The guidelines essentially say that anything deeply interesting is on-topic, but there are inevitably people who will jump up and say that if it isn't Tech or science, then it doesn't really belong here.
Articles are flagged by users, not moderators.
(I'm not a moderator here, just a long time member who likes talking about social stuff.)
Are you sure this isn't the result of HK's "overheated discussion detector?[0]"
Threads mentioning China often seem to bring out a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment, which results in arguments, which results in heavy voting, which may trigger the flamewar detector.
Wanting to keep the forum honest isn't "off-topic", and I'm not sure what "metaflamebait" is..
Thanks for the link to the query, but would it show everything that has been flagged?
Meta posts like this one (posts about the forum itself) are addictive: it feels like they're interesting, but actually they are not. They're more like a waste product of the community, consisting of the same half-dozen points over and over. We've learned over the years that such discussions need to be managed like weeds.
In this case the post added nationalistic flamebait (cruising for a fight about China). That's close to the worst kind of flamebait we see, actually, because it leads to flamewars where people bash each other's countries. Since the post combined meta and flamebait I decided to join the words together.
As for that search query, it shows you that the countless active HN discussions about China aren't for or against China as a whole.
Most recently this was flagged, but not sure why.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17633498
That was more likely flagged due to the MeToo topic and not the China topic.
The guidelines essentially say that anything deeply interesting is on-topic, but there are inevitably people who will jump up and say that if it isn't Tech or science, then it doesn't really belong here.
Articles are flagged by users, not moderators.
(I'm not a moderator here, just a long time member who likes talking about social stuff.)
Are you sure this isn't the result of HK's "overheated discussion detector?[0]"
Threads mentioning China often seem to bring out a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment, which results in arguments, which results in heavy voting, which may trigger the flamewar detector.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089
You can easily answer this for yourself instead of posting off-topic metaflamebait (which please don't):
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=china%20points%3E10&sort=byDat...
Wanting to keep the forum honest isn't "off-topic", and I'm not sure what "metaflamebait" is.. Thanks for the link to the query, but would it show everything that has been flagged?
Meta posts like this one (posts about the forum itself) are addictive: it feels like they're interesting, but actually they are not. They're more like a waste product of the community, consisting of the same half-dozen points over and over. We've learned over the years that such discussions need to be managed like weeds.
In this case the post added nationalistic flamebait (cruising for a fight about China). That's close to the worst kind of flamebait we see, actually, because it leads to flamewars where people bash each other's countries. Since the post combined meta and flamebait I decided to join the words together.
As for that search query, it shows you that the countless active HN discussions about China aren't for or against China as a whole.