Someone is flagging political posts
Today alone I’ve seen articles shared from The Guardian and The Washington Post flagged and removed. What did they have in common? Reporting on war crimes by Israel and the US. I’ve seen the downvote and flagging campaign increase here by the week. Will HN please do something about this manipulation?
17 comments
I'm not an admin so I don't really know, but generally this board is by and for techies. There's lots of places to discuss politics, but this board ain't it. My guess is that's why the posts disappeared.
One such post today reported on the USA's apparent use of an aerial land-mine distribution system in Iran. That sounds like tech reporting that fits here — even more than the post a day or two ago about origami patterns for paper models of space vehicles, including the Winnebago from Space Balls, which post was not only flag-free but rather popular.
Literally the story I was reading when it got flagged and removed, about the US dropping mines on Iran.
Here's a venue that's friendlier to politics: https://www.fark.com/politics/
It wasn't me, but had I seen any of that stuff, I certainly would have flagged it as well. There are other places to have those conversations. Keep this crap off of HN.
Many HN users dislike political posts, especially those have nothing to do with technology. I occasionally do the same, too.
Political posts appear to fare better at the beginning of the week.
Give people a break.
Give people a break.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That does not mean the stories are not important. They are. Vitally important. HN is just not the place for those discussions. This is not being dismissive of the stories, it should be seen as instead encouraging everyone to find a better site to engage even deeper with things that matter. At the end of the day, HN matters to your job, but stories like the ones getting flagged matter to the lives of millions.
Show some respect for how important they are by not striving to mix them in here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That does not mean the stories are not important. They are. Vitally important. HN is just not the place for those discussions. This is not being dismissive of the stories, it should be seen as instead encouraging everyone to find a better site to engage even deeper with things that matter. At the end of the day, HN matters to your job, but stories like the ones getting flagged matter to the lives of millions.
Show some respect for how important they are by not striving to mix them in here.