Do we ever learn why these posts get censored or is it just going to keep fuelling conspiracies? Unless fuelling conspiracies is actually less bad for the offender because there _is_ a conspiracy!
- Some people will flag any political content they see, believing all political content to be off-topic.
- Some people support the current regime and will flag any content they consider anti-establishment.
- Hacker News is designed so that it takes very few flags to stick, so as to aggressively filter signal from noise, for as greedy a definition of "noise" as possible.
There's no conspiracy here, it's just Hacker News being Hacker News. If you want to be able to discuss these things freely, find another platform. Otherwise just accept that any "political" content will very likely be flagged at some point.
Everything on this site is political. YC is very much a political entity, they are simply censoring what to an outsider would be YC’s political opposition.
> If you want to be able to discuss these things freely, find another platform.
I believe it is productive to continue discussing these topics here.
Hacker News has a reputation as a place where you can have reasonable discussions with smart people in good faith. It is a facade, but tearing down this facade is done by making the attempts at censorship more visible and blatant.
No but there are clearly patterns in what "off topic" stuff gets flagged. Many people work in analytics here. It'd be nice if some number crunching was done.
I can tell you why. There's no conspiracy, not really.
Instead, it's an attitude of "I know what I voted for, and I'd prefer not to be reminded of its negative externalizes, thanks. Also, I'd really prefer it if this sort of news not filter out into the greater consciousness of Hacker News, because it might cause other people to reconsider their support."
One of the biggest lies of HN is that it's a place of open and reasonable debate and discussion. In reality, it is highly curated by the users who have access to the moderation tools in order to shape the conversation. There's no direct coordination or conversations, just a widespread unspoken agreement.
I don't disagree with their decision-making in a vacuum. There's nothing wrong with bias if it's something people are generally aware of, so it can be accounted for. On the other hand, I think that there's a significant moral hazard of a site that pretends to be unbiased but has an unaccountable cabal of users putting their collective thumbs on the scale, and HN very much falls into that camp.
I mean, yeah, that’s one of those subjective things. I think freedom of speech topics are pretty closely embedded with tech and entrepreneurship whether we like it or not. But I appreciate if that’s not how moderators see it. As long as that kind of choice moderation made consistently. I feel like I see far more off topic posts live longer. And for sensitive topics, a short explanation might be worth it.
> I think freedom of speech topics are pretty closely embedded with tech and entrepreneurship whether we like it or not.
That's a useful fiction, useful until it's not. This post[1] was on the front page briefly today. These people aren't obscure or powerless, they're billionaires, embedded in the current administration, etc.
> Then I started noticing something I couldn’t ignore. Smart people I respected—especially in cryptocurrency—were casually discussing feudalism. Not as history or provocation, but as serious proposals for organizing society. “Democracy and freedom are incompatible.” “Most people aren’t capable of self-governance.” “Elite overproduction is the problem—we educated too many people above their station.”
> These weren’t fringe cranks. Peter Thiel writing that democracy and freedom are incompatible. Curtis Yarvin publishing blueprints for corporate monarchy. An entire neo-reactionary apparatus in Silicon Valley while I optimized payment systems. And they were explicit: the democratic experiment failed, constitutional constraints prevent necessary action, most people should accept subordinate roles, the intelligent few should rule.
Absolutely, but the mods here are great and I trust their opinion.
The panopticon is built on the technology and culture at the center of HN, so hopefully they have sympathy for my not being able to predict that the post would be flagged. I think it's important to understand and discuss the escalating technology-based erosion of our privacy and rights, but I'll guess we'll just do that at the monthly Antifa meetings. /s
That is highly debatable. Stories about "politics, or crime" are allowed if "they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon"[1]. I'm not sure what to make of the word "interesting" there, but this is clearly a new phenomenon that is deeply concerning and worth discussing.
There's the written rules, and then there's the enforced rules. Political posts might not always be against the rules-as-written, but they're almost always against the rules-as-enforced-by-flagging.
HN moderators will tell you flagging is a user voting phenomenon they have control over, but it's not - I was also told my flags don't count, because mods disabled my flags from counting because I flagged things different from what the mods wanted to be flagged. Flags are not a type of user voting, they are a centralized moderation thing.
