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Comment by trymas | Hacker News Reader

I "like" how all prominent election posts are flagged instantly today.

I know that HN owners are far-right, but it just proves time and time again that considerable amount of HN users are too.

Anything that is against current US administration policy is flagged fast and deemed as "too political for this forum" in the comment section.

Politics are always interested in you. Especially US elections, that impact not only US citizens, but essentially whole world. Tech sector included.

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The owners aren't doing it. And it's not bots either.

No, they claim they aren’t doing it, and say ‘it’s the users doing the flagging’

Yet when I flag something that I evidently shouldn’t have, I get flagging privileges revoked.

I think that's the wrong interpretation. HN users are probably more democrat than republican but kind of anti HN being about politics.

Compare this thread to one two years ago announcing Trump's Presidential victory. That wasn't flagged; thousands of comments; still US politics. No, it's clear partisanship that's hidden behind an implausible veneer of anti-politics rhetoric.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42057647

A lot of new accounts were made that day

you not know, consistency in moderation is impossible, anyway we are orthogonal

A midterm shellacking of the party in power is not quite as man bites dog as the first nonconsecutive POTUS in a century.

Texas, Kansas, and potentially Mississippi voting for blue senators is remarkable.

As is the Democrat takeover of Texas (along with what that means for all the tech companies hailing Texas as the greatest place on Earth).

This is the biggest midterm shellacking that has ever happened in US history. That's worth talking about regardless of the forum.

Texas went from almost entirely Republican cabinet to almost entirely Democrat basically overnight (in the "spending ten years to become an overnight success" kind).

Republicans in that state lost --- by very wide margins --- _every single key seat_ after a 30-year run. Nobody expected that.

Okay, fine; too political. Consider that the Railroad Commissioner, who is responsible for oil and gas policy in the state, also switched parties today and that Texas is a key state for AI datacenter and EV development.

Or that "reigning in AI" is a lynchpin of the Democrat strategy...and they now control both the House and the Senate.

Or that Kansas became a Democrat-run state for the first time in NINETY FOUR years.

Or that Mississippi, a state that everyone assumed was a Republican stronghold, STILL hasn't been called because the race is too close to call by like 50 votes.

The man has absolutely bit the dog here. This is Boston Tea Party levels of historic in my opinion.

Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th president, serving nonconsecutive terms.

Thus the "in a century" part of "first nonconsecutive POTUS in a century." Cleveland's terms in office were 1885-1889 and 1893-1897.

I think the majority of people that actually post on HN are left leaning, but flaggers appear to be disproportionately right leaning, given the permissiveness for retaining right leaning topics and rejecting non-right leaning topics, which makes a kind of sense because historically the right has tended to censor opposing ideas rather than debating them. And I say that as having been a republican for half my life.

One thing to note is that mods can shadowban people from flagging. You can still hit the flag button but it doesn't get counted. (I'm pretty sure this happened to me at some point.)

It would not surprise me one bit if more left-leaning users got shadowbanned from flagging than right-leaning ones.

So you’re proposing user flagging intent may by evenly divided, but the bias could entirely be the mods inhibiting the left-leaning flaggers disproportionately? Is there evidence of the flag shadow ban mechanism/biased application or is that mainly suspicion?

Yes. And I’m not saying the mods are secret right-wingers who are trying to shape the discourse, but I am saying that their implicit biases may come into play when they decide who to flagshadowban. (And also which articles to manually remove flags from: anecdotally, this seems to happen more frequently with right-aligned topics.)

This site desperately needs a public moderation log.

You can’t even vouch for an article the way you can for comments.

I don't think this is accurate minority power on HN to flag posts is very high. Flagging is a costless power move to surpress "off-topic" / off interest stuff. I basically can't stand looking at HN without the /active filter. The conversations usually are way more interesting

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