Isn't this the second time this has happened? Like, happening once is crazy enough but for it to happen twice? There is clearly some tampering happening with people trying to coax it a certain way. I also have to question the people who work at xAI. Are you all on board with Elon's very clear beliefs? Anything for a high enough paycheck?
At least the third time this year, but every post on HN related to grok's prompt gets flagged soon after, with a rigor not shared by any other political or "celebrity" topic.
I am always reminded of HN's interesting flagging habits when I think back to how well upvoted and certainly not flagged the Pope's death and appointment news articles were.
A US presidential candidate got shot and people flagged that. How would one even assess this 'rigor' without considering the things that never made it to begin with.
There was also at least one giant thread about the Grok South Africa thing.
It's the same with anything negative related to Musk, DOGE, etc. Examples below.
And you can't just blame people flagging the stories - people ask for them to be whitelisted and are gaslit in response. No surprise, maybe, when Garry Tan and PG are writing fluffy tweets about Musk and the DOGE team.
I started keeping a list of falsely flagged stories that I noticed in my favorites recently, and it has grown quite large. Everything Musk is a dominant theme.
I think it's totally reasonable to flag posts about politics that don't connect to tech much (including non-tech stories about Elon/DOGE).
But then there are submissions like this one that are clearly tech-related: prominent AI alignment issues have to be topical here on HN. Or this one I recently submitted which was at the time new breaking revelations about the TikTok ban: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461158. Also directly tech-related. And both posts have 100+ upvotes while still remaining flagged. It's definitely frustrating.
When technocrats become cornerstones of American democracy I think the "well it's political" arguments sort of dissolve. Yes, it is political, but it's also technical. Technology, both historically and presently, has been used for just about every political goal. What is War but not a demonstration of technology?
