[hipadev23]

I think you need to admit HN is failing due to how easy it is to manipulate what content and comments are shown. Allows a single determined group to literally control the narrative. Eliminate upvotes/downvotes. Keep flagging but make it public record. And revoke privileges for those who abuse it.

[dang]

That's not an accurate description of what's happening, and we're not going to redesign the site in response to political winds, gale-force though they are right now. Actually that would be the worst moment to do that.

[hipadev23]

It 100% absolutely is, you're just too deep to recognize it.

It's what's happened across Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook over the past decade. You've all built platforms intended for social discourse but instead built extremely brittle systems subject to gamified manipulation by showing people which opinions reward and punish them. And those are then manipulated at-large by outside groups responsible for elevating a particular way of thinking about a given topic.

Conversations do not need a algorithmic popularity mechanism.

[wswope]

I think many users would be willing to hear a long-form version of your take on the subject (maybe in a fresh meta thread for visibility?), but your comment as-is feels like a shallow dismissal of legitimate concerns.

You’re not really offering any insight into why or how you reached the conclusion that you posted. As a user on the outside, it sure looks like the site structure has begun to buckle in the wind.

[computerthings]

These aren't "political winds". This is all a bit too much "we're all looking for the guy who did this", when it comes to Y Combinator and "tech bros" in general.

> Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

> The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

-- https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-net...

That HN is for stuff not discussed in the news is basically disproven daily. The other thing I keep hearing that "if we allow this, the front page would be only about politics", I don't believe it anymore. It's like the stone that keeps tigers away. People may genuinely believe in that stone and that they're guarding the village, but I think it's bull and having to entertain this superstition takes up more resources than the occasional tiger attack would.

I know disabling flags is probably not feasible, since real spam does get posted. but we have "showdead" for comments, why can't we simply have the same option for threads? Then those who want to discuss these things can do it, at the price of also having to wade through actual spam. Anybody else would be unaffected. If the goal is not to suppress awareness and discussion, that can be very easily proven with such a feature, and the best time to implement it would have been a long time ago IMO.