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Comment by tom_ | Hacker News Reader

I figured enough people just flag the submission, because they don't want to put up with the Xlibre guy's specific category of shit, or that of his inevitable hangers-on. Are they right? Are they wrong? Well, it's their decision. I've seen enough stuff I've flagged myself disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with more surprisingly reasonable discussion than I at least had predicted), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step.

(Of course, admin intervention in the other direction is always a possibility, and that's fair enough too. If you want unmoderated discussion, you'll need to go somewhere else.)

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> I've seen enough stuff I've flagged disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with surprisingly reasonable discussion), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step.

That's the whole point.

The default for everything that has at least a small hater base is to disappear, until for manual reenabling by moderators. This is not community moderation, it is de-facto pre-moderation. Which, in this case has a strong bias against xlibre despite it having literally nothing wrong with it (like the other stuff reappearing). It's gross censure (for the sake of a gross, user hostile corporate), and the moderators should be called out for it.

While I find the moderation on HN a bit heavyhanded at times:

When the originator of the XLibre fork decided to push a heavily partisan political stance right there in the README, he made a choice that ensured that the project will be controversial.

He can fix that very easily if he wants to.

As someone who detest Wayland, I would very much like to see Xlibre be sucessful, but I'm not surprised a lot of people will reflexively downvote or flag stuff about it given the circumstances.

(EDIT: Having seen some of the other stuff he's said, I'm now not convinced he can do anything to salvage this as long as he's the figure-head for this new project)

He stated everyone was welcome regardless of their race or politics. This is only a strongly political stance if you contrast it with Red Hat, whose extremist, racist and illegal discriminatory policies they implemented under the banner of DEI now has them in hot water with 3x workplace discrimination lawsuits. Honestly i don't understand how people can call xlibre political but abide by red hat's active evil.

You left out that he contrasted this with DEI. That is a strongly political stance that to a lot of us is extreme. You're not convincing anyone here. If anything being defended with rants like this is likely to make people even more unwilling to consider this project. I certainly won't touch a project that attracts this kind of defence.

I directly mentioned DEI, obviously i didn't leave it out.

If you support red hat's DEI program then you are defending systematic discrimination on the basis of race and other immutable characteristics. This is an ultimately indefensible position, and one that will come back to bite you. There is nothing extreme about this position unless you are a racist extremist yourself.

You are as a human being morally bankrupt if you're willing to touch a company with multiple active discrimination lawsuits that has shown zero remorse or policy changes, but are pretending that someone mentioning DEI is a real problem (the tool which was used to implement that illegal discrimination, which he personally had to deal with.) People have an inalienable right to defend themselves in every case.

I don't think it is a good reason or even an acceptable reason to actively censor the news about the project, and prevent people to communicate about it. While XLibre is unfortunately political at the moment, this is not an excuse for what the HN staff is doing.

You keep assuming that it's HN staff, but HN articles very often get flagged by regular users when they get political, and having seen some of the comments on one of the other articles, including some of yours, I'm not the slightest bit surprised they got flagged.

If people want Xlibre to have a shot at HN at all, those are things to fix. Making unsubstantiated claims about HN staff is not going to change anything - if anything that too is likely to attract flagging.

No, a project or a project leader having haters (just this thread there are 3 distinct people jumping in with various insults or fake news on normal questions) should not be enough for something to get censored. What kind of 'Why are you hitting yourself?' logic is that?

> You keep assuming that it's HN staff,

It's HN staff, and I've already explained it. Read back.

It's quite possible that there are just people flagging things without commenting. I do this all the time if the discussion looks particularly stupid, unproductive, bad-tempered, pointless, and so on - or some combination thereof. (I haven't done it in this case, but only because I was silly enough to comment. This thread has been quite reasonably flagged, I'd say.)

This is part of the how this particular site works. If you don't like it, that's fine, but you will have to go elsewhere to avoid it. And even if it is indeed the admins working away behind the scenes, a committee of shadowy puppetmasters directing their every move, suppression of X11 forks just one probing toothed tendril of this multi-armed octopus - well, this place was never a democracy anyway.

> It's quite possible that there are just people flagging things without commenting. I do this all the time if the discussion looks particularly stupid, unproductive, bad-tempered, pointless, and so on - or some combination thereof.

Huh? Wait, really? I never ever once considered to flag an article based on the discussion. I've flagged some articles, which I think are bad (as articles).

What's the reasoning behind doing that?

edit: hmph, probably the same reasoning as my reasons to flag, but considering the submission with comments as a whole, instead of the article.

Still, I don't think that some bad comments made by some haters should be enough to remove a good article with several separate good discussions.

edit2: the news guideline[0] is pretty clear about what is a good submission and what is not:

> Hacker News Guidelines

> What to Submit

> 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.

XLibre having haters that flag it, or randomly appear calling the creator jerk, arsehole, nutjob and more should not be connected for it to be hidden--according to the guidelines, that is. The only remaining option is deliberate censorship I believe.

[0] : https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> XLibre having haters that flag it, or randomly appear calling the creator jerk, arsehole, nutjob and more should not be connected for it to be hidden--according to the guidelines, that is. The only remaining option is deliberate censorship I believe.

You can dislike it as much as you like, but it is how HN works, and have worked, for many years, and complaining about it is not going to change that.

You have assumed it is HN staff, without evidence. I've read what you've written.

You've then further demonstrated exactly why these threads gets flagged by being hostile and making unsubstantiated allegations.

If you care about this project, the best you could do is to stop pushing this.

I'm pretty much the perfect audience for this project, and at this point not just the project leader looks like a problem, but supporters of it like you as well.

If you're intent on pushing away potential supporters, this is the way to do it.

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