Isn't this exactly why downvoting should be a bit more prevalent than it is now? For marginally topical (and in my opinion completely off-topic) political stories like that?
Right now only the people who upvote it get to have a say.
I totally respect the Economist, but are they really saying something about the pointlessness of the drug war that I haven't heard a thousand times over already? Furthermore does it belong on a site devoted primarily to programming topics?
What next, some really intelligent analysis of Ron Paul?
It seems it does based on the voting. We also had a post by Tim Ferriss on the top of the page for nearly two days last week, not programmer specific but it was enjoyed / hated and had a good discussion going on about it.
This site is vastly related to programming and startups, but other topics that are of interest and thought provoking tend to rise up as an interest.
We don't have kittens on the front page, so I consider it a victory.
Yes, it does belong here, because it's interesting, and it's not like Hacker News is flooded with drug stories. It's okay to have the occasional off-topic article if it's one of the best of its genre.
There have also been intelligent, interesting stories about Ron Paul on Hacker News. For example this one ;-)
Man, I know you were joking, but suddenly I feel that a psychological/humor-driven analysis of popular memes might be a fascinating article to read/write.
I think flagging is a very different (and basically silent) axis of expression; you can't counter an upvote in the case of controversial, marginally on-topic questions like the drug war one.
I totally agree that some of the powers like voting down and flagging have to be earned through participation, by the way. We do the same thing on Stack Overflow.
flagging is a very different (and basically silent) axis of expression
I think the silence is a feature not a bug. The meta-noise reached its peak just before flagging was introduced, and it got way better after that. It still flares up intermittently, like now. An interesting observation is that it's mostly new(ish) users who post complaining meta-comments. Perhaps after they've been around for a while they notice that those discussions are always the same, as are the "sky is falling" threads.
Edit: uh-oh, the right margin is fast approaching. And damn it, I had managed to go at least 6 months without getting sucked in to this meta business!
Good and worthy discussion, though, because this is the very heart and soul of designing software (or at least web apps with discussion) for human beings.
As I understanding, flagging brings articles to the attention of the secret cabal of editors (no one knows who they are, beyond the fact that pg is likely one of them). The more an article is flagged, I presume, the more it stands out to their attention. They then make a manual decision whether to kill the article - and can even bring it back if they change their mind (I've seen that happen a few times).
So flagging in and of itself does not trigger any automatic removal of the article. There has to be a human action to remove the offending article.
Right now only the people who upvote it get to have a say.