When you see [flagged] on a story it means users flagged it. We don't know why users flag things, but it's probably not hard to understand in this case. The topic is inflammatory, the threads have both been flamewars, and there's not much information to discuss.
Incidentally, some of the users flagging the story are people who, I know from their usernames, are sympathetic to the cause of the protestors. The flagging is therefore not exclusively ideologically driven. Seasoned Hacker News users often flag threads that they feel are bad for the site (e.g. because the thread is a flamewar), separately from their own views on the topic. That's community stewardship, not ideological suppression.
Edit: also, is it really a mystery what's happening here? The article linked at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867746 seems to explain it pretty well: the feds have sent police to Portland and there's a strong disagreement between the federal government and the state and local governments about whether they should be doing that. If those are the facts, it's not surprising that the threads are flamewars, because there's really not much for commenters to comment on other than to repeat the political commitment they already have.
I absolutely believe it is ideologically driven.
HN has never been a site to shy away from political flamewars. You can look back through the various posts we have on China here where people rightfully claim the government in China has been responsible for various atrocities. Those threads fall along similar political lines and there's no real debate to be had, yet they still survive [1]. Hell, we can even talk about the recent threads on Trump [2] to see similar threads explode in popularity and make it through unflagged.
But we have a very obvious instance of something that all sides should be able to agree on, which is the feds picking up people off the streets without identification or recourse. This shouldn't even have political contention because both the left and the right should be able to agree it's a Bad Thing. Especially here on HN where there's a running trend of anything that involves censorship or rights being taken away [3] [4] [5] [6] gets massive amounts of traction but a story of very obvious government overreach ends up getting flagged.
This isn't to say that I think all topics are driven like this. As you've linked before, there are various discussions on police brutality made here on HN. But I've noticed those threads also go through significant periods of being flagged or pushed off the page until there's enough users to vouch for it or vote it up to bypass those flags. Which is to say I firmly believe stories nowadays are being flagged not on the basis of discussion but because of ideological reasons even if there are a few users using flags as it is intended. Otherwise why do those other stories explode in popularity considering they have the same levels of political flamebaiting?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739567
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347155
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23758547
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22954765
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23681596
all sides should be able to agree on
In reality, that's just not the case. Lots of topics just lead to low-quality discussions and those are flagged. I'd be inclined to flag something with this submission's title without as much as looking at the discussion thread.
Sure, but my point being that I linked multiple topics which lead to very obvious low quality discussions that don't end up being flagged. In fact, they end up becoming the topic of the day in many ways. So the argument becomes why do those topics end up becoming popular and topics such as this one do not?
Obviously I'm already giving away my ideological slant here which is that I firmly believe the story in question is horrific. But what I find frustrating is that flagging only works if the userbase agrees to flag topics that will lead to low quality discussions. If the userbase ends up not flagging those topics, then flagging comes down to ideological divides and that's what I see.
Things drop off the front page through flagging long before they pick up enough flags for [flagged] status. So I'm not sure your 'not flagged' metric is actually right.
It works for the low effort, low interest stories. So the stuff that trolls might submit or stories that are otherwise uninteresting.
But what I'm referring to are the high interest, high flamebait stories. Which all of the stories I've linked are examples of where the discussion largely falls down along partisan lines and the end result is poor quality discussion. Then there are stories which fall somewhere in the middle such as this one, which are high interest but end up flagged over ideological reasons. One of the ways you can tell that is specifically the case for this story is because it's been submitted a number of times now [1] with a large amount of votes and a varying degree of flags.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23870693
How can you tell the 'degree of flag' other than show their time on FP, though? I'm saying there's no real way to evaluate your claim with the links you've given because they just show you, dunno, that it was a story on HN. And again, 'high interest' is just an assumption of yours. A story can be high interest and lots of people can think it's just a poor HN fit.
That's why I qualified my claim with 'believe'. There's no way for either of us to validate our claims because flags are not public, so all we have are inferences and figuring out what stories survive and why.
But this goes back to my main point is that what people think is a good fit on HN boils down to ideological reasons. That's why stories about Youtube banning someone gets a large number of votes upwards with complaints of censorship while stories like this one get flagged.
Sure but you started by saying these things weren't flagged and they probably were. Lots of things are flagged, it doesn't take a lot of flags to throw something off the front page. I'm sure people flag for 'ideological' reasons but I think the chances are pretty good it largely evens out.
PG's most recent essay got banished off the FP (correctly, if you ask me) within a couple of hours, with zillions of upvotes and a thread made of pure HN hell. You can actually interpret that outcome N different ways to support a preferred narrative. One might be that HN is just a place for oblivious techbros. Another one might be that HN's immune system worked and deep-sixed the thing.
When you break the site guidelines the way your account has been doing—by outrageously breaking the rules in comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23867312, and also by plainly using HN primarily for ideological battle, I don't think your lengthy arguments about how HN should be moderated hold much water.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23884760. As I explained there, I've held off chastising you for much, much longer than we normally do with users who are abusing the site the way you have been. This needs to change. If you want to use HN for its intended purpose, that won't be hard—plenty of users who share your ideological views manage to do so, and I'm happy to give you any explanations that would be helpful. But if you don't want to, you need to conduct your battles elsewhere. No, this is not because we secretly side with $appalling-position. It's because it's the only way to protect the commons, and the commons has to come first. Scorched earth will do no good for anyone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Nowhere did I accuse you of secretly siding with a position. I don't believe you're siding with any appalling position but what I do believe is that HN will not survive in the current way y'all moderate content here. Eventually there'll be some sort of controversy or problem that'll pop up with the site as a whole and all of the bad faith actors will come out of the woodworks to take advantage of it. I've even personally emailed you about the people that are outright threatening other HN posters and what do you think will happen when one of them decides to take it more seriously and actually attack someone here? Since there's a lot of people that actually have PII as part of their account info.
The person I plainly insulted and called a liar is a great example of that sort of poster. You can literally look at his post history and see how he's been arguing and you even noticed that he's created multiple accounts to fuel that shit. As I've mentioned before flagging and upvoting only works as a preventative measure if the community can collectively deal with people who are not engaging in good faith. But when the person I was arguing with was explicitly advocating for the destruction of dissidents [1] there is no other side to be had.
But you know what, I'll go ahead and say I'm done posting here. I appreciate your restraint in dealing with me but I've said my peace. I've noticed older users start to become fed up in the same way I've been and once the people that were managing the commons leaves, who will be left?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23866956