Ask HN: Make Flagging Activity Public?
It is my understanding that the HN code-base is pretty much write-only so it's probably a tall ask but I think it would help confidence in the site at this... turbulent time globally, if people could do their own investigation of which accounts are jumping on stories to kill them.
This would be useful irrespective of your political slant, e.g. on issues like Israel-Palestine.
For the example story there are a few possibilities:
- people are sick of 'political' stories and flag them out of tedium
- there is a prevailing pro-Trump, anti-science majority of active users on the site
- there are active influence campaigns using sock-puppet accounts to hide and prevent discussion of ongoing attacks on science
The most likely answer is all-of-the-above. But why should such anti-speech activity as flagging be private? This may already be possible via the API so I'd be interested to learn that if so.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44961584