The moment you see it. People will call you crazy, and and an alarmist, and hyperbolic, but it's your duty to call it out and to keep calling it out from the moment you recognize it until it goes away. And don't let anyone tell you you're wrong, because the number one tool of fascists is plausible deniability. They thrive on Hanlon's razor. The love to play in a gray zone, to get you upset, and then to say "you're overreacting" when you call them out for exactly what they're doing. Don't fall for it.
The comment pointing out that this story is flagged is itself flagged, for some reason.
Since you might have showdead off, I'll repeat the point.
And to add to the point, this isn't a snapshot. It's a trajectory. Look at my favorites for a list of good, important stories which were flagged here lately.
Look at PG and Garry Tan's Twitters, where they praise the DOGE team. Look at the point-blank refusal of the mod team here to permit a discussion on these false flags in their own thread, rather than just in comments. You don't need to be a savant to notice the pattern here.
> Nope, not yet, this post dropped three pages in 5 minutes. I guess someone's feefees got hurt.
Please refrain from nonsense HN conspiracy theories. The HN algorithm is and has always been designed to encourage good behavior on the site, favoriting the overall health of discussion on the site over any particular topic and penalizing pages where participants interact poorly. Yes, that means many important topics get automatically downranked because the participants in those topics disagree on the topic strongly enough to engage in upvote/downvote wars and other signals of bad conversational behavior. That is an acknowledged result of the long term algoritm design.
HN has been very clear over the years that their primary goal is for people to debate interesting topics well here, and the overall quality of discussion on HN compared to other sites suggests there is some validity to their approach.
