We all know that HN wants to keep the topics as tech oriented as possible. Which is a good thing.
In normal times. But we're not living in normal times. Tech elites, like Musk, Sacks, Thiel are taking over US government. Tech enabled propaganda is in full swing, to the extent few of us can grasp entirely.
To take the latest example, one of the latest DOGE employees, apparently made some very racist remarks recently.
However, within 24 hours, Musk managed to manipulate the public opinion to believe that it was actually the journalist reporting this awful behavior that was 'doxing' the guy. The vice-president of the USA chimed in saying the guy should be re-hired, and he will be, according to Musk.
All of this is absolutely mind blowing and I frankly could not find words to describe how I feel about it.
What I do know though, is that a lot of this is done with active precipitation of Tesla / SpaceX / Xai employees who do follow HN.
My question is, WHY any article about DOGE / Musk is immediately banned and silenced ?
Dang has unflagged several posts and has explained "the algorithm" clearly throughout the week, so this seems a little unfair. Though I personally remain disappointed that there seems to be no concern that "the algorithm" is clearly being abused here to suppress coverage of, at best, one of the largest security breeches in American history or, at worst, a potential coup of the world's largest superpower. And that I've not seen arecognition that unflagging a post is like splinting a broken leg - still a broken leg. It robs a thread of several hours of natural growth and still biases the ranking, so the abusive flagger gets their way. I would guess their opinion is in the ballpark of "that's the way the cookie crumbles".
I don't think I've seen Dang say if they're revoking flagging privileges - I doubt it? And they seem pretty adamant on not making exceptions to the moderation system, so that's that... Though it seems reasonable to me there should be a temporary whitelist system they could use to make flagging require manual review if a post meets a condition, I'm also not an HN moderator with analytics and years of practice.
WRT many of the flags, there are admittedly a lot of duplicates. Heck, this thread is a duplicate, but I can hardly blame that when the flagging is as ridiculous as it is right now.
Also, @dang doesn't really work IIRC. Moderators tend to not want to be spammed easily.
Here's a post from @dang to begin your hunt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572
What is it you wish to gain from having more of these posts not moderated that you cannot get from the related posts which appear on the front page each day?
May I recommend Metafilter? They discuss almost nothing else than current American politics, you‘ll feel right at home.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
I'd say "someone made a racist remark" stories are politics and happen every day.