If you say something that is 1) false, 2) political, and 3) aggressive in tone, getting flagged does not prove that what you said was in fact true. Don't take the flagging as confirmation of the correctness of your position. It doesn't work that way.
It isn't really a political appeal, you know. It's an argument about effective processes. Which is what hackers do all day, look for the best process to solve a problem. I urge you, in the strongest terms, to click the [unflag] button now.
One concern I immediately have is that what is politics to one person might not be politics to another, and given that too many flags that are judged to be inaccurate result in the removal of the user's ability to flag...
You see where I'm going with this. It may be worth rescinding that policy during the testing period.
You're seeing the effects of a lot of flagging, which is common for things which are either very political, or for which the discussions are overwhelmingly lame. This discussion is both.
I regularly flag pretty much any and all political articles, but this is something that... hey, maybe it's just interesting to people. It's not some lame thing causing boring, trite political flame wars.
I usually only flag spam. I also posted the guidelines, so people reading the thread could read them. We are getting a lot of political threads these days, and I'm not sure new people understand that political posts aren't good.
It seems like you're doing a dry run of your ability to censor the community. By asking members to flag posts pertaining to politics, you're going to drastically offer what people see by default.
And when are you going to use this newfound ability again? When you arbitrarily get tired of some other topic? And even if you use this responsibly, what about the person who has your job next?
I've been active on this site for over eight years now. We've managed to govern ourselves just fine. I really hope this isn't a moment we all point back to in the future.
I didn't flag the original. The problem is, this board is generally (political) flamewar free. And many of us want to keep it that way. To that end, partisan politics has no good place here. Policy discussions, even more to the philosophical "capitalism" vs "socialism" side are better than Republican vs Democrat.
Yeah I've wondered about that. I've flagged some BS political stories too and wondered if I was endangering my flagging privileges by disagreeing. I don't really care, but interesting to know.
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