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mateus1 | 11 months ago

Topics mentioning DOGE and Musk are being quickly flagged here in HN, so I don’t think there is much hope for discourse here.

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_fs|11 months ago

Its completely obvious that a bot army is gaming the system. Posts are flagged within minutes of posting

swatcoder|11 months ago

That's not obvious at all.

People refresh all day here and often on the new post and new and comment feeds specifically, and many earnest users who take pride in maintaining a certain character to the site are quick to flag anything that's likely to devolve into noise and vitriol, like most political topics.

It can be frustrating to have them do that when you really wish you could to commiserate, explore, or debate the community on these topics, but bots aren't at play. Many people just don't see this as the right place to have these discussions and work to keep it that way.

While almost all of are political in some way, and most of us are tracking all these same events, we don't all want talk about it here.

oooyay|11 months ago

I really wish people, widely, would stop blaming bots. I am sure there are plenty of bots doing lots of things, but by immediately attributing this behavior to bots I think we detach ourselves from a fundamental fact: there are a lot of US citizens that are so far drowning in propaganda that they actually manufacture reason for much of this insanity without much provocation or incentive beyond it being done by their tribe.

throwawa14223|11 months ago

I am in the habit of flagging anything related to American politics. It never leads anywhere and seems orthogonal to HN.

rcpt|11 months ago

I don't think flagging automatically kills posts, no?

pogue|11 months ago

It's still here, and anyone who finds HN posts by rss or other means will see the headline, url & have access to this discussion (although it might be closed to replies by then)

blackeyeblitzar|11 months ago

The reason they are flagged is precisely because there isn’t much hope for discourse, not the other way around. Also, I think per the guidelines, these types of discussions are also not welcome:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

The guidelines also say the following, so I’ll just stop here:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

danorama|11 months ago

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Given your comment history, trying to call out others on this rule is interesting. But we all can improve, I guess!