent away from anything that might be seen as harmful to that core purpose.

It's unfortunate.

It's funny that even on hacker news wiki there is a proclamation from Paul Graham that they do not help feature stories of their startups from YC. If that wouldn't be a quote from from 2013 I would call it an straight up lie.

It's explained in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) how, and why, we do that (see "What's the relationship between YC and HN?")

It's important that HN give things back to YC in exchange for funding it. Otherwise the lack of balance would eventually make the site, and thus the community, unsustainable. For all of us who care about HN, this is the way to ensure its long-term survival. But there's no reason not to be transparent about what those things are, which is what the FAQ does.

For example, there's a startup launch on the front page right now which our software placed there this morning:

Launch HN: mrge.io (YC X25) – Cursor for code review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692476 - April 2025 (89 comments)

One nice thing about startup launch threads is that, to judge by the comments and upvotes they receive, the community often (though not always!) finds them interesting. They fall off the front page more quickly if they're not resonating.

There's always been a right wing / libertarian contingent here. These days I recognize most of the top 20 or so usual suspects. Says nothing about how many flags happening though.

I don't think it's that simple. If you look at the comments here, and in general on political stories, it's the comments defending DOGE and Trump that tend to be downvoted.

i would love for this to be true but it's hosted by a venture capital firm. hard to ignore possible conflicts of interest since tech/VC culture is so intertwined with american rightwing politics.

I haven't commented here in years.

I watched the steady decline as the bros slowly took over. I tried commenting, only to be flagged and downvoted. I tried sharing articles, only to have them flagged. Starting with Gamergate, and then accelerating with Musk's purchase of Twitter, and metastasizing into its current form when leaders in the community (Andreesen, Thiel, Sacks, Rabois, Calcanis, Horowitz, Palihapitiya, Maguire, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc) decided that fascism was worth protecting their crypto deals. And it's time to accept that this is the reality of Hacker News today (and it's time to forget what it once was).

This is quite literally one of the most significant cybersecurity fails of all time.

And yet, right now, it's not on the Hacker News home page. But an article about how many supernova explode per year is. An article about how to "win an argument" with a toddler or similar set-in-stone-thinker is. The number one submission is about a "back-of-a-napkin" probabalistic calculator.

So let's just say it like it is...

If you're going to be forgiving, you can say that Hacker News is consistently gamed by the bros who have taken over the tech industry. If you're in a less forgiving mood, you can say that Hacker News is the Pravda for the bros of the Venture community.

"Oh... it's hard with an algorithm!!!" Total BS. Hacker News is making a choice. Hacker News made a choice a long time ago. Hacker News continues to make the same choice.

For what it's worth, I also made a choice and walked away from this place. You all can do the same.

You joined in 2011.

Let me assure you: the trash can bully vibes were default here far before you were.

HN is fine for what it is, but it's never ever been good.

I'd hate for you or others to read the GP comment and for your perception of HN to be altered, without any further detail or nuance to be presented for consideration.

Gumroad is not a YC company and its founder has no influence over HN or YC. Joe, whilst being one of the most successful, is still just one YC-backed founder out of more than 10,000, and doesn't represent YC. Paul Graham, YC's co-founder (who, whilst retired, is still actively involved and is very influential at YC) heavily criticises the current U.S. administration almost every day on Twitter. The other figures named in the GP comment have no involvement or influence on YC, and indeed some have had very hostile disputes with YC partners and notable founders in the past.

This is not to claim that we moderators are perfectly impervious to every influence and incentive at every moment. Awareness of our own potential to be biased and influenced is essential to being able to do this job effectively.

I just think it's important to point out that things are not nearly as simple as the GP comment purports.

It's censorship plain and simple.

And the admins/mods are still refusing to admit it.

You really don't need many users to flag a post. Get five users constantly flagging anything that makes Trump look bad (and a complicit mod that doesn't undo this) and that's all you need.

sigh it's just how any site with algorithmic ranking works: some things are going to get down voted. Politics is one of them, for a bunch of reasons articulated in this thread. Complaining about censorship is not going to make any difference.

Things have stabilized on roughly one thread on the evils of Republicans per day. Unfortunately they're managing a lot more evil per day than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com