It’s interesting. The initial post that mentioned that Rob Lee was murdered got mass flagged and stayed at the bottom of the page. There’s discussion about his murder and crime in general, but the top comment is asking people not to be political and to post their memories of Rob Lee.
The only submission about Rob Lee’s death that stayed at the top of the page was one that didn’t mention that he was murdered in the headline, and where dang came in and told everyone to keep politics out of it and avoid flamewar stuff.
People said it was reasonable that people mass flagged any submission that mentioned the murder in its headline, because it was flamewar stuff.
But now we have this submission. I looked through all of the top comments, and they’re _all_ using this to talk about the larger “is San Francisco safe?” debate. About half of them are specifically complaining about other people’s views, including complaining about other Hacker News comments.
That's absolutely not what happened. This, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899, was the original post that got a lot of traction about Bob Lee's death. I was one of the people who flagged it pretty early on, not because I thought it wasn't newsworthy, but because it was one of the biggest collection of dumpster fire comments I've ever seen on HN - hardly anyone was interested in anything but spouting their own preconceived notions, particularly since at that point very few details were actually known about the crime.
But as you can see from that link and the vote counts, it was definitely (pretty quickly) unflagged, and then you can see in the top comments that dang just split the threads into 2 separate posts, one for rememberances of Bob Lee and the other one remained for political discussion.
The only submission about Rob Lee’s death that stayed at the top of the page was one that didn’t mention that he was murdered in the headline, and where dang came in and told everyone to keep politics out of it and avoid flamewar stuff.
People said it was reasonable that people mass flagged any submission that mentioned the murder in its headline, because it was flamewar stuff.
But now we have this submission. I looked through all of the top comments, and they’re _all_ using this to talk about the larger “is San Francisco safe?” debate. About half of them are specifically complaining about other people’s views, including complaining about other Hacker News comments.