HACKER Q&A
📣 tuyguntn

Why my Ukraine related question got flagged?


I asked legitimate question here to understand the reasoning behind, but my question got flagged immediately: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30681090

Can you please explain why?

P.S: I am not Russian, neither support Putin's invasion, English is not my first language, I do have both Ukrainian and Russian friends and it is sad for me to see them get into the contact with difficulties at the moment

  👤 DrScump Accepted Answer ✓
Because this isn't a political discussion forum. There are plenty of those.
👤 graderjs
As far as I understand how the thinking behind moderating this forum works the most likely reason is because such a question is expected to lead to a low value discussion probably involving many statements that could be said to be nationalistic flame war or something along those lines. And HN simply cannot handle those types of discussions and it's not what they try to make here.

I tried to find relevant comments by moderators I'm not sure how helpful it is but here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I agree that it's sad because then that seems like it means that you can't get the perspectives of various sort of intellectual interesting or intelligent people (may be in a similar career space to you) about topics which are contentious. So that gives the impression that these people are unable to think about or talk about those topics in a way that is sort of... Nice. Which doesn't bode well for society if some of the "smartest" cannot engage on issues they find important. But I think that's, maybe, just misperception because I think the cause of those types of flame wars is because human social cognitive emotional development / evolution at the present time is not equipped to do that kind of stuff without devolving and also that the nature of the text only forum mostly devoid of social cues and body language and nonverbal stuff and also where people are sort of freed from social or mostly reputational context by anonymous accounts I think those are some of the things that contribute to the intense interactions that can occur.

My suggestion is you just fire off a couple of random LinkedIn messages or emails to people whose views you're interested in or respect and ask them their opinion. I know it's not the same type of scatter shot wide net approach that you can get here with an Ask HN but it might help you get some feedback that you're looking for.

And I don't think there's much harm in at least trying to ask it here first and seeing you know if it gets flagged or not. Maybe doing that can also help you refine your views of what content this forum is seeking.

If you post in good faith and try to stay curious and sincere and well intentioned, even if you do something that is sort of against what the forum can handle, in my experience the moderators will let you know and they will help you turn it into an opportunity for you to create an improvement.

👤 pipework
Reviewing the comments you’ve made from this account, one might arrive at the assumption that you’re both argumentative and unpleasant to do anything but agree with. You also don’t appear entirely able to accept ‘no’ without challenging it.
👤 readonthegoapp
can't see your previous question, but it's tough to say anything here or elsewhere that doesn't fit an acceptable narrative.

best i can offer is maybe ask same question, but extremely gently -- something so soft and gentle that it wouldn't even melt a snowflake.

👤 tuyguntn
Previous question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30681090