The stories being submitted are all being flagged into oblivion.
Sad. We can do better.
I've emailed hn@ on the hope that this will be corrected administratively.
You shouldn't treat this bigger than it is. Democrats still have a lot of work to do.
We should be able to debate the significance...not have every article flagged/hidden.
That they have to be flagged to get suppressed is telling.
Does anyone need convincing that a broad repudiation of all that is important to the tech industry? Or have we got butt hurt Thiel and Musk acolytes flagging news they don't want to see or discuss?
The opposition party taking back both the Senate and the House has only happened four other times since 1946 -- notably, in 2018 the Democrats only took back the House. And this result includes states that have basically never flipped before: the last time Kansas had a Democratic senator was 1932, when Democrat meant something totally different.
> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Do you think TV news isn't covering it? The tiny euro country I live was covering it with extra news bulletins in the morning.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
Plenty didn't get flagged for not meeting the submission guidelines.
‘We run HN mostly hands off, and when people are insistent on flagging or discussing a topic, there’s only so much we can do while remaining largely neutral per our founding ethics.’
I continue to insist that HN will need to take more actions that are perceived as biased, over the objections of its users, if it wants to become a healthy community; but I tend to do so in the form of one or two essay-length emails a year, rather than posting to HN. Here, I think HN needs to openly be willing to kill ‘not sufficiently specialized for this site’ submissions that are still of interest to the community, which will get them labeled ‘anti-this’ and ‘pro-that’ more often than now. (It doesn’t help that most users confuse ‘user action [flagged]’ with ‘algo/mod action [dead]’, either.)
To the best of my understanding, HN’s founding ethics prioritize community votes and flags over adherence to the guidelines up until the violations become hateful, interpersonal, or form a pattern of bad outcomes sufficient to earn action. Pressuring them to take a stand for or against the community on one specific topic that isn’t covered by those points is probably less likely to pan out, but I wish you luck all the same.
I mean, there's no tech angle here. The discussions are mostly "yay, our side won!". That's one step away from turning into a flamewar, if the other side gets out of mourning enough to show up.
Whether it turns into a flamewar or not, there's no fodder for an HN-style discussion here.
Example of what succeeds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50365982
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
Plenty of non tech articles make it to the top.
> but democracy has spoken: those given rights by the site are curating out the noise.
I highly doubt what's happening looks anything like democracy. Given that some of the articles, even flagged, have plenty of comments and upvotes, it seems to me that it's more like an empowered minority has spoken.
Plenty of noise still reaches the top, unfortunately. Feel free to join me in curating the off-topic articles as you see them.
> it seems to me that it's more like an empowered minority has spoken.
That is quite literally the original model of democracy, empowering a vested and vetted minority of naturally born citizens. Modern “democracy” is nothing akin to Athenian democracy, but closer to mob rule. We, the posters who have proven ourselves as high-value, have powers vested in us to curate the website. Most commenters either lack the ability or the knowledge to use it, which is for the best.