zlacker

>>hungle+(OP)
All: Whether he is right or not or one likes him or not, Hersh reporting on this counts as significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), so I've turned off the flags on this submission.

If you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're up on the site guidlelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We don't want political or nationalistic flamewar here, and any substantive point can be made without it.

>>dang+Jl1
I'm honestly really shocked by your stance on this. Regardless of whether or not this information is credible, this seems like text book flame war kindling. In the past, I've thought HN's policy of "you can discuss things like this in other forums" was wise and I've been corrected by it myself many times. Why wouldn't that apply in this case?

>>davesq+Bv1
Because it's interesting. Hersh reporting on it is an interesting story in its own right. Is what he says true? I have no idea. We don't have a truth meter here.

>>dang+AB1
But we do have a proofen and working mechanism: Flagging. If the submission doesn't get flagged, cool. If it does, it does. I don't see a reason to intervene here.

>>hef198+NE1
Unfortunately it's not that simple. The flagging system works well, arguably better than the upvoting system does, but you can't just rely on these systems in an unsupervised way—it leads to suboptimal outcomes. Another way of putting this is that moderation is necessary to jig the software+community systems out of their failure modes.

You can of course argue that I've made a wrong call in this case, but the point I'm making here is different: you need moderators who make judgment calls, including to override flags sometimes. And of course no one is ever going to get the calls 100% right; we have failure modes too.