Of course it's routine, and you guys mostly showed your unfamiliarity with the site by acting like you uncovered some shocking new scandal in Hacker News users flagging the political news of the day off the front page.
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.
This article covers considerably less of the torture Ms. Haskel is responsible for than the other two threads on this, which were both flagged in under an hour.
Maybe since this one sanitises the gory details it'll be allowed live past the hour mark - but I doubt it.
Looks like this one was unflagged. There seems to have been some funny business on these threads. Three others previously reached the front page and then were flagged.
Try to find this thread on the front pages of HN...
It's not there, at least in the first 150 results.
It seems to have been unflagged, then "shadow flagged". Which is even more fucked up.
Your first two links are the same btw, did you mean to link to this one,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577485 , where I asked for a discussion on removal of such an important story? According to moderator 'dang', I was just "creating drama".
Thanks, I meant to link this one, but upon looking again it appears it likely never got enough votes to hit the front page before being flagged/shadowflagged
So? Once a mod is informed, and the story is proven legit, the flag needs to be removed.
In fact, a user made a post - news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18577485 - calling for discussion on the removal of this thread, and the implications of such.
'dang', the moderator, accused him of "breaking site guidelines", "creating drama" and said the story needed to remain flagged to prevent "outrage".
It does break the guidelines and it does create drama.
Dang is Dan Gackle. His handle is his first name and last initial, a fairly common format of member name used by such prominent members as Sam Altman (sama) and Jacques Mattheij (jacquesm). He does have a sense of humor about how his user name also works as a mild faux swear word or exclamation, but it isn't the primary reason he chose that handle.
I'm sorry you aren't happy about stuff being flagged or whatever, but this is not a good way to try to accomplish anything on this site. The mods do a good job and are generally pretty respected and the rules exist for a reason.
The story is mainstream politics, which is off topic. It presents no new or interesting phenomenon of intellectual interest, nor does it bear an even tangential relationship to technology. And, as expected, the threads posted have mostly devolved into partisan shit-flinging or complaints about the mods.
This isn't censorship or improper flagging, it's an attempt to keep Hacker News from descending even further into the cesspool of politics. The bar for these kinds of stories needs to be set much higher than it has been.
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.
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?