by dang | 2025-12-24 20:12:53+00:00
The accounts that flag these things are almost always legitimate established accounts, so I'm not too worried about them being sockpuppets or paid influencers.

From everything I've seen—and this has been consistent for years—flags on political stories are a coalition between (1) users who don't want to see (most) political stories on HN, and (2) users who don't like the politics of a particular story they are flagging. In other words, users who care about the quality of the site, and users who care about a political struggle.

This dynamic shows up on all the main political topics.

There are some accounts that abuse flags in the following sense: they only ever flag political stories, and their flags are always aligned with the same political position. When we see accounts doing that, we usually take away their flagging rights.

This, so far, seems sufficient to me. If we start to see indications that it's not sufficient, we'll take more action.

I know there are many users (actually a small-but-vocal minority of users) who complain that flags are being abused to suppress political stories. What these complainants never seem to take into account* is that we want most political stories to be flagged on HN, for a fundamental reason: if they weren't, then HN would turn into a current-affairs site, and that would not be HN at all.

From the point of view of HN fulfilling its mandate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), the status quo is within (let's say) a standard deviation of the desired state: most (but not all) political stories either fail to make the frontpage or get flagged off the frontpage.

That's the desired outcome, not because such stories are unimportant—they are often far more important than anything that does stay on the frontpage—but because HN is trying to be a particular kind of site. Food is more important than toys, but that doesn't mean there's no place for toy stores, or that toy stores should dedicate more shelf space to food. It certainly doesn't mean that toy stores are suppressing food! or that toy store proprietors don't care about food or don't think people should have any.

When we become aware of a political story that is being flagged off the frontpage even though it fits HN's criteria for being on-topic (e.g.: contains significant new information, has some overlap with intellectual curiosity, has a chance of a substantive discussion, and there haven't been too many political stories on HN recently), then we turn off the flags. This is the best strategy I know for balancing the frontpage according to HN's mandate.

If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but any HN user) want us to change how this works, you'd need an argument that engages with why we don't want most political stories on HN's frontpage. That is, your argument would need to proceed from what kind of website HN is trying to be, and trying not to be.

Instead, the arguments I hear are concerned with the behavior of flaggers, whether they're "politically motivated" (i.e. are against the political causes that someone personally identifies with), whether they are "unfairly suppressing discussion" or not, and so on. But none of this engages with the fundamental point, as I'm trying to explain it here.

My sense, from many discussions with users who feel this way, is that they have a mistaken idea of what principles HN operates by, or think it should operate by different principles. The principle they seem to favor, when they use phrases like "unfairly suppressing discussion", is that submissions should simply be ranked according to upvotes. The stories that get the most upvotes are the ones that people care most about, and those should be the ones on the frontpage. According to this democratic (or dare I say populist?) model, anything else is unfair and constitutes censorship.

There are many reasons why HN doesn't work this way, has never worked this way, and is designed not to work this way. The most important is simply that if it did, it would be a completely different site. The frontpage would consist of the hottest and most sensational/indignant topics, and yes, plenty more would be political.

[editing - bear with me... I'm almost done!]

I don't want to say we "don't care about any of that as long as the overall outcome is achieved", but I do think (1) it's secondary, (2) this ought to be clear from HN's mandate, and (3) we would be foolish to make changes that made HN do worse by its mandate. I'm only interested in changes that make HN better for its intended purpose. After all of the above, I hope it's clear why.

* I had a long, though unfortunately unsuccessful, exchange with a user about this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367653