The post was flagged and removed. Not sure why other than wikileaks discussion not being allowed....
Just for clarification, as I understand it, "flagged" is a result of users marking it flagged. I'm not sure how a submission gets marked dead (for example, if it's moderator-only or can be marked dead if there are enough flags)
There's been a lot of discussion on other similarly politically-charged threads as well. For example:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12738677
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792215
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12839742
Those are just the first couple occurrences I found. I don't intend them to be representative of any particular bias.
Now, when most submissions are anti-Clinton, they are being flagged and removed. Those which despite that are able to get many upvotes, are being silently hidden from front page. Moderators also add "a moderation downweight" to these submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12715332).
WikiLeaks submissions are particularly targeted, as these are pure facts, which cannot be easily dismissed in comment threads.
Yes, I am a relatively new commenter (24 days). I started following comments at a particularly heated time. And the community aspects of the site are very interesting to me, in traction between users, community policing, the behavior of the moderators, how people choose to trust some sources and distrust others, how people who disagree can constructively discuss the contentious points. This last is particularly important to me, especially given the polarized political climate in the US.
I'm not prepared to weigh in on whether or to what extent there's user bias as to which stories or comments are getting flagged or down voted. I think it's a worthwhile question that should be examined analytically, with more than anecdotes.
Also, I don't know how the flamewar detection algorithms work, which causes some submissions to be removed from appearing on the front page. And based on what I've seen of the moderators, I give HN the benefit of the doubt that this system doesn't specifically include a political bias.
As for "moderation downweight", do you have some links for discussion on this feature?
Personally, I see no evidence that the moderators are actively biasing discussion other than trying to keep things civil and substantive. As for user flags and down votes, those are reflective of the community, and I say that without judging whether it's the correct behavior or not. Communities play a role in shaping themselves. How that shaping occurs is also up for discussion.
As for changes in flagging aggressiveness, I think people here in general want to be tolerant (explaining the early political/election topics) and have been getting increasingly tired of seeing the same topics getting rehashed (explaining the more aggressive flagging of political topics now).
Anyway, I am new so maybe this is all crap :) Thanks for taking the time for reading to this point. What do you think? Fair analysis? Bunk?
I checked the next 7 pages as well, and it isn't present there either.
1. Being heavily censored by admins
2. Being heavily flagged by butthurt Hillary supporters
Idiotic comments like this are why users are flagging election news, by the way.
(The same applies for Trump quotes! We should give him the benefit of doubt and make a reasonable attempt to understand the proper context of his bizarre but extremely quotable statements... But in his case, it's often difficult or meaningless to determine context because he rambles off the cuff all the time -- often it seems like many of the quotes just surface from his subconscious, and there's nothing else in the surrounding thought stream that could explain it.)
He provided a link to the full content of email he cited. I thought that this is a preferred approach: provide just facts, without adding own subjective context and interpretation to them.
That's why I wish the poster would have given some context: why is this worthy of being on HN? Just because it's a private email from Eric Schmidt?
There are plenty of places for on the internet where you can find Donald Trump circle jerks where you can discuss this with the plethora of conspiracy theorists, white nationalists and Trump supporters this stuff tends to attract. Hacker News is not one of them.
Quickly killed threads include https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12840068 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12840251
There's an intrinsic tension on this site: by excluding pure politics and the low level of discourse that comes with it (c.f. "butthurt Hillary supporters" elsewhere in this thread), HN becomes a place for relatively substantive discussion. Naturally, people then want to use this relatively substantive place for political discourse as well. That's understandable, because there are so few public places to have substantive discussions about politics. But if we were to let that happen, HN would soon become just like everywhere else (as I said, c.f. "butthurt Hillary supporters" elsewhere in this thread). Therefore we can't let that happen.
Unfortunately, a lot of people respond to this not with "yeah, I see the tradeoff" but with "this site is censored by butthurt Orwellians".
