"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."
- Peter Thiel
"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."
- Elon Musk
"Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”."
- Marc Andreessen
"Democracy is to power as a lottery is to money. It is a social mechanism that allows a large number of hominids to feel as if their individual views affect the world, even when the chance of such an effect is negligible."
Are there any structural or systematic changes that should be made to how the site works right now, so that remedies such as this do not need to be hand performed one-offs?
I think you are describing a different, hypothetical problem?
The current problem is that news that are critic of the current administration are suppressed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43462783 (U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat) was off the front page for like ~24 hours?
You are describing the problem that there are too many actual politic related news on the front page. That is not a problem right now.
That's an inaccurate perception. HN has had a high number of political threads on the front page in recent months, and most (nearly all, in fact) have been critical of the current administration.
If you find that hard to believe, see these lists:
They are a couple months old now, but the point hasn't changed: the most-discussed (by far!) topic on Hacker News gets perceived as totally-suppressed-and-silenced by the passionate portion [1] of the audience that wants more of this material. I call this the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. [2]
This is not a new phenomenon [3]. Here's an example of the same thing from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. That was me responding to someone complaining that the most-discussed-by-far topic on HN was being "aggressively removed from discussion".
Meanwhile, the audience that wants less of this material perceives the site as being completely-overrun-by-politics. To these we have to give the inverse of the current explanation. You can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 how far back that goes.
Both of these perceptions are wrong. Both are consequences of the fundamentals I listed in the GP comment. And both are special cases of a more general phenomenon: for anyone passionate about topic X, the HN front page never contains enough X.
The most passionate users rarely express their preference as "I would prefer more X on HN". Rather they say: "It's unbelievable how X is completely and utterly suppressed and censored on HN".
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I use 'passionate' or 'passion' a lot to describe these segments of the audience (on any topic and/or side). This is not intended disrespectfully. People have legitimate reasons for feeling passionately, and often the topics are far more important than most stories on HN. However, mitigating the power of these passions to shape HN is critical to keeping this the kind of site that it's supposed to be. If we didn't do this, HN would turn into a current affairs site overnight.
I don't know if there's anything to admit from their public stance on this kind of stuff, and I'm certainly not wanting this account to receive retaliation for whatever I post regarding this - they've mentioned that they do get swarms of downvoting groups on particular topics and have taken steps to un-flag things that fall victim to it. I'm not sure what that mechanism is, or if they've seen it, or maybe it's auto-flagging off certain keywords - giving massive benefit of the doubt as possible. Regardless though I've seen this trend on similar news, I think a lot of my favorites contain flagged submissions that are highly relevant for a site like this.
Particularly the argument "these types of posts don't warrant good discussion and turn into flame wars" or generate too many comments per up-votes, a signal for bad thread quality - this has really none of that. If this remains flagged after a time it is a statement.
If this story is true, this is potentially the biggest breach of all time. It's tremendously relevant and that's why I'm annoyed.
sigh it's just how any site with algorithmic ranking works: some things are going to get down voted. Politics is one of them, for a bunch of reasons articulated in this thread. Complaining about censorship is not going to make any difference.
Things have stabilized on roughly one thread on the evils of Republicans per day. Unfortunately they're managing a lot more evil per day than that.
You really don't need many users to flag a post. Get five users constantly flagging anything that makes Trump look bad (and a complicit mod that doesn't undo this) and that's all you need.
