zlacker

It is much more on-topic than the Musk thing. HN has been debating this conviction, in intricate detail, since 2015. Meanwhile, you can just go to any news site from CNN to Fox to the Guardian to see the Musk thing. There's stuff to talk about with the Ulbricht story, and basically nothing to talk about with the Musk thing, except for subsets of both sides who are just itching to have a flamewar about it.

>>tptace+(OP)
The Ulbricht story is also in the news. I don't see that there's a ton to say about it that hasn't come up in the previous (exhaustive) discussions that you mention. The people who thought Ulbricht was prosecuted unjustly are happy and the people who didn't are less happy (unless they thought the sentence was too harsh). I suspect that we just disagree about the significance of the Musk story.

>>foldr+H5
The problem with the Musk story isn't simply that it's a news story; it's that it's only a news story. It's important to understand that this isn't a question of the significance of either story. Important things happen around the world every day that aren't good subjects for HN threads.

>>tptace+C9
I don’t agree that the Ulbricht story is more than just a news story, but in any case, my issue is not with that story being unflagged.

HN is, as you know, chock full of enormous unflagged threads about news stories involving Elon Musk that amount to little more than “Elon Musk says something on Twitter!” It may well be that the mods would happily flag all these submissions into oblivion if they had the time. But I don’t think it’s a good look to have all of this trivial discussion about Musk on the site and then defer to the submission guidelines (reasonable enough in themselves, but lightly enforced in Musk’s case) now that he is in a position of power within the US government.

This isn’t about individual moderation decisions necessarily being wrong or unjustifiable in isolation (though I do think the 'but it might cause a flamewar!' excuse is applied with wild inconsistency). The issue is that avoiding political flamewars on a tech news site in 2025 is a fundamentally different proposition than it was in 2010.

>>foldr+og
All of those "Elon Musk says something on Twitter" threads are worth flagging. They're insubstantial, and I can't be the only one here who would like a lot less of that guy in his life.

I'll spare you the detailed argument for why Ulbricht is clearly not "just" a news story.