[mitch3x3]

[flagged]

[duxup]

There are a lot of articles I don't care for on HN. Outside straight advertising and scams, I don't flag them. That's life, stuff you don't want to see sometimes.

Sometimes I even open those articles wondering what everyone is talking about and sometimes it turns out to be worthwhile, sometimes not.

[Karrot_Kream]

It's not the articles themselves. It's the quality of the commentary that comes from them. IMO these highly charged topics are very corrosive to the culture of a site. The people that post the hyper emotional comments on these posts and get rewarded in upvotes start doing the same thing throughout the site. Also in my experience if I post a low effort political comment I get much more karma from the crowd than a high effort technical post. What does that do for content incentives?

It's my belief that the recent growth in both user count and highly emotionally charged low quality content on this site is directly proportional to the amount of hot button issues on this site. A decent amount of folks use this site as yet another culture war front.

IMO these kinds of discussions need much, much more moderation than HN does to be productive. That's not a knock on HN moderation, it was never meant to be a structured debate platform. But taking a lightly moderated site and inundating it with hot button high emotion posts will not go well.

[jleyank]

Isn’t it easier to just put your fingers in your ears, shut your eyes, and go la-la-la? Some of us prefer to see what’s going on, particularly when the HN community might be people making the situation worse. Not every bit of software is helpful, and “data”in the wrong hands can be fatal.

[Jensson]

> Some of us prefer to see what’s going on

And you can see that anywhere else, why should every site talk about the same things?

[cloverich]

That's literally every other site. The reason you can't see high quality HN style comments on those sites, is because they don't block stuff like this. And quality goes exactly where you'd expect. You can't get quality commentary on charged political topics on a mostly unmoderated online forum. You need dedicated groups and in depth moderation.

Like it or not life does go on regardless of political complex and so long as we're working, we need more than _just_ politics in our news feeds. That's what HN is.

[mingus88]

I don’t use any other social media site. I use this one because I want to have meaningful discussions on things relating to hacker culture

And what could be more relevant to hacker culture than authoritarian takeovers? Is not the entire hacker spirit one that pushes back against someone who tells you that you can’t do X or Y?

How long until the administration turns its focus from late night hosts to hackers who are also publishing things the administration does not want you to know?

[soraminazuki]

> hackers who are also publishing things the administration does not want you to know

As much as I'd like to tell you otherwise, whistleblowers have consistently been treated terribly even before we all were even born.

Yes, the situation is worse now in all sorts of ways, but it was already rock bottom when it came to the treatment of whistleblowers.

[sterlind]

the topic of government censorship is highly relevant to technology, like it or not. the FCC was involved, so this is relevant to those who rely on FCC licenses.

[dfxm12]

You have to work hard to find a flagged thread. You also have to work hard to come into a tread you don't want to see and post something this compared to just hiding it.