That's nearly always the case when you see [flagged] on a submission, btw. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
(It's a bit more complex with comments, but also the majority of [flagged] comments are flagged by users, not mods.)
It seems entirely disingenuous to come into this thread and pretend you are entirely separated from the flagging of this post when you are actively supporting it!
More at >>42776410
That's not to say that the HN discussion went well, but we can't control that. We can only play the odds, and it's important to.
You guys are talking about this (both the stimulus and the response) as if it's some unusual phenomenon. It's not—it's the most standard aspect of HN moderation. If we didn't moderate this way, HN would be a completely different site; the front page would be filled with the latest outrages. To see that, all you have to do is multiply the present situation by a sufficiently large number.
It always feels as if the latest high-energy stimulus as the important one, the indispensable one, the one where things will fall apart if we don't stop everything and argue about it right now. HN is about trying to disengage ourselves from that brain-chemistry ratwheel. I realize that energy is running higher than usual because of the events of yesterday, but again, that's the sort of dynamic this site is about not being determined by—irrespective of political position or feelings about celebrities.
In past threads I've described this as the difference between reflexive and reflective discussion. If anyone wants to understand the basic approach, maybe some of that would help: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
It's not possible to run a site like HN without moderation. However, if you delete moderated posts outright, users will rightly complain about censorship. I'm not referring to the politics of the last 10 years when I use that word; I'm talking about 2006 or so, when pg was first designing HN. The solution he came up with, which has held up well over the years, is not to delete moderated posts, but rather to tag them as "[dead]" in a way that anyone who wants to read them is welcome to.
So what you call "hiding the news from people without an account", I call "not deleting anything and making sure that anyone who wants to can read the complete set of moderated posts".
This is in the FAQ (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and there's lots of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
(p.s. for those who like precision: HN does also have deletion, but only the author of a post is allowed to delete it, and only if it didn't have replies. We sometimes delete posts when users email and ask us to, but we never do this as part of moderation.)
Rather, I understand and appreciate the moderation strategy as it applies to discussion.
That said, there's a subset of intellectually stimulating news that also happens to not be great discussion material.
In the hypothetical where there's some important news that warrants being seen but you know the discussion would be impossible, why is there no option to just lock the discussion?
Again, this is a hypothetical where the* news is deemed intellectually stimulating, important, or otherwise deserving* to be shown.
I trust you have a reasonable answer, I just didn't see it in your comment.
I respect the efforts you put in and the wonderful place it carves out on* the internet. Thank you!
Edit: edits
I don't think locking comments out of threads would be in keeping with HN's mandate. We try to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1]. Preventing users from commenting, and reading each other's comments, would go against that.
I also feel like it would be a shallow technical trick to avoid facing the deeper issue of us all learning how to be with each other, including with others who come from different backgrounds and have different views [2]. I'd rather face the hard problem squarely and see what we can do about it together—even though this brings many cases that suck and feel awful.
Also, I don't think the community would like it. HN users would probably just keep posting until they got a thread where they could comment. I try not to fight the community in that way. Having made the mistake of doing so in the past, I can tell you that (1) you can't win, and (2) it is painful!
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] >>23308098 is a longer post about that if anyone wants more
Thank you for the insight!