Not downvoting. An automated penalty kicked in on this submission. It wasn't related to NSA/Snowden content, by the way—there used to be a (weak) penalty on those, but we removed it, as I think I said we would the last time this discussion came up. The one in this case was related rather to general politics.
We normally take this penalty off of clearly major stories, but we missed this one. Someone has reposted it, though, and we'll make sure that the penalty doesn't kick in on the repost (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8224529).
Comments
Not downvoting. An automated penalty kicked in on this submission. It wasn't related to NSA/Snowden content, by the way—there used to be a (weak) penalty on those, but we removed it, as I think I said we would the last time this discussion came up. The one in this case was related rather to general politics.
We normally take this penalty off of clearly major stories, but we missed this one. Someone has reposted it, though, and we'll make sure that the penalty doesn't kick in on the repost (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8224529).