… you have an opportunity for self-improvement.

I mean, I don’t generally like to go over somebody’s posting history because it feels like stupid very-online silliness, but they brought it up.

I see some unflagged center-right political opinions sometimes. It is stuff that a mainstream democrat would probably disagree with but find, like, not odious or offensive. Therefore I think they are just getting flagged because any political opinions here have a chance of getting flagged. This is how the website is supposed to work, if we as a community decided that mainstream political opinions were ok, the site would become a place to argue about what exactly is considered mainstream.

Yes and some people will also make scientifically inaccurate claims like "sex is a spectrum" and "there are more than two sexes" and "it is possible for humans to change sex".

There's a great deal of misunderstanding around this topic. Having open-minded, interesting and reflective discussion about topics like this should however lead to greater understanding. But that is not possible if it gets flagged and censored.

If stating certain facts is made illegal (by our democratically-elected representatives) then by all means HN will need to censor those facts for the sake of its own self-preservation.

But until then, we should be free to state facts.

> The old adage “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it” was once a touchstone of liberal society. Having been involved for most of my adult life in areas of social debate, it was a phrase I once commonly heard. Not any more.

> Instead, public discourse is marked by efforts to find offence, destroy the character of opponents or ensure reason is smothered by emotional manipulation.

> -- John Deighan https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/banning-those-w...

That would be very positive IMO. It would expose bad actors.

However, the bar for creating new accounts is low, so bad actors could create lots of accounts cheaply and use them for flagging. That's why I think flagging needs to be a privilege that requires a high user "trust level" - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559629

Despite being a small-ish site, HackerNews does still suffer from the Reddit problem of having enough users that you often don’t get to really know anybody. Realistically most conversations here only go back and forth for like 3 or so comments on each side. I mean, the site is structured to promote that kind of thing; reply buttons start getting hidden after a point, right?

I don’t think anyone really can be convinced to deviate from a strongly held political belief in a handful of posts. At this point I think most people with any interest in politics have already seen every path through 4 or so posts around their opinions.

Standard talking point, standard counterpoint, standard objection that the the counterpoint is not back by data, request for citations, citation, argument that the math was wrong, and by now the thread is a week old and we’ve forgotten about it.

So, I wouldn’t say it is an issue of people being bad faith or overly obstinate. It’s just a bad format. Old phpBB boards and those sorts of sites were better for this sort of stuff, despite being mediocre, because at least you could remember who was who.