zlacker

>>Sone7+(OP)
Users flag stories that they don't think fit the site guidelines. That's all that happened here.

I get that you disagree. People disagree about this all the time, often strongly. I doubt there's a single story that every user agrees belongs on HN.

The only unusual thing in this case is the drama you've created about it. We can debate whether a CIA director nomination belongs on HN, but there's no question that the above submission and your comments are breaking the site guidelines. Those are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please read them and follow them when posting here. They're written the way they are for good reasons, based on over ten years of running this place.

No one's questioning the importance of major political stories, by the way. Of course they're important—much more important than most of what gets posted here. That's why we need flagging. Otherwise they would take over the site, and HN would be a completely different place.

HN's mandate is to gratify intellectual curiosity. Not all political stories are off topic, but the ones that only stir up outrage, however justifiably, and don't also gratify intellectual curiosity, are not a good fit.

>>dang+Ed
>>Not all political stories are off topic, but the ones that only stir up outrage, however justifiably, and don't also gratify intellectual curiosity, are not a good fit.

So does that mean I can flag anything that doesn’t gratify my intellectual curiosity?

Because I personally find it very intellectually curious what is currently happening in the United States, but when those stories get buried by a few overzealous people then I feel like I should do the same when someone else posts a story about the latest JavaScript framework. Yet I feel like if I started flagging them I would probably lose my privileges here.

>>enrage+2n
It sounds like you might want a different kind of forum than HN. If every political outrage made the front page, that would change HN into a forum about "what is currently happening in the United States". Such a site could be valuable, but wouldn't be HN. HN has a different mandate, which it's our job to stick to.

There's room for lots of kinds of website. I think a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity has a right to exist, among others; and if HN is to be that, it has to be preserved actively, since the default forces all point the other way. User flags are part of how HN preserves itself. Yes, there are exceptions, but those need to be infrequent and have some unusual quality that raises them out of the category of latest outrage.

The supply of outrages outweighs the capacity of this site to accommodate them. Rather than calling that disgusting and despicable (as happened a lot today), it would be better to find a different kind of site that can accommodate them, or perhaps even to start one.