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1. johnet+e3[view] [source] 2025-01-20 21:20:06
>>sundae+(OP)
Why is this flagged? Surely one of the most influential people in the tech space (and the richest man in the world) doing a nazi salute is pertinent to Hacker News?
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2. dang+YE[view] [source] 2025-01-21 01:57:28
>>johnet+e3
Users flagged it.

See >>42775519 for more

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3. comput+Ko1[view] [source] 2025-01-21 10:15:24
>>dang+YE
Anyone can be a user, so that tells us nothing.

There's clearly forces flagging all the remotely important things, just take this: >>42777938

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4. dang+UU3[view] [source] 2025-01-22 02:15:33
>>comput+Ko1
What "users flagged it" tells you is that it wasn't moderators who flagged it. That's important because many readers assume otherwise.

Re that link: I turned off the flags on it earlier, but it isn't a great story for HN. The way it is written is as tendentious as it gets; at minimum, we would need a more neutral source.

Beyond that, there are endless stories about weird patterns showing up in someone's limited set of data points on the internet. I can tell you from personal experience running one of these sites* that sometimes these turn out to just be people seeing patterns in randomness, as humans do; sometimes they are actually happening, but people are misinterpreting and jumping to dramatic conclusions about them; and sometimes (though rarely) they turn out to be an interesting story. What that means is that the existence of a post like this isn't enough of a signal to make for a good HN thread. At minimum there would need to be more information. This is the case regardless of what side of any political fence a post or an author happens to be on.

* a tiny one compared to the big fish! but big enough to observe all these phenomena, which show up increasingly at scale

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