The moderators don't seem to want this to show up on HN. A previous attempt at posting it was removed in short order.

Hmmm who owns Hacker News?

It's HN users flagging this story all day, not the mods

Wonder why

Because we can tell already that it's going to lead to a discussion that is full of zealotry (on all sides) rather than a thoughtful discussion.

Ah, maybe some topics are kinda worth being a zealot about...

Moderators didn't touch this. Users flagged it.

That's nearly always the case when you see [flagged] on a submission, btw. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

(It's a bit more complex with comments, but also the majority of [flagged] comments are flagged by users, not mods.)

Well... can you remove the flag, please? Why in the world are we not supposed to be talking about one of the most influential, powerful people - a tech icon of all things - in all of humanity's history doing a Nazi salute on stage to thunderous applause?

It seems entirely disingenuous to come into this thread and pretend you are entirely separated from the flagging of this post when you are actively supporting it!

Also, I’m pretty sure dang has manually unflagged political topics in the past, though I don’t have a list handy.

That's true. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... has lots of explanation of how we approach this, and should also explain why the current story isn't one that we would turn off flags on.

I'm sorry dang but there is no consistency at all in this decision making, but I do appreciate your work and think you should review why this is been flagged while other posts about "woke culture" were not as other users said in comments.

You guys might be looking for consistency in the wrong place, on the level of specific moderation calls. There are too many factors, such as plain randomness, inevitable subjectivity, and (yes) moderator error, for the set of specific moderation calls to ever be consistent—without even considering that the sample set which each reader uses to decide "is moderation consistent or not?" is biased (because people tend only to notice the cases they dislike - see [1] for what I mean by that, if interested).

The right place to look for consistency is at the level of moderation principles, and there I do think we've been consistent over the years. Do we apply the principles optimally? No. Do we mostly apply them ok? I hope so. If not, I probably shouldn't be doing this job.

There's another point which is important here. Unfortunately it's more subtle and I'm not sure I can explain it well but I'll try:

There is a temporal decay of interestingness in any sequence of related stories. Curiosity withers under repetition, so we can't have too much repetition [2], and that means we can't have too many predictable sequences [3].

When you have a sequence of related stories (S1, S2, ... Sn), once S1 has had significant attention, S2 becomes less interesting (in HN's sense of the word) until enough time goes by. This, for example, is why we downweight follow-ups [4]. Time counteracts repetition ("everything old is new again"), so letting enough time go by is one solution [5], but that takes longer than people usually want it to.

What this means is that we can't treat related stories consistently, because how interesting they are doesn't only depend on the story—it also depends on what else has been discussed recently. S2 might be a more important story than S1, but if they're related enough and S1 was discussed recently, then S2 becomes less interesting, qua HN topic, than it would have been absent that S1 thread. If you take seriously the principle of avoiding repetition, that is how we have to moderate. Otherwise the same few themes (the hottest ones) would dominate the site.

It is something of a lottery which story (S1 or S2) shows up first and so "wins". But if you only consider the articles, and not the sequence, this is inconsistent! "Why is S1 on-topic while S2 is not?" is inevitably a common question.

As moderators we're more concerned about the overall functioning of the site (e.g. not having too much repetition) than we are about specific stories. Users, on the other hand, are concerned with specific stories, and rightly so—why should they care about the global state of the site? It should just be there and be good enough.

This disconnect flares up when users are personally interested in S2 and don't see why S1 got to "win" and now S2 has to suffer. This is a consequence of mod attention and user attention being scoped at different levels. It's our job to care about the global state while users' job is to care about what interests them (specific stories). To a reader who cares specifically about S2 (and we all have our S2s), this feels like unfair prejudice.

To treat all stories consistently, we'd have to go back and rearrange the sequence (S1, S2, ..., Sn) over time. That's not doable, and from a moderation point of view, not so important either. There is an endless stream of stories in every category. Few matter much in the long run. We try to make sure that the major ones get discussed (e.g. right now, the launching of the $500B data center project and the Ross Ulbricht pardon) but that too is subjective. I'm sure that some commenters in this thread feel like the Musk video is more important than those.

What does all this mean? Maybe it means that people are right that the mods are inconsistent, error-prone, and biased, but a bit less so than at first appears.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[5] That's why HN allows reposts after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

HN's principle is to have intellectually curious conversation about topics that gratify intellectual curiosity. It seems pretty obvious that this isn't that.

More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42776410

Was pg's post about "woke ideology" an intellectually curious conversation starter?

It's not. Yet the post you are talking is still up.

All I ask is consistency.

Sure. Certainly far more than this story.

That's not to say that the HN discussion went well, but we can't control that. We can only play the odds, and it's important to.

That seems like a stretch. Discussions on wokeness are among the most common on the internet, it's also a well-known flame-war topic and explicitly political in nature. I think most people could have predicted the outcome of that thread based on the title alone. I suppose anything written by pg is automatically germane to HN, but that creates an awkward situation if other tech adjacent politically relevant discussion is subject to normal moderation policies.

Anyway, I know moderation is difficult, but I want to gently suggest that this feels like a double standard.

I'm not buying that; it's pre-emptive laziness, you don't want to attempt to even bother to see a spirit of discussion fostered on this thread because of your hunch that there will be some bad actors in the comment section that will cause moderators and high-karma users to, well, moderate.

The comments on this have already amply fulfilled my prediction. People's interpretation of this 3-second video clip are determined by their prior feelings about this person. HN is about learning, and nobody learns anything new in a thread like that

You guys are talking about this (both the stimulus and the response) as if it's some unusual phenomenon. It's not—it's the most standard aspect of HN moderation. If we didn't moderate this way, HN would be a completely different site; the front page would be filled with the latest outrages. To see that, all you have to do is multiply the present situation by a sufficiently large number.

It always feels as if the latest high-energy stimulus as the important one, the indispensable one, the one where things will fall apart if we don't stop everything and argue about it right now. HN is about trying to disengage ourselves from that brain-chemistry ratwheel. I realize that energy is running higher than usual because of the events of yesterday, but again, that's the sort of dynamic this site is about not being determined by—irrespective of political position or feelings about celebrities.

In past threads I've described this as the difference between reflexive and reflective discussion. If anyone wants to understand the basic approach, maybe some of that would help: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

History is watching, and you are complicit. How long are you going to justify censoring anyone against the Grand Free Speech Absolutist? What is going to be _your_ red line?

We're all complicit.

I'm going to do my job the same way as always. History will come to its own conclusions.

This sort of flare-up always feels absolutely critical in the moment—how can one possibly justify not dropping everything to orbit around it?—and then vanishes. Their half life is so brief that I'm surprised people don't notice how ephemeral they are. They come in an endless sequence, and they aren't what HN is supposed to be for. They're also not that hard to resist; it's not as if this is a borderline call.

The title is watering it down a bit. The video leaves no wiggle room and it should not have been met with applause.

As it turns out the US actually lost WW2. Well how about that?

WW2 and Cold War.

WWII, sure. Cold War, fat chance - the USSR was defeated by the mujahideen and then succeeded by Yeltsin and a bald ape that killed 800,000 trained men to take 1/3rd of Ukraine.

Ok you are right. But lets see what current US administration is going to do.

Well the U.S. certainly isn't responsible for defeating the Germans. That honor belongs to the Soviets.

As for the nukes, pretty much exactly what the Nazis would have done if they had gotten some.

The name Elon comes from this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mars:_A_Technical_Tale

Written by a former nazi paperclip scientist

Nonsense. Elon is a hebrew name and occurs in the old testament (Book of Judges).

You would have known that your statement is not fact had you read the article you linked, especially the section about the claim:

Interest in this novel increased in 2021 when people connected Elon, the Martian leader, to SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, suggesting that von Braun may have predicted Musk's space exploration ventures.

His father did say that he knew about the name used in the book when naming his child

The book was published in 2006.

That's decades after he was born.

Any explanation for that or are you claiming Jungian levels of synchronicity?

The book was written in 1949, so we might not need help from Jung here.

This forum is too soft and not at all helping with the flow of information that, 6 hours into this administration, has already become evidently crucial to have for the next 4 years. Why is this flagged? Accurate title, accompanying video with clear-cut evidence, an open spirit of discussion - what are we doing here?

I will note that hacker news, unlike most sites, has a pretty well-defined set of criteria for what they're looking for, as defined on their guidelines page: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . They explicitly list politics as a reason why things might not be appropriate for this forum.

Unlike, say, reddit, which has a bunch of subreddits for various topics, hacker news only has one feed. So it is naturally more restrictive about topic.

I can see how reasonable folks can see this post as sort of grey area, but at the end of the day, the users of hacker news flagged this post, the moderator -- who I've historically found to do a fantastic and neutral job of monitoring -- believes it does not meet HN guidelines, so I think this just isn't the platform to discuss this news. And that doesn't seem unreasonable, either. I'm sure there are other places to discuss it online.

Why is this flagged?

you think there will be a sane discussion here about it?

So lock the comments. This is important. It's the most powerful man on earth doing the nazi salute on stage at the US president's inauguration party. He is the owner of several tech companies this is HN bread and butter. How on earth is this flagged

Not surprised on this.

I expect even more censorship on this site for the next few years (especially criticism) as even the mods and higher ups are kneeling down on this administration just a few hours into it.

The selective enforcement is what fucked over moderation on this site. Somehow Ukraine is considered an apolitical topic but Gaza isn't. Posts about North Korean troops and Russian losses are okayed because that's a boogeyman our progressive world despises. But then we upvote posts about war crimes in Gaza and illegal border expansion in the Golan Heights and the standard flip-flops again. You've crossed an invisible line, it doesn't matter how civil you were.

It has to be all or nothing. There is no apolitical discussion of modern technology, and this Trump/Musk ticket is going to show everything that's wrong with embracing such a fickle guideline. The worst part is, it's only going to contribute to HN's decline in civil digression and make perfectly intelligent people question why they use this site in the first place. We need this sort of discussion, otherwise people become complacent and tone-deaf like Elon.

Why are you even surprised? I mean, considering the demographics of this site, these stances are to be expected.

So far, there's only one rogue comment. So yes, I do.

it is because it is flagged :) you think there would be like 10 comments on a story like this 1 hour after it is posted?

Just wanna say I can't understand Hacker News' stance on politics:

Someone posts Paul Graham's post talking about "woke" ideology and mods/admins do nothing about it

While this one stays flagged

At least be consistent

Just to be clear, there's one main mod (dang) and they don't flag submissions, that honour falls to regular users who've been here a year or three or more (whatever the time | point threshold is).

Most of the users that can [flag] also have the option to [vouch]. If enough vouch the flag is reveresed (as far as I know).

You can't vouch for posts, only comments.

Dang has directly commented on this post now. He is upholding the flag, which makes him complicit.

It's the users doing the flagging.

Musk and PG are both heroes in the startup / tech / VC world.

For better or worse, it's hardly surprising that this forum is very supportive of them.