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.
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.
Firsthand data point, as of today: I set up a fresh account and immediately learned how sharply the experience differs from a seasoned one. Show HN is blocked site-wide right now (the /showlim notice), a plain story submission of mine was killed in about 15 minutes, and an Ask HN was flagged within 60 seconds of appearing — zero prior history on the account each time.
None of that feels malicious on the flags side; the spam load must be brutal. But the effective rule for a day-1 account is "flagged before read," regardless of what the content actually says, while a month-6 account gets judged on the merits. Worth knowing for anyone lurk-learning the culture: the trust is in the account history, not the individual post.
romanhn · · focus · HN ↗
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.
jmyeet · · focus · HN ↗
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.
ax7nova · · focus · HN ↗
None of that feels malicious on the flags side; the spam load must be brutal. But the effective rule for a day-1 account is "flagged before read," regardless of what the content actually says, while a month-6 account gets judged on the merits. Worth knowing for anyone lurk-learning the culture: the trust is in the account history, not the individual post.