I can't say for sure. What I said is that they seem that way to me, and are within the range of what one expects from divisive and emotional topics. That isn't proof (which is elusive if not impossible in any case), but is at least based on many years and god knows how many lost hours poring over this sort of data.

Incidentally, I was talking about downvotes and flags from every side of the conflict, not just the side you're talking about. I don't see a lot of difference there either.

For what it's worth, I think the current cadence of allowing one flamewar every 3-4 weeks on this topic is bang on, you're not censoring it and also not letting it take over the site. Nice job.

Thanks for demonstrating that at least one user feels this way. I wasn't sure.

Even if literally no one agreed, I still feel that not this topic is not an option, and I still think that could be derived from the first principle of the site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), although I admit that the exact proof escapes me.

I do appreciate the hard work you and Tom are doing. This is an immense work you both are doing. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the quality we appreciate here. And I can understand the challenges to moderate a topic like Israel/Palestine.

it isn't a flamewar, it's one side flaming and flaming. allowing them to do that once a month while stopping them from injecting it everywhere all the time might be a good policy, but I don't get a sense I'm hearing both sides

It's definitely not just one side flaming. As evidence of that, I have no idea which side you're saying this about.

there are plenty of pure "Israelis bad" comments, not downvoted. Can you point me to a "Palestinians bad" comment that's not downvoted? I don't mean this as part of the debate, I would just enjoy reading it, don't kinkshame me.

Not sure what kinkshaming is but fully on board with not doing it!

It's hard to respond without specific links. From my perspective, there are throngs of comments on both sides of this getting downvoted and flagged, mostly for good reason but not always.

FWIW, I think any "$large-group-bad" comment probably should be downvoted on HN. The world doesn't work that way*, so any such comment is likely to be a pretty bad one (relative to what we're trying for here).

* (edit: what I mean is that there don't exist large bad groups in the world, except in the trivial case of groups whose definition has badness baked into it)

Are you familiar with Tal Hanan, an Israeli businessman and former special forces operative alleged to have run disinformation campaigns to manipulate elections in several countries? That activity was pre‑LLM. What concrete safeguards, audits, and transparency measures does this platform use to detect and prevent similarly professional manipulation?

We're a relatively small site. Though this thread is at the bigger end of what HN hosts, it's still manageable enough that when the two of us spend all day watching the thread and looking at the commenting, flagging and upvoting/downvoting, we can pick up evidence of manipulation and abuse quite easily. For example, we both independently noticed the user who was commenting/voting/flagging under multiple different usernames. It just looked weird. And it's easy to detect users who are driven by an ideological agenda from observing the patterns of their activity.

You have no idea how much we all value the effort you put into moderating HN!

It's one of the last bastions of large-scale intellectual discussion that hasn't be overrun by bots, teenagers, or trolls. Digg was destroyed, then Slashdot, and now Reddit is mostly AI spam.

Hacker News is a place where when I see spam, it looks obviously of place. And then an hour later... it's gone.

I think it is a mistake of moderation to treat this as any divisive topic. The division line here is support for genocide. Users which are in favor of genocide—no matter how they justify it—are clearly in the wrong, both morally, and probably legally, and should not be given any ways to influence the discussion here.

I think that argument is making an is/ought error. I'm simply describing how it is. Whether it ought to be that way or not, I leave to you and other commenters.

I think one could very easily argue there is no genocide in Gaza, so this doesnt work.

And how can you say it's not the opposite?

China, Russia, Iran, etc would definitely benefit from pouring fuel on this topic.

Not sure why you think only one side does it.