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Comment by Schmerika | Hacker News Reader

And there are people who own and run this website with extremely aligned interests.

Altman and Thiel have long had YC connections (obv); and for the last year or so Garry Tan and PG have been full-throatedly cheerleading Musk and DOGE on their Twitter pages.

Then there's the many connections between YC and the 'defense' industry; you know, the one making billions of dollars from wars that people speak out about on social media.

It's very easy to explain why posts get flagged here. It's a lot harder to digest why they don't get unflagged. Especially when all the posts about it are quickly removed, every single one.

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Cue the usual dang copypasta how there is no evidence of flag brigading, and how they "moderate less", and so on.

Yep.

Followed by the usual sycophantic support: "You're doing a great job dang, we all love you so don't worry about these cranks", and "Well I'VE never noticed any censorship so it obviously doesn't exist" (Yeah dude that's how it works lol).

To be fair, dang's position has consistently been (and he posted as such yesterday[1]) that the flag brigading comes from two distinct groups: 1. Users who don't want to see "politics" and 2. Users who are partisan and want to hide politics they don't like.

My view is that these are essentially the same group. "Not wanting to see politics" is itself just a partisan view in favor of whatever the Status Quo currently is. So if you're going through and flagging articles describing wrongdoing or calling for change, because they are "political," then you're just operating in the service of whoever is currently in power.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46771917

Agreed.

Given the consistency and speed of flags though, I don't think #2 is just "organic" flagging.

> Given the consistency and speed of flags though, I don't think #2 is just "organic" flagging.

Thousands of people view these very quickly once they hit the frontpage, its enough 0.1% of those are willing to flag to see consistent near instant flagging.

> My view is that these are essentially the same group. "Not wanting to see politics" is itself just a partisan view in favor of whatever the Status Quo currently is. So if you're going through and flagging articles describing wrongdoing or calling for change, because they are "political," then you're just operating in the service of whoever is currently in power.

But some people do that regardless who is currently in power, what do you call that? I'd call that "not wanting to see politics" and not being partisan.

Can’t make a man understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.

Dan sold out his moral compass.

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