| ▲ | forvelin 12 hours ago |
| why is this flagged ? |
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| ▲ | myrmidon 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged: 1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful 2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics) 3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those. |
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| ▲ | dang 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang... We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this. In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox. | | |
| ▲ | computerex 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I literally can’t say anything pro humanity without it being flagged even if it hints negativity towards Israel. | |
| ▲ | EvgeniyZh 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can you remember any pro-Israeli posts you turned flags off for since the October 7 attack? | | | |
| ▲ | a456463 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content? What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred. |
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| ▲ | RobotToaster 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran. | | |
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| ▲ | appreciatorBus 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html |
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| ▲ | anigbrowl 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing. | |
| ▲ | ycombinatrix 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me. | | |
| ▲ | glenstein 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible. I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine. | | |
| ▲ | appreciatorBus 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective. Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky. | | |
| ▲ | glenstein 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here. Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention. I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging. |
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| ▲ | ycombinatrix 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | mhb 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | ycombinatrix 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | simonjanssen 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think the solution which will lead to the best quality of life for people in and around the levant is a single, secular state. Two states that are both ethnonationalist is unsustainable, and any single state which isn't secular can only be achieved through genocide. Freedom to practice whatever religion, seperation of church and state, and no apartheid for a certain group of people. | |
| ▲ | mhb 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
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| ▲ | blitzar 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | dang 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Edit: if https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136856 is correct and you did not intend that as a slur (edit 2: which having seen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137004 is now clearer to me), it would be good to read some of these comments about intent vs. effects, and adjust how you post in the future: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... --- original reply --- If you post like this again we will ban you. There's no place for slurs on this site. Yes, we apply that equally - I've banned the account that was slurring the opposite group elsewhere in this thread (btw, their comments won't appear to anyone who hasn't turned 'showdead' on in their account). In that case, I didn't post a reply because the account was new and already had a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. In your case, the account is well-established so we wouldn't just go ahead and ban it without replying or warning first. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | | |
| ▲ | Y-bar 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Dang, I'm writing this reply as a target of antisemitic hate. I am not strictly a Jew (though I am often mistaken for one due to both name and appearance). My relatives were hunted and gassed in WW2. The poster you are responding to is making ha joke:ish observation (probably badly communicated) that the modus operandi in the Israeli Government is to label all evidence of their crimes "antisemitic" no matter how truthful they are, no matter how many facts, no matter how vile their actions look. Netanyahu et al have nurtured a context where there is no difference between real antisemitic hate and valid criticism. He and the people like him equate truth to antisemitism. Something which hurts many of us. Please understand this. | | |
| ▲ | dang 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That was not at all obvious from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136682 alone, which gave me quite a jolt. We have to be proactive about moderating anti-semitism on HN—which does appear, unfortunately, though of course not in every comment that someone happens to read that way. There is huge variance in how people interpret these things and we do our best to be charitable. (Also, I had better add that we do our best moderate other types of slur in just the same way.) Let's assume you're correct. Such a point needs to be expressed thoughtfully and substantively, not snarkily in a way that pattern-matches to a slur. This ought to be clear from the site guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - "Eschew flamebait." - "Don't be snarky." - [etc.] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | | |
| ▲ | Y-bar 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It might not be the most substantive comment ever made. But by now it is about as classic as the Stephen Colbert quote ”reality has a well-known liberal bias”, and I bet you would not consider that quote hateful near-bannable offence, versus Republicans, right? It follows the exact pattern, and has a similar connotation. There is a large contingency in power in Israel and the west who loudly considers the truth to be antisemitism. Therefore we have a duty (BECAUSE ALL OTHER WAYS HAVE CLEARLY FAILED) as human beings to mock them. And what better way to mock them (like a court jester) than to use their words against them? |
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| ▲ | throwaway3060 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are others here who would strongly disagree with this view, or the other views expressed on here. Personally, I was startled by the post in question, even as I wondered what was actually meant by it. We all have to coexist on here. | | |
| ▲ | Y-bar 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Were you more or less startled by reading it here or hearing those words from the mouth of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Minister of National Security since 2022? | | |
| ▲ | dang 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Here's a tip I learned the hard way: you can't assume that other commenters have seen or heard the same things that you have; and when they have, you can't assume that they have the same subset in working memory. As I mentioned above, I was also startled by that post, because the obvious pattern-match was to something nasty. | | |
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| ▲ | ivan_gammel 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context. It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier. | | |
| ▲ | ycombinatrix 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think GP was making a joke - since zionists claim any anti-zionist behavior is anti-semitic. | | |
| ▲ | ivan_gammel 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Then I apologize without retraction. | | |
| ▲ | SauciestGNU 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Good instinct to fight against antisemitism, because there is a lot of it. Unfortunately the Israeli government lobs accusations of antisemitism at its (legitimate) critics frequently, enough so to muddy the waters between actual antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state. | | |
| ▲ | ivan_gammel 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nah, let’s not let them to set the narrative. It is not antisemitism to criticize Israel and I do not care what Israeli or my (German) government says about it. |
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| ▲ | jquery 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yep. It's used as a shield for the worst humanity has to offer. |
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| ▲ | halflife 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Zionism is the idea of self determination of Jews in their homeland. You separate Jews from zionists. How would you call the Palestinian self determination movement, would you separate it from the rest of the Palestinians? Would you call that group for committing war crimes? | |
| ▲ | glenstein 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Their message didn't make any of the extrapolations that you're suggesting and I don't think that the post itself does that either. | | |
| ▲ | ivan_gammel 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | The message is ambiguous. It can be interpreted the way I read it. | | |
| ▲ | glenstein 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I disagree that it's ambiguous, and I think how you choose to interpret it comes down to the difference between charitable interpretation and bad faith. | | |
| ▲ | ivan_gammel 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Whether you agree with it or not, does not matter. It is ambiguous due to a simple fact that I did not had the choice of interpretation in my mind. It is how I understood it and it differs from your understanding. The author should have been more clear. |
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| ▲ | blitzar 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > why is this flagged ? Because flaggers deem it to be anti-semitic > committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists This is 1) extending responsibility for actions of induviduals to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion 2) a display of anti-semitic bigotry Otherwise it, like most tech heavy investigations, showcase how much useful information there is fly around out there in the air just waiting to be hoovered up - and (althought not the case here) YC funded companies happen to be at the frontlines of such work | | |
| ▲ | SAI_Peregrinus 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Zionism isn't an ethnicity or a religion. | |
| ▲ | GuinansEyebrows 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | whether or not you agree that zionism is intrinsically jewish or not, it would serve you to understand that the poster you're arguing against does not believe that zionism is intrinsically jewish, and thus, you're talking past them. |
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| ▲ | mothballed 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But it's not all zionists committing war crimes in Gaza, it's the IDF. And it's not all IDF members, only some individuals. And its not all of those some individuals, only some of their brain and trigger finger. And it's not all the time, only some of the time. We mustn't generalize. | | |
| ▲ | ivan_gammel 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You are surprisingly right. I know people who served in IDF and would prefer to have nothing in common with those criminals. Generalizing to them would be wrong. It is not voluntary service, different people are required to serve. But people aside, is IDF as institution rotten? It is not generalization to say „yes“, when such things happen. An institution is an entity with the agency to prevent such things and not only did it fail, it covered up. Is Israeli government complicit? Hell, yes, same reason. | | |
| ▲ | 1718627440 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | There were people in the German army (Wehrmacht) who wanted to have nothing in common with those criminals. Some even tried to kill Hitler and get rid of the regime. | | |
| ▲ | orwin 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not the majority though, else the wehrmacht would have done less war crimes. | | |
| ▲ | 1718627440 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think this depends on whether you draw the boundary at "refuses to do X even when killed for it" or "wouldn't have done X on their own". |
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| ▲ | throwaw12 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | IDF is an army of Israel, not some unknown militant group. Israel is a state, as they call "democratic", which elected officials who have control to stop these crimes, but not stopping deliberately. |
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| ▲ | lostmsu 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I believe religion is a reasonable extension. Some of them explicitly call for murdering unbelievers. | | |
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| ▲ | asdfss674564 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | jLaForest 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| @dang any explanation for this being flagged? Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story? |
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| ▲ | dang 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | (@dang doesn't work. I only saw this randomly.) Your question is answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443, but the short version is that your assumption that we see everything is incorrect. | |
| ▲ | glenstein 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I also would appreciate knowing if the mods see this. I'm worried that flagging is possibly automated and vulnerable to campaigning. | | |
| ▲ | dang 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | We eventually saw it, but only randomly. In case you didn't see them yet, here are some of my other comments in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141517 Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users. Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look. I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. | | |
| ▲ | dang 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment. The rise and fall of peer review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123133 - Feb 2026 (0 comments) Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899 - Feb 2026 (692 comments) Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119210 - Feb 2026 (440 comments) Music Discovery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114672 - Feb 2026 (56 comments) The 7-Year Bug That Took 3 Minutes to Fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090261 - Feb 2026 (1 comment) AI made coding more enjoyable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075400 - Feb 2026 (97 comments) RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934499 - Feb 2026 (52 comments) Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845567 - Feb 2026 (9 comments) There is an AI code review bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766961 - Jan 2026 (249 comments) Proof of Corn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511 - Jan 2026 (307 comments) XLibre XServer 25.1 Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474846 - Jan 2026 (4 comments) Python Data Science Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120611 - Dec 2025 (61 comments) NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995834 - Nov 2025 (228 comments) Best shipping logistic aggregator in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 - Nov 2025 (0 comments) WebDAV isn't dead yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698070 - Oct 2025 (128 comments) Unicode Footguns in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689443 - Oct 2025 (20 comments) AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627171 - Oct 2025 (124 comments) Super Ace: Your PH Home for Jili Slots and a 300% Welcome Bonus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939 - Oct 2025 (0 comments) Pkgbase Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 - July 2025 (42 comments) | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | As always, thanks for the transparency. It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism? | | |
| ▲ | dang 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | If the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions. If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases. Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes. Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning. | | |
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