I get that you disagree. People disagree about this all the time, often strongly. I doubt there's a single story that every user agrees belongs on HN.

The only unusual thing in this case is the drama you've created about it. We can debate whether a CIA director nomination belongs on HN, but there's no question that the above submission and your comments are breaking the site guidelines. Those are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please read them and follow them when posting here. They're written the way they are for good reasons, based on over ten years of running this place.

No one's questioning the importance of major political stories, by the way. Of course they're important—much more important than most of what gets posted here. That's why we need flagging. Otherwise they would take over the site, and HN would be a completely different place.

HN's mandate is to gratify intellectual curiosity. Not all political stories are off topic, but the ones that only stir up outrage, however justifiably, and don't also gratify intellectual curiosity, are not a good fit.

Stories like the one being discussed are important, and need to be heard. There could be a compromise solution where everyone ends up happy.

I'm pretty sure Google News and, even though it's not it's main purpose, Facebook are far more popular news aggregators, and even if the latter isn't intended as a news aggregator, both are deliberately more general focus than HN.

For news discussion platforms, Facebook (again) and Reddit are bigger than HN.

HN is distinguished by it's focus.

That doesn't mean I only want to read tech news or things of "intellectual curiosity", it just means that the news sources the two organizations you named draw upon are in the business of publishing garbage. The up/down moderation and flagging of a real aggregate site like HN makes a huge difference in quality of content, when it's used properly. Reddit users abuse it to vote their feelings which defeats the benefits.

So does that mean I can flag anything that doesn’t gratify my intellectual curiosity?

Because I personally find it very intellectually curious what is currently happening in the United States, but when those stories get buried by a few overzealous people then I feel like I should do the same when someone else posts a story about the latest JavaScript framework. Yet I feel like if I started flagging them I would probably lose my privileges here.

It sounds like you might want a different kind of forum than HN. If every political outrage made the front page, that would change HN into a forum about "what is currently happening in the United States". Such a site could be valuable, but wouldn't be HN. HN has a different mandate, which it's our job to stick to.

There's room for lots of kinds of website. I think a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity has a right to exist, among others; and if HN is to be that, it has to be preserved actively, since the default forces all point the other way. User flags are part of how HN preserves itself. Yes, there are exceptions, but those need to be infrequent and have some unusual quality that raises them out of the category of latest outrage.

The supply of outrages outweighs the capacity of this site to accommodate them. Rather than calling that disgusting and despicable (as happened a lot today), it would be better to find a different kind of site that can accommodate them, or perhaps even to start one.

Also, it's messed up that a HN mod would accuse a user who wants this story unflagged and discussed of "creating drama".

Your reluctance to state exactly which guidelines OP broke is telling, as is your open contempt and patronising attitude to the many HN users who have expressed that they want to be allowed to discuss this. Regardless of how much "outrage" it might generate (seriously that's gotta be one of the stupidest dang things I've ever read) we need to talk about this.

You felt this story should be on HN. Other users felt it shouldn't be. That's normal. The flags won over the upvotes, indicating that the bulk of the community doesn't agree with you. I don't see why your preference should matter more than theirs, especially since the mandate of the site (intellectual curiosity yes, political flamewars no) at first blush points rather in their favor than yours.

We're always fine to hear counterarguments, but when the 'counterargument' consists of calling names like despicable, etc., merely because HN is behaving the way it always has, you actually create a persuasive reason not to give you what you want: you're showing what kind of discussion would result from doing so.

If you want to influence what discussion takes place on HN, you need to do two things. First, you need to really grok the mandate of the site and make your case based on that. Otherwise your argument will amount to demanding that HN be a different kind of site than it is, which doesn't hold water. And you also need to really grok the values of the site (civility and substance yes, snark and attack no) and demonstrate how the discussion you want can adhere to them by adhering to them yourself. Otherwise you'll have influence all right, but in the reverse direction.

I understand how strong these feelings can be and why. Torture is wrong. If we were to let that determine HN moderation, though, HN would soon become only about that and things like that, which would kill HN. We work to make sure that doesn't happen, but not because we don't care about more important matters.

Can you name one other topic that had repeated flagging like this, while this many HN users expressed concern?

Is this really a "daily occurrence" here now? Allowing stories like this to remain flagged despite many users polite and passionate protest?

You'd do better to familiarize yourselves with what HN is and how it works before jumping to confrontational conclusions, stimulating though that is. It's not as if any of this is secret.

I don't complain in Ask HN posts when stuff I upvoted is flagged off the frontpage. If you have a problem with moderation, email the moderators, like everyone else.

I have an issue with flagging active and important stories, hiding upvoted comments, silently de-ranking stories without any notification, etc.

Straw-man all you like, there's no justification for this.

I also believe this is a terribly important topic to discuss, with special relevance for the HN community (not that I need to prove that, the number of comments speaks for itself).

I have emailed the mods, and will update with the reply I get (if I don't end up banned).

Back during the US election, HN became mostly news like this, and if I remember correctly it was decided it wasn't the purpose of HN to link to such news. It does not mean that these news are considered false, or not important, it does not mean censorship, it just means that HN is for a rather specific kind of stories.

This story from 3 months ago is as tech-related (Google changing their algorithm) as you can get. It wasn't visibly flagged, but was almost certainly de-ranked, and it wasn't just me who commented about it.

Even if you can buy the excuse that this isn't related to tech or start-ups, and ignore the very active commenting on it, you're still left with the utter refusal to allow any transparency about what is flagged and de-ranked. Why shouldn't we demand better?

Many of us (including me) find this matter interesting, but HN is designed to allow a tiny minority to flag content. Whether that's wise or not is another topic. It's always been HN's design.

You can't do much about other commenters, even if they are professional trolls paid by the post. Nonetheless, political matters (which this arguably is) are considered by many to be off-topic. That's why you're getting squelched.

And no one has been able to offer any explanation why my comment is permanently collapsed even when opened on a different browser, despite no obvious flag and a healthy amount of positive votes.

Finally, as I've said elsewhere here, there appears to be evidence of "silent de-ranking" where stories like the one about Google's censorship are not flagged in any way but won't show up on the front pages.

As a community HN deserves better, by far. Normalising this behaviour will lead to dark and bad places.

Jesus christ...

And by the way, this censorship happens on tech stories too. This article from three months ago wasn't even flagged, just didn't show up until page 3 or 4 despite being new and having tons of comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745363.

From the guidelines. (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Spectre/Meltdown showed up on the news. Does that mean it's not relevant? Same goes for the Broadcomm purchase blocking. Same goes for whatever statement Elon Musk made this week, or the current SF housing policy. (I chose examples intentionally in "Decreasing-tech-relevancy" order, and could probably go even further and still be picking recurrently front-paging-topics.)

I would also argue that openly placing someone with such a history in charge of an agency we're all under the purview of, one with already such iffy history, is both interesting and new, and to echo my post from the thread in question, the prevalence of corporate governing boards to take members with iffy track records on these subjects to my eyes links the relevance directly with our purview as tech entrepreneurs. (see: Uber Board) I do not believe we (members of the tech community) can abscond the responsibility of involvement that our position affords us.

The "hide" button exists as well, and I've become somewhat saddened by the extent to which HN seems to lean on "flag" for topics which, in an interconnected world, I consider very worth discussing in a tech context. I have a fundamental mental dissonance with the pattern this enables, that "I don't want to see this topic discussed" turns into "I don't want others to see/discuss this topic." HN (and the startup/tech community as a whole) is not a monolith, and if the mechanisms of voting try to structure it that way, I see that as highly unfortunate.

(I don't mean to "complain about points" but it's rather absurd to look at the wild swings from +8 to -8 and back again for any of my posts on this topic. It speaks to me that there are at least two "factions" with very polarizing opinions on this, and the context has turned less from discussion into silencing vs vouching. I certainly don't remember seeing these patterns as strongly 5+ years ago.)

well it didn't at the beginning. hn readers at least had one or two days in advance.

Politics shouldn't be discussed at all.

It has been understood that thing don't go as smooth as in a community like these. I personally think that the story about Trump and Broadcom or endless parade of bitcoin at $x price shouldn't be voted up at all. But, somehow people feel value in those. I tend to skip those stories.

You pointed an inconvenient fact about Obama and a lot of people are not going to like that. They could discuss it or flag and run away quickly. Flag and run away is too easy, so that's what ends up happening.

One time I criticized the obsession with Russians. A user went and start digging through my comments to determine that I speak Russian (which I do) and that meant proof I was a Russian shill, paid by Putin presumably to subvert Democracy right here on HN. Which is doubly creepy given that the Russian government deported and persecuted members of my family in the past.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576865

Seems pretty arbitrary to me. That's the internet, I guess.

Perhaps for the good ;)

Ps. I posted it

HN is not Reddit. HN is not Twitter. HN is not Facebook. HN's readership is making it clear through the site's moderation tools that they, to some critical degree, do not want content such as this on HN. There are plenty of other forums for the politically-minded to be activists.

It's pretty irresponsible: Primary news outlet for an industry that is already noticeably lacking in social and political responsibility decides to put up another set of blinders.

Low EQ Silicon Valley refuses to use its influence to affect political change in any meaningful way. Or even just political awareness. Ironic when you consider this political/social passiveness enables the same surveillance capitalism that this community is constantly complaining about.

Yes; that was happening before the experiment, too. Most general political news has been officially OT on HN long before the experiment, and remains so under the general guidelines. The experiment was effectively a ban on that small subset of political content that would otherwise be generally within the guidelines.

Some political threads get flagged and others don't. There was a thread about austerity and Nazis a couple days ago.

If you're looking for a blanket rule ("all politics" or "no politics"), we don't have those.