Yep this happened with my last 3 flagged submissions. All on social issues. Really sad because especially first one listed below I thought would elicit good discussions, somewhat tied other issues like affirmative action.
I'd say https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458 was an interesting submission that probably shouldn't have been flagged, although it's doubtful whether a thoughtful, curious discussion is possible. Usually we end up with people charging in and wielding their priors as a stick, and from that point of view I can understand the flags.
Your thinking on these and other posts is narrow minded and totally subservient to the richest people in Silicon Valley, starting with the people who own this site. You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship. Your reply here is a great example of why you are a poor moderator. I wish you would quit.
> You also have the temerity to go outside HN and tell people to rewrite posts on other sites - a corrosive form of censorship
I don't understand what you're referring to. Can you explain further?
Edit: oh, I see - you're talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719273. Yes, sometimes when startups ask me for help, I make suggestions about how they can change their articles to better appeal to HN readers, or to avoid pitfalls. For example, mentioning one's startup only at the end of an otherwise interesting article (which I guess people do because marketers told them it was a "call to action", or something?) makes many HN readers feel like the whole article was a bait-and-switch, and then they rush into comments to complain that the article is "just an ad" or whatnot. That's what happened in that thread - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718172 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718321. In such cases I advise authors to mention their startup right at the beginning - an easy fix. I don't think most people would call that censorship! - certainly the authors who take the advice do so freely and say they're grateful for it.
I can't help but wonder if there's something else to your complaint because it's hard for me to understand why that would be objectionable. If you want to explain more I'd be interested...
Btw re "the richest people in SV" - the startup in that case wasn't SV related as far as I know, and certainly not YC related; I believe it's a spinoff from Andy Pavlo's research group at CMU. I wasn't helping them for any reason other than to make the HN thread more interesting and because they emailed to ask.
Hey, that's not fair! HN is for everyone's pet topics and non-technical stories are welcome. The only criterion is that they be interesting and gratify curiosity.
Even if you're right, this is an unprofitable direction for an HN thread to go in. We want curious conversation here, so we have to minimize ideological battle because the two are basically incompatible - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679 for a long past explanation about this.
not op, but a wild guess is i think they're attempting an "oh you know the ones", aka the ones trying for a more equitable society, which the status quo equates with "they're trying to destroy the status quo!"
Some people want to be able to comment freely without the zealots of the New Church of Diversity trying to get them fired.
Some people will use HN for job postings. I would certainly expect that anyone with two brain cells to rub together uses a throwaway account for anything but the most boring opinions about C++ proposals. All it takes is a single throwaway sentence 7 years ago that pisses off the Church, and you could end up not getting hired.
You can turn on 'showdead' in your profile to see everything that has been killed by moderators, software, or user flags.
Just be aware that if you do that, you're signing up to see the worst of what the internet has to offer HN—alongside a lot of other stuff that isn't as bad. We never delete things outright, unless the author asks us to, so that setting is basically x-ray glasses into everything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877423 (Jan 2016 - maybe before we figured out how to treat the dreaded title fever, which drives men mad like mosquitoes in the old northwest)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35867458
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065735
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627969