> But for now the evidence appears consistent with my innate prejudice - the Hacker News ranking algorithm tends to penalise stories that address social issues.
My innate prejudice says something worse: that many stories that have to do with social justice but are oblivious to their potentially adverse effect (intentionally or not) are not penalized and are rather handsomely rewarded. These are stories that seem to be about "innovation", but are really about a power struggle (e.g. stories about companies providing marketplace services in the "sharing economy"), with the sole exception of privacy (which fits with the techno-libertarian bias).
It is often said that discussion here shouldn't be about politics, but the worst kind of politics is that which you don't even notice (or choose not to notice).
And once something of substance does come up, it's so frustrating to see it quickly drop in rank because it's automatically tagged as controversial. So a story about a company offering cheap food delivery can stay at the top for a while, but a discussion about a workers' strike against Uber quickly disappears from the front page.
You may be including it in "automatically tagged as controversial", but I have the feeling that there are lots of people that are flagging those topics (which fits under "automatic" if you include reflexive flagging of social issues topics, but doesn't if you limit "automatic" to the software running the site).
I pretty much don't flag anything, but I can see how that flagging could be driven more out of a feeling that those discussions don't accomplish anything than out of a desire to penalize those stories.
Right, flagging is another issue. But as to "those discussions don't accomplish anything", what does any discussion on HN accomplish? On the more technical stories, the discussions often educate. Thing is, HN isn't /r/programming, and there are many stories about company culture, startups raising money, SV superstars etc.. What do the discussions about that kind of stories accomplish? It's just people schmoozing for entertainment. What's wrong with that?
But I have a practical suggestion: Instead of having unpleasant discussions about important stories related to technology, innovation and startups (like women in startups, which is a far more important topic than, say, Uber raising another trillion dollars), simply block comments on these stories, and at least let people read them without having them drop due to too many comments. Sure, people will still flag the stories, but AFAIK, the flagging privilege can be revoked if a user abuses it.
I don't really have an answer to the first paragraph, like I said, I don't really flag things (exceptions are things like dupes of recent, decent conversations or if I happen to look at /new, the really dumb, offtopic stuff (like celebrity news or cat pictures, the stuff that is waay out there)).
I think we also probably see the importance of visibility on hacker news differently; you're arguing that it should be a certain way, apparently because you think it will do some good (the soft phrasing there is because I'm guessing at what you are thinking, not sarcasm), I don't think it is going to have much impact (for example, many of the people that make threads awful see it as an opportunity to defend, with guile and shenanigans, their pet point of view; that's pretty clear evidence that the story isn't reaching them). I also think the media spends a lot more time pandering than it does manipulating (just throwing that in there as a similar situation where I apply a similar world view).
My innate prejudice says something worse: that many stories that have to do with social justice but are oblivious to their potentially adverse effect (intentionally or not) are not penalized and are rather handsomely rewarded. These are stories that seem to be about "innovation", but are really about a power struggle (e.g. stories about companies providing marketplace services in the "sharing economy"), with the sole exception of privacy (which fits with the techno-libertarian bias).
It is often said that discussion here shouldn't be about politics, but the worst kind of politics is that which you don't even notice (or choose not to notice).
And once something of substance does come up, it's so frustrating to see it quickly drop in rank because it's automatically tagged as controversial. So a story about a company offering cheap food delivery can stay at the top for a while, but a discussion about a workers' strike against Uber quickly disappears from the front page.