There is no blanket ban on politics. The guidelines only say "Most stories on politics" are off topic. The top guideline is that if it "gratifies intellectual curiosity" then it is okay. Even the tech angle is not mandatory, unless you believe that politics is just inherently unable to be the object of curiosity (to each his own but I would disagree with that).
> There is no blanket ban on politics
Nor did I claim there was. My point is simply that there is a very obvious pattern to what passes this subjective "gratifies intellectual curiosity" test among those with the ability to flag posts from the front page.
Case in point, this thread is now being visibly flagged off the homepage:
"ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543420
It's inarguably tech-relevant and for the intellectually curious. And yet...
Yeah, flagging needs to be limited in a major way. As things stand it's used as a tool to arbitrarily silence certain discussions.
Use https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Everytime there a post containing a whiff of negative sentiment related to the 2024-2028 US administration, a wave of elective sociopaths swoop in to flag posts and derail discussion. Even if they understand the merit of the material, they will bemoan the political aspect. Even if they agree with the sentiment, there is absolutely an audience that prefers to ignore any sense of personal responsibility or culpability, however small, to the environment today-- and choose to attempt to stifle discussion broadly instead of politely allowing others to meaningfully engage with it. I believe this activity boils down: 1) agenda or 2) stubbornly evading shame/guilt
I was shocked (and a little spooked) that this was allowed to remain unflagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515191
Yeah, the more I look at different articles on here, the more I feel like the flagging is pretty targeted at any ideology at all left of center. Or specifically criticism of the current administration.
All that their "anti-politics" flags really do is to make HN more of a "head-in-the-sand" echo-chamber for right-wing ideologies.
It was completely impossible to post anything about Gaza on here through the entire course of the genocide.
It's not necessarily "right-wing" per se, for example during COVID questioning the party line on masks and vaccines could catch you massive downvotes and flagging. It's this technocratic neoliberal cryptofascist thing the people who have always actually run Silicon Valley adhere to.
> a wave of elective sociopaths swoop in to flag posts and derail discussion
The biggest vulnerably of the entire social media model is the "engagement pyramid" where the number of viewers is much larger than the number of upvoters is much larger than the number of commenters.
HN gets ~5 million monthly unique visitors, or 150,000 per day (conservatively assuming each visitor only shows up once, so that number is probably much larger). But if you look the top post right now has around ~1,500 upvotes, and ~200 comments (and, if you look, comment sections frequently have single users commenting repeatedly, so less than 200 actual people commenting).
This makes it very easy and very worth it to run even loosely coordinated commenting/upvoting rings. 10 people can easily downvote a new post off the homepage, give the impression that the community disapproves of a certain opinion, disrupt conversation, etc.
What's funny is that proposing this is often treated as a claim of a wild conspiracy theory. But the weakness in most conspiracy theories is that they require high levels of coordination among similarly large groups of actors, often for little reward. In this case it's almost more outrageous to claim that this isn't happening (especially since I have personally seen teams of people coordinate to get their startups work on the front page). I suspect even 3 very coordinated people could do a lot to control the front page (or alternatively increasingly large N of increasingly less coordinated people).