Yes in the sense that users flagged it, but not in the sense that moderators penalized it. I didn't see it until someone emailed a couple minutes ago.
The only thing I've done since then is mark the post so it won't be killed by excessive user flags. This means the thread can stay open for new comments.
I'm not going to remove the flags, because they are clearly an authentic community reaction, though of course some users will have the opposite reaction as well; this is normal.
Wouldn't excessive/above average flagging rather indicate a post is controversial/counter narrative enough to warrant longer front page exposure? It certainly seems to have gotten the people going in the short time it was up, and it's not a secret that early vocal users can be quite generous with the flag button.
IMHO, for fairness, upvotes should be the vouches countering the flags. I think unless the amount of flags is really significant, they shouldn't have priority over the 117 upvoters (and counting) who are clearly interested to have this discussion here.
My thinking could be naïve, as the algorithms were probably created with the backing of some data and experience, but anyway, I felt like sharing my opinion.
Flags having a stronger influence than upvoting is a necessary algorithmic check against genuinely bad behavior/brigading, not disagreement. In general it works as intended, which is the best you can do without something potentially worse.
Quite the choice to say he doesn't deserve attention. Doing a public work to raise some much needed attention, to give people a basic heads-up what they are stumbling into.
Once again here Drew just letting the fishes know what particular brand of wet the water is.
All of these "reasonable political" comments that he points out for being moderated out SHOULD have been moderated out. They are absurd, not in good faith, extreme leftist arguments.
Unexamined bias against progressivism and the rights and interests of anyone who isn’t the “default” middle-class white cis male
This is just stupid as well. The default is a middle-class white cis male? Its tech, the average is a 1/3 Indian 1/3 Chinese and 1/3 White man.
Sorry to say DHH and Elon Musk are both not Nazis, and the demand for Nazis seems to be perpetually outstripping the apparent demand for them.
I think it's not crazy to say they both hold opinions that a Nazi might hold, but that's also usually just an excuse to insult somebody, rather than engage (I'm thinking more of DHH - I don't follow Musk aside from his Nazi salutes, so maybe he's closer to a holistic Nazi). The point is not that one can not equate any right-leaning opinion to a Nazi's opinion - obviously they both share some opinions. The point is that the umbrella insult "Nazi" is used to mean "you're wrong and evil, so I don't even have to engage", when often that's going too far. It's an escape hatch.
That was rambly, but I'm saying I 75% agree with you.
"I hold views that are acceptable and conventional in most elite/academic circles. There's an organization and network of people who hold different views from mine. I don't like theirs. They don't seem to like mine, and sometimes say so out loud. Also, they have a website that looks like it's from 2005 but is popular, at least among them. For these reasons, I'm big mad."
This is almost comically backwards. HN is very pro-union, like reddit. In fact, it's pretty much the same users and political opinions as reddit.
It's funny he mentioned the grok discussion. The other day I saw grok got some new release, and although I don't use it, I was curious whether it is any good, and was pleasantly surprised people were actually discussing it and not all running to the keyboard to see who could get their EM comments in first. Like they really cleaned up the place.
This article complains that all their political comments got removed for calling Elon 'fascist', 'nazi' etc. - yes, that's the point; your useless, political opinions nobody else wants to hear, get removed.
The article is practically a meme, using every buzzword imaginable. Racism, sexism, nazi, hate, bigotry, wokeness, etc., they're all there. The person who wrote this article is practically an NPC.
Elon "Sieg Heil"ed twice on national TV. Some labels are just accurate.
Are we forgetting how Elon put his thumbs on the scale and Grok suddenly kept bringing up white genocide in South Africa in completely unrelated topics [1]?
Here's a great example (and I don't mean to pick on you personally, jmyeet).
You wrote "Elon "Sieg Heil"ed twice on national TV." as if it were undisputed fact. This "fact" been repeated here to the extent that "only Nazis could have interpreted it differently" is the default.
Well, I interpreted it differently. It was an (admittedly inartful) attempt to extend his "heart" to the crowd. This is further supported by his spoken words at the time of the supposed salute: "My heart goes out to you."
Perhaps I just like to assume innocence as opposed to malevolence, but this explanation makes sense to me. Elon isn't the most effective public speaker, so it's entirely reasonable to me that he was just trying to mime what he was saying.
You're welcome to disagree, but the fact that folks here just uncritically repeat "Elon is a Nazi; he even saluted" without any pushback is another example of the symptoms I describe in my earlier comment.
This doesn't mirror my experience, which is that most posts and comments criticizing the current administration and conservatives in general get significant positive engagement. There are few posts taking the opposite side, and those that try often get downvoted to oblivion.
As a recent example, anti-progressive themes (being supportive of Israel, for example) are nowhere to be found. Pro-Palestinian views abound with little counter-engagement.
In addition, just look at all the anti-US posts/comments. Other countries do not get the same treatment in the same volume. The US is a punching bag here. It's tiresome. HN used to be a respite from political insanity on both sides. Now some days it's no better than reddit.
From my (politically neutral, believe it or not) perspective, this site is extremely hostile to conservatives. It's interesting that progressives feel the same way. Maybe we should put a pause on political discussions altogether.
But shouldn't anything about Grok be flagged as political then? (or rather: where do you put the threshold?)
There is a big political aspect to Grok: it does not really bring much more technologically than any other model, its existence is mainly political in the first place. And talking about it / promoting it is participating to that: not everyone who does that does it for ideological reason, but a part of people doing it clearly does.
Right, I think it's basically just the permanent phenomenon that if a community is mostly politically on side A, then they over-perceive the presence of B-leaning comments and the downvoting of A-leaning comments, and vice versa. "Wow, HN is so B", says the A guy, because HN is 20% B. I've seen this exact same thing in conservative-leaning communities regarding liberal content.
Hmmm, it's a genuine, not provocative, question: as an outsider from the US, I genuinely can't say what the USA (as a state, as a government) have done in the past few years, that is unequivocally worth of praise?
The flagged comments given as examples are exactly the type I don't want to see here. Not because they are wrong (they are not), but because they are boring, low-calorie declarations of obvious that add very little value to the topic at hand. It's like every mention of an iPhone got a comment about poor conditions of Chinese assembly workers. These, and the Musk rants, absolutely belong on threads about those topics, but let's not turn every thread into a holy war - you're just pushing people that already agree with you away.
For the record, I vouched for this thread to keep it from being flagged, but that didn't seem enough. I think it's an interesting discussion.
But couldn't a bunch of posts that are just coming here to lift up one of Elon's products also be counter productive? You can never tell if someone is genuine when reviewing a product he put out. I think that is a big problem as well.
Absolutely. That's when I use my dang-given right to flag left and right. Or if that doesn't work, ignore. I don't think I've entered any Grok thread in ages. But I also can't say that I've seen a ton of them, so maybe the ecosystem is working?
One thing I've noticed is that people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things.
So what they're doing is leaving low value comments and then they're probably the same people flagging it as "controversial" or "flamebait" when there wouldn't be any of those things if they didn't leave those comments. It's incredibly bad faith behavior (by some of them, not you to be clear).
We're at the precipice of AI unravelling the fabric of society. Many tech issues now are so consequential that the politics simply cannot be ignored.
I agree about boring comments but that goes well beyond political. Every time I see a comment about how this year's iPhone is "evolutionary not revolutionary" or some variation. It's boring, lazy and pointless.
When it comes to submissions and comments, "political" or "controversial" is what you disagree with. As the article notes, capitalism (as just one example) is taken as a given. Anything else is "political".
Shouldn't intellectual curiosity challenge norms and assumptions?
What's changed I think is that Big Tech are essentially defense contractors. You can put Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the same bucket as RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
A huge portion of HN is simply after their bag. The idea of the countercultural almost beatnik "hacker" like early Steve Jobs (yes, yes, I know, he's not the tech guy) is long dead. We saw this with crypto dominating HN. Crypto is just a bunch of people who are hoping to be the first to do the rug pull. Now it's AI.
Silicon Valley itself grew out of the military industrial complex. It's simply returned to its roots.
It's a promotion platform for a specific way of conducting business, and for the liberation of these businesses from democratic oversight (if not the other way around). And in that perspective, that's politics.
This is a good example of a person observing a community, slotting the whole thing into one of a small handful of political categories based on the relatively tiny proportion of comments that lean one way or another, and then claiming that the community has changed or is hypocritical when it turns out people tend to have more dynamic opinions than that.
It’s because people keep amplifying meta-discussions instead of focusing on the topic at hand. Hence, this article as example. I shouldn’t even be commenting.
Leftism, progressism or wtv tries to remove all social
value from individuals for their beliefs. Leftists tried to make the world lose respect for people like J. K. Rowling, Elon Musk and recently DHH. If some people say something that is not illegal but is deemed to be offending by leftists, they go tribal gang on that person and try to devalue all they work. I myself prefer to live in a world where people is free to express their thoughts even if they are being retarded at it.
Then they start to use their "well-earned" money to bend the world to their worldview, but "it's their right!". Of the people you bring up, i've been affected just by Musk (his endeavours are a net contributor for global warming), I'm still suspecting you should get fucked with your freely expressed opinion.
I'm not sure how much HN/YComb really does put it's finger on the scale.
But the system itself so conveniently allows for just a couple people to suppress and deny, to shut down topics, that it systematically gives quarter to the very worst, to the motivated bad actors, and the other lesser plagues that befall humanity.
I really wish there was some accounting, some visibility, some consequence for this abuse of the system, this steering away from hackeryly inquiry & examination of the world. The act of cloaking & hiding shouldnt be so easy to do from the shadows; HN should at least make you do such moderation acts in public.
It’s no surprise that Hacker News favors capitalism, opposes labor, and objects to questioning the privileges of its largely white, male, middle-class audience. It’s “political” and “ideological” for it to do anything else.
I don't think leftists/progressives are nonexistent on this site. Maybe some of them don't want to bring politics everywhere because it's tiring and unproductive.
Regarding Musk and his antics, I just tune them out. His projects are vain and self-serving. Let them die, the community sooner or later will recognize them for what they are and move on.
I also don't think they are non existent. But there is also another factor of timezones. I have the impression that there are big differences between the continents. Like depending on time the most top comments might be leaning much more left or right.
Although Drew's points don't seem actually wrong to me, I would say that a far bigger problem for HN is the way in which the discourse is dominated by excessively confident and passively authoritative comments that are actually somewhere between "not really correct" and "not even wrong".
Reading HN comment threads about things I know little about always feels like a delight: all these smart people who know so much about this topic, contributing their thoughts.
Reading HN comment threads about things I know a lot about nearly always feels horrific, straight torrents of incorrect information and ignorant speculation. Occasionally not, but not typically or even often.
Just so. Thanks Drew. Good to to find another one that can see ;) They live!
I wish n-gate.com was still active and posted regularly to the comments sections.
We lost a mirror in n-gate that was reflecting some of the ugly faces here back at some people that really needed it.
Silicon valley is weird.
Does any one else get confused between this guy and BurntSushi?
Unfortunately moderated out of existence in 10, 9, 8, 7....
Yes in the sense that users flagged it, but not in the sense that moderators penalized it. I didn't see it until someone emailed a couple minutes ago.
The only thing I've done since then is mark the post so it won't be killed by excessive user flags. This means the thread can stay open for new comments.
I'm not going to remove the flags, because they are clearly an authentic community reaction, though of course some users will have the opposite reaction as well; this is normal.
Wouldn't excessive/above average flagging rather indicate a post is controversial/counter narrative enough to warrant longer front page exposure? It certainly seems to have gotten the people going in the short time it was up, and it's not a secret that early vocal users can be quite generous with the flag button.
IMHO, for fairness, upvotes should be the vouches countering the flags. I think unless the amount of flags is really significant, they shouldn't have priority over the 117 upvoters (and counting) who are clearly interested to have this discussion here.
My thinking could be naïve, as the algorithms were probably created with the backing of some data and experience, but anyway, I felt like sharing my opinion.
Flags having a stronger influence than upvoting is a necessary algorithmic check against genuinely bad behavior/brigading, not disagreement. In general it works as intended, which is the best you can do without something potentially worse.
[flagged]
disagree
Yup. With public service like this? https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49596826
Quite the choice to say he doesn't deserve attention. Doing a public work to raise some much needed attention, to give people a basic heads-up what they are stumbling into.
Once again here Drew just letting the fishes know what particular brand of wet the water is.
Absurd article.
All of these "reasonable political" comments that he points out for being moderated out SHOULD have been moderated out. They are absurd, not in good faith, extreme leftist arguments.
This is just stupid as well. The default is a middle-class white cis male? Its tech, the average is a 1/3 Indian 1/3 Chinese and 1/3 White man.
Sorry to say DHH and Elon Musk are both not Nazis, and the demand for Nazis seems to be perpetually outstripping the apparent demand for them.
I find dogwhistle arguments interesting. If someone is hearing dogwhistles, maybe they're the dog.
I think it's not crazy to say they both hold opinions that a Nazi might hold, but that's also usually just an excuse to insult somebody, rather than engage (I'm thinking more of DHH - I don't follow Musk aside from his Nazi salutes, so maybe he's closer to a holistic Nazi). The point is not that one can not equate any right-leaning opinion to a Nazi's opinion - obviously they both share some opinions. The point is that the umbrella insult "Nazi" is used to mean "you're wrong and evil, so I don't even have to engage", when often that's going too far. It's an escape hatch.
That was rambly, but I'm saying I 75% agree with you.
"I hold views that are acceptable and conventional in most elite/academic circles. There's an organization and network of people who hold different views from mine. I don't like theirs. They don't seem to like mine, and sometimes say so out loud. Also, they have a website that looks like it's from 2005 but is popular, at least among them. For these reasons, I'm big mad."
This is almost comically backwards. HN is very pro-union, like reddit. In fact, it's pretty much the same users and political opinions as reddit.
It's funny he mentioned the grok discussion. The other day I saw grok got some new release, and although I don't use it, I was curious whether it is any good, and was pleasantly surprised people were actually discussing it and not all running to the keyboard to see who could get their EM comments in first. Like they really cleaned up the place.
This article complains that all their political comments got removed for calling Elon 'fascist', 'nazi' etc. - yes, that's the point; your useless, political opinions nobody else wants to hear, get removed.
The article is practically a meme, using every buzzword imaginable. Racism, sexism, nazi, hate, bigotry, wokeness, etc., they're all there. The person who wrote this article is practically an NPC.
Elon "Sieg Heil"ed twice on national TV. Some labels are just accurate.
Are we forgetting how Elon put his thumbs on the scale and Grok suddenly kept bringing up white genocide in South Africa in completely unrelated topics [1]?
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...
Here's a great example (and I don't mean to pick on you personally, jmyeet).
You wrote "Elon "Sieg Heil"ed twice on national TV." as if it were undisputed fact. This "fact" been repeated here to the extent that "only Nazis could have interpreted it differently" is the default.
Well, I interpreted it differently. It was an (admittedly inartful) attempt to extend his "heart" to the crowd. This is further supported by his spoken words at the time of the supposed salute: "My heart goes out to you."
Perhaps I just like to assume innocence as opposed to malevolence, but this explanation makes sense to me. Elon isn't the most effective public speaker, so it's entirely reasonable to me that he was just trying to mime what he was saying.
You're welcome to disagree, but the fact that folks here just uncritically repeat "Elon is a Nazi; he even saluted" without any pushback is another example of the symptoms I describe in my earlier comment.
This doesn't mirror my experience, which is that most posts and comments criticizing the current administration and conservatives in general get significant positive engagement. There are few posts taking the opposite side, and those that try often get downvoted to oblivion.
As a recent example, anti-progressive themes (being supportive of Israel, for example) are nowhere to be found. Pro-Palestinian views abound with little counter-engagement.
In addition, just look at all the anti-US posts/comments. Other countries do not get the same treatment in the same volume. The US is a punching bag here. It's tiresome. HN used to be a respite from political insanity on both sides. Now some days it's no better than reddit.
From my (politically neutral, believe it or not) perspective, this site is extremely hostile to conservatives. It's interesting that progressives feel the same way. Maybe we should put a pause on political discussions altogether.
Yes. Flag everything political. From both sides. We are here for tech. Not Reddit level content.
But shouldn't anything about Grok be flagged as political then? (or rather: where do you put the threshold?)
There is a big political aspect to Grok: it does not really bring much more technologically than any other model, its existence is mainly political in the first place. And talking about it / promoting it is participating to that: not everyone who does that does it for ideological reason, but a part of people doing it clearly does.
Right, I think it's basically just the permanent phenomenon that if a community is mostly politically on side A, then they over-perceive the presence of B-leaning comments and the downvoting of A-leaning comments, and vice versa. "Wow, HN is so B", says the A guy, because HN is 20% B. I've seen this exact same thing in conservative-leaning communities regarding liberal content.
Maybe the volume is proportional to the impact each country has globally? (especially these years)
This might be true, but then you would expect to see some proportion of pro-US posts as well, right? I can't remember the last significant one.
Hmmm, it's a genuine, not provocative, question: as an outsider from the US, I genuinely can't say what the USA (as a state, as a government) have done in the past few years, that is unequivocally worth of praise?
The flagged comments given as examples are exactly the type I don't want to see here. Not because they are wrong (they are not), but because they are boring, low-calorie declarations of obvious that add very little value to the topic at hand. It's like every mention of an iPhone got a comment about poor conditions of Chinese assembly workers. These, and the Musk rants, absolutely belong on threads about those topics, but let's not turn every thread into a holy war - you're just pushing people that already agree with you away.
For the record, I vouched for this thread to keep it from being flagged, but that didn't seem enough. I think it's an interesting discussion.
But couldn't a bunch of posts that are just coming here to lift up one of Elon's products also be counter productive? You can never tell if someone is genuine when reviewing a product he put out. I think that is a big problem as well.
Absolutely. That's when I use my dang-given right to flag left and right. Or if that doesn't work, ignore. I don't think I've entered any Grok thread in ages. But I also can't say that I've seen a ton of them, so maybe the ecosystem is working?
True. I actually don't read or enter threads for stuff I know will piss me off. So yeah makes sense.
One thing I've noticed is that people will engage in thread arson to kill submissions they don't agree with. When I see some of these low value comments, I check their comment history and often they have reasonable comments on other things.
So what they're doing is leaving low value comments and then they're probably the same people flagging it as "controversial" or "flamebait" when there wouldn't be any of those things if they didn't leave those comments. It's incredibly bad faith behavior (by some of them, not you to be clear).
We're at the precipice of AI unravelling the fabric of society. Many tech issues now are so consequential that the politics simply cannot be ignored.
I agree about boring comments but that goes well beyond political. Every time I see a comment about how this year's iPhone is "evolutionary not revolutionary" or some variation. It's boring, lazy and pointless.
every thread has some “low calorie” comments. The only ones being flagged are the political ones
When it comes to submissions and comments, "political" or "controversial" is what you disagree with. As the article notes, capitalism (as just one example) is taken as a given. Anything else is "political".
Shouldn't intellectual curiosity challenge norms and assumptions?
What's changed I think is that Big Tech are essentially defense contractors. You can put Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the same bucket as RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
A huge portion of HN is simply after their bag. The idea of the countercultural almost beatnik "hacker" like early Steve Jobs (yes, yes, I know, he's not the tech guy) is long dead. We saw this with crypto dominating HN. Crypto is just a bunch of people who are hoping to be the first to do the rug pull. Now it's AI.
Silicon Valley itself grew out of the military industrial complex. It's simply returned to its roots.
It's a business promotion platform from the very beginning.
"The purpose of a system is what it does"
By this metric, HN is not a business promotion platform.
It's a promotion platform for a specific way of conducting business, and for the liberation of these businesses from democratic oversight (if not the other way around). And in that perspective, that's politics.
This is a good example of a person observing a community, slotting the whole thing into one of a small handful of political categories based on the relatively tiny proportion of comments that lean one way or another, and then claiming that the community has changed or is hypocritical when it turns out people tend to have more dynamic opinions than that.
It’s because people keep amplifying meta-discussions instead of focusing on the topic at hand. Hence, this article as example. I shouldn’t even be commenting.
Leftism, progressism or wtv tries to remove all social value from individuals for their beliefs. Leftists tried to make the world lose respect for people like J. K. Rowling, Elon Musk and recently DHH. If some people say something that is not illegal but is deemed to be offending by leftists, they go tribal gang on that person and try to devalue all they work. I myself prefer to live in a world where people is free to express their thoughts even if they are being retarded at it.
Then they start to use their "well-earned" money to bend the world to their worldview, but "it's their right!". Of the people you bring up, i've been affected just by Musk (his endeavours are a net contributor for global warming), I'm still suspecting you should get fucked with your freely expressed opinion.
I'm not sure how much HN/YComb really does put it's finger on the scale.
But the system itself so conveniently allows for just a couple people to suppress and deny, to shut down topics, that it systematically gives quarter to the very worst, to the motivated bad actors, and the other lesser plagues that befall humanity.
I really wish there was some accounting, some visibility, some consequence for this abuse of the system, this steering away from hackeryly inquiry & examination of the world. The act of cloaking & hiding shouldnt be so easy to do from the shadows; HN should at least make you do such moderation acts in public.
Why are anti-capitalists like that?
I don't think leftists/progressives are nonexistent on this site. Maybe some of them don't want to bring politics everywhere because it's tiring and unproductive.
Regarding Musk and his antics, I just tune them out. His projects are vain and self-serving. Let them die, the community sooner or later will recognize them for what they are and move on.
I also don't think they are non existent. But there is also another factor of timezones. I have the impression that there are big differences between the continents. Like depending on time the most top comments might be leaning much more left or right.
Although Drew's points don't seem actually wrong to me, I would say that a far bigger problem for HN is the way in which the discourse is dominated by excessively confident and passively authoritative comments that are actually somewhere between "not really correct" and "not even wrong".
Reading HN comment threads about things I know little about always feels like a delight: all these smart people who know so much about this topic, contributing their thoughts.
Reading HN comment threads about things I know a lot about nearly always feels horrific, straight torrents of incorrect information and ignorant speculation. Occasionally not, but not typically or even often.
This should not be flagged and I veto the decision. This article is spot on.
HN has a massive problem where it's low key fostering right wing ideology with inadequate moderation. I'm flagging what I can.