>I wish there was a way to just disable the feature so those of us who don't trust it could continue to see and interact with flagged comments.
>I don't know what "dead" comments are
You can enable showdead in your HN settings to see the comments. You won't be able to directly reply to them, but you can vouch for them, which when I do it, generally brings them back to life.
If I wanted predictable repetitive reddit hysterics, I'd go to reddit. If the benchmarks were cheated we'll know soon enough, which is itself reason to assume they weren't cheated. The rest of it is just tedious whining.
Hopefully that is an overstatement, but, either way, most social media sites are so nasty and braindead that my attitude to HN is conservative: we should err on the side of leaving the site as it is.
No, but comments that go against the grain or against the hivemind are. Downvotes and flagging encourage group think more than they weed out 'bad' comments.
It encourages the 80% into group think. Flagging is a signifier that “you should not dare to think that was a good comment. Move on and don’t think for yourself”.
I expressed that poorly. Just 'boring' alone doesn't warrant a flag.
There's a subjective element.
As an example of something I would flag: a one sentence 'hamas supporter!' or 'genocide denier!' accusation in reply to someone's thoughtful comment. If the same sentiment were expressed in a more original way, I might upvote.
Edit: In regard to news stories, sometimes a story breaks and the main and 'new' pages wind up a dozen links to it. At some point, I might flag that. I'm not sure if that's kosher, but there's little purpose in having users wade through identical articles. Maybe @tomhow or @dang can set me straight if they happen to read this.
>but the apparent reason for many, many flags here is that the content is unoriginal.
Unoriginal to who? What's unoriginal to you might be original to someone else. So your justification for flagging only reinforces the groupthink argument even if you don't realize it.
Our branch of the thread seems to be drifting away from the original issue.
Whatever combination of user behaviors it is that HN's moderation promotes, it appeals to some people more than X, 8chan, gab, reddit, etc.
Perhaps some of the other sites contain the 20% of comments - with its pearls of contrarian wisdom - that HN flags. There is an audience of people (like me) to whom that absence doesn't matter.
I have no interest in wading through posts where there's no minimum bar for garbage. Some people do, and good for them: they can pan for gold on reddit, etc.
HN works well, as-is, for a certain segment of the public.
I often don't understand why my comments get flagged. Sometimes it feels random, sometimes I can see that it is because I'm too libertarian or something?
Idk, it feels like people push comments into the 1 dimensional US political dimension (like critical of vaccins = pro-life = climate-change-denier or polar-opposite). Whereas one can be anywhere on a spectrum on any of the axes.
Critical of some research branches? You must be pro-doge then, and you are the "don't look up crowd" and vote maga.
I thought its probably some bot accounts that are flagging anything close to right wing content on here. But maybe its the people who knows but it's funny I kinda feel similar to you.
>I often don't understand why my comments get flagged. Sometimes it feels random, sometimes I can see that is is because I'm too libertarian or something?
Can you link to any pro-libertarian comments of yours that got flagged?
The 5d chess is Elon did the mechahitler thing a day before the announce to make sure that all anti-free speech people would have to deny themselves the use of the most powerful AI. He already won the money game, and now he's doing things purely for his political goals, and the lols as well.
The "mechahitler" was simultaneously criticizing Musk for trying to flood the country with a slave caste of H1B Indians. That's inconsistent with Musk being the one who did it, but entirely consistent with a disgruntled "/pol/ aligned" twitter employee doing it.
