Looking for flagged discussions on HN? See what's active
news.ycombinator.comThis aggregator grabs HN submissions and they remain on the landing page even if HN supernukes them with great prejudice (probably because they’re getting the RSS feed as pointed out in another comment)
https://brutalist.report/source/hn
Most of the time that’s warranted but I do find some pretty curious stuff in there. It has other uses (it’s how I went back to find/comment on one from yesterday just to be like “hey this things apparently a crypto miner.” Because it had been taken down from the front page in about as much time as it took me to research it… but I wanted to get a comment logged in case they spam that thing again.)
The active view seems to be a strict activity based feed where the ranking is only based on number of comments and age. No upvotes, flags, anti-flame war detection, spam detection or what have you.
What does "flagged" mean in this context?
"flagged" generally means flagged by users, which is an option with enough Karma on Hacker News. Such posts will have a [flagged] tag and will not appear on the front page normally.
In this /active page, there are two posts pertaining to politics (without a direct tech angle) as user-flagged, as the Guidelines state that is off-topic.
Users with enough karma can "flag" posts and comments, which a) calls for moderator attention and b) decreases ranking. It's meant for off-topic/inflammatory/low-quality submissions.
People on Hacker News with a high enough score get a "super downvote" that can downrank a story, with enough removing it off the page entirely (flagged). It's why you won't see stories critical of Elon Musk or the current administration last for longer than an hour.
HN has had plenty of large frontpage threads fitting each of those descriptions. What we don't want is too much repetition. Otherwise the small handful of hottest topics on the internet would dominate everything else, and HN isn't that kind of site.
Lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so..., many more available on request!
Speaking as the user you responded to in the first link: I’m sure you get flak from all corners, but I (and presumably many others like me) take zero issue with your philosophy or design goals for the site. I’m with you all the way when you say you don’t want to HN to turn into a current affairs site.
The problem IMO is the current sensitivity of the filtering. You said upstream that a high enough number of upvotes could outweigh flags — but that CECOT thread was one of the top 5-10 posts of the month despite having been taken down for many hours overnight. If that wasn’t a thread where the upvotes should be a strong enough signal to override the flags, I dunno what is.
We’re asking for subtle knob tuning, not revolution.
It seems like this post got killed as well, but it's the first I'm hearing of the functionality. I wouldn't say I'm a frequent user of the site, but I think I would have noticed if people were posting this link often.
“Too much repetition” of subjects you find politically incorrect, you mean.
As I've said in the past*, avoiding repetition is a core principle here and applies to every topic - especially when it's a repetitive+indignant combo. There's no political exemption.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
* (edit: to you, as it turns out!)
And as I’ve said in the past, to you, no one’s buying it. It’s obvious to everyone that the same tech and biz topics can and do appear here ad nauseum.
Indignant, though. What a joke.
If you read via the RSS feed the flagged discussions and original links often still exist in it. FYI
There's also https://hckrnews.com which is "a chronologic list of items that have made it onto the Hacker News homepage" regardless of the post-made-it-onto-the-homepage flagged status.
Thanks for sharing! That's a pretty cool view.
It's linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/lists, which is linked from the footer below.