This submission was flagged by HN users. Moderators didn't touch it or even see it until a couple minutes ago.

Not sure if this makes me more or less "complicit" (except insofar as such perceptions are monotonic, so can only become more, never less), but I have to agree with the flaggers here. OP is an opinion piece about a Major Ongoing Topic that is so major and so ongoing that the bar for Significant New Information is too high for most opinion pieces to clear.

If that convoluted sentence doesn't make sense, it's probably because I'm using HN moderation jargon—but there are many explanations available:

major ongoing topics: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

significant new information: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

how we handle stories with political overlap: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Anyone with karma > 30 can flag a post or vouch for a dead post. We try to review all the flagged submissions but there are too many for us to look closely at them all.

It's largely random, but yes of course there's opportunity for bias. We do our best to avoid it, but I don't imagine it's eliminable.

> And surely there is no opportunity for bias there.

Didn't writing this sentence feel like a good snap, as no one could possibly have a good come back at this?

Maybe that means you set the bar impossibly high.

It would be easy to defuse my claim of bias by being open about which flagged posts the moderators do have time to look at, and which they don’t.

Maybe the bar for moderation should be higher than it is right now. I guess I’m an asshole for wanting such a thing, I can live with that.

No, that seems a fair request, I like that idea! But I can also see that it's not likely to be implemented.

Though I'd see that transparency as a step forward, it's very likely to generate flamewars and even more discussion on the topic. If I was a mod I'd probably weigh the pros and cons of that to be negative overall.