Ask HN: Why is censorship rampant on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is censorship rampant on HN?

16 pointsmankash66624 comments

Dear HN Users -

I've found certain stories getting censored more than other on HN.

1> Anything that's critical of the GPL gets flagged 2> Ongoing terror attacks get censored (For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12145106 )

As practitioners of evidence based science, censorship simply doesn't hold a place in HN - where logic should trump any divisiveness.

I implore HN to be more receptive to these kind of topics, while not turning this into a reddit kind of non-evidence based banter.

More power to the scientific method - less mind control.

Cheers

View on HN

Ongoing terror attacks get flagged, not censored because they are 'normal news'. I personally don't flag those and don't agree with those that do the flagging because there are lots of other 'local news' stories such as stories about BART (the public transport) that only appeal to a small portiton of HN (it is essentially local news) that do make it to the homepage but strictly following the guidelines neither of those belongs on HN.

As for anything critical of the gpl, do you have an example of what you mean?

> while not turning this into a reddit kind of non-evidence based banter.

Indeed.

> Ask HN: Why is censorship rampant on HN?

That title also presumes that censorship is rampant on HN, it isn't. It may be in your view but that's just your opinion.

Full live coverage on CNN, BBC World and Al Jazeera should be evident enough that this is not a misc "local news". I dislike this downvoting/flagging and think the site could work fine with just public up-voting.

You are conflating two things... Terror attacks are "normal news" (as you say, they're already covered by a wide range of normal media outlets). The "local news" comment was referencing things like stories specific to BART, a very regional mass transit system.

Also ongoing terror attacks are not a good subject in a lot of ways.

I remember when redditors decided they were going to "solve" the boston bombing and they just ended up harassing innocent people and distracting law enforcement.

It is like the stupid idea that people are going to fight terrorists with handguns. Really when the shooting starts you don't know what the hell is going on and if you see some guy with a gun you are going to think they are the shooter and maybe they are just somebody like you who wants to help.

For instance when Gabrielle Giffords got shot, the hero who wrested the gun away from the shooter when he was reloading was holding the gun so he could keep it away from the shooter and then somebody showed up with a gun and demanded that he drop the gun, and they argued about this. Here you had people who were trying to do the right things and did not know the facts and could have added to the tragedy. I think of that crazy scene were a bunch of wastoids were shooting at each other in Waco.

You don't want to be part of that either in real life or cyber life.

Something like that happened the other day with the police shooting someone giving aid to another person.

Weird world we live in.

http://www.wcnc.com/news/attorney-cop-said-he-didnt-know-why...

Yes, for all the problems of racism, militarization of police, etc. the nature of the job is that police officers have to make split second decisions that can have awful consequences.

It is hard enough when the people involved are trained professional gunfighters, but even worse when it is just some average person who decides to pack a piece. There you are dealing just with competence at actual gun fighting, but even people who are so bad at just operating a gun that they shoot themselves on the way home from a gun safety class.

(Oddly, the first thing I learned about gun safety is go to the range, load the gun there, shoot all the bullets, don't carry or leave a loaded gun around)

It's not censorship, it's curation. There is a distinct difference.

Here's what I had to say about this a few years back when (ironically) Reddit first started having to deal with this:

[1] People tend to think of online communities as democracies where the freedoms they're accustomed to from their normal lives apply.

So when a post gets deleted by a moderator, people tend to think of it as a freedom of speech issue. There's a whole constitution out there specifically defending anybody's right to create a pro-Nazi subreddit, and to otherwise post anything they please on the site so long as it's not illegal, right? Not really.

Not at all, in fact. Reddit is not the United States. It's Reddit. Online communities are not democracies any more than your back garden is a democracy. You pull weeds, plant seeds, and otherwise encourage the plants in your garden to comport themselves in a manner that ends up with a pleasing result. It's your garden, so you have the absolute right to pull weeds. The weeds get no say.

Reddit seems to have forgotten this for a while, and as a result they started sliding until they became, well, Reddit. The community we're currently discussing this in, on the other hand, has been a lot more conscientious in cultivating the type of garden it would like to see. And I think we can all say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit or 4chan.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3586667

> Reddit is not the United States.

I'd substitute 'the world' for 'The United States'.

Both Reddit and HN have an audience that transcends the borders of any one country, including the USA.

The United States is given as a particular example of a country that has strong freedom-of-speech rights. "The world" includes many countries that don't.

In addition, people often forget that the United States Constitution only prohibits what the Federal Government can do - it says nothing about private entities prohibiting speech.

It's quite disingenuous how commentaries like yours bundle 4chan and reddit as a "virtual cesspit" of some sorts. The variegated setup of these communities makes such a comparison sound willfully stupid.

There are lots of communities within reddit and 4chan that are equally moderated and tended with curated posts and contributions and I'll be surprised you're not aware of this. HN on the other hand is a one size fit all!

Instead of pointing the finger in the other direction why don't you focus on the question OP asked?

Many people come to HN because its user base often has interesting and insightful opinions about and experiences related our commonly shared interests. Hardware, software, tech jobs, startups, etc.

When it comes to topics outside of those areas, the discussion can largely be boiled down to what your morals are about a particular topic. Discussing morals is boring and you will rarely change anyone's mind. Because of this, I don't really see the point of discussing it unless you care specifically about the person you're discussing it with.

I think a lot of HN users agree, and so these topics get flagged and hidden.

One man's censorship is another man's spam filter.

This is not censorship in the way the word is usually used. The contents of HN's front page are mostly determined in a democratic, automated manner based on users' upvotes and flags. Some topics are, in the eyes of the people voting and flagging, not suitable for the front page. It has to be this way because the amount of content submitted is many many times greater than the amount of space.

I'm not sure Democratic is quite the right word, since it takes much less than a majority of people flagging an article to effectively bury it.

I don't understand your reference to "evidence based science" and the "scientific method"...

If you want to discuss stuff, that's fine, but suggesting that "posting ongoing terror attacks is appropriate" is somehow supported by "evidenced based science"... well... show me the study.

News is basically fact reporting. HN is the opinion layer on top of that, where opinions are expected to be derived independent of ideologies. That's in contrast to Reddit where ideological debates are encouraged

> News is basically fact reporting.

Suggested reading: Manufacturing Consent.

Ideally, news is objective factual reporting, but editorial bias, conflicts of interest, emotional manipulation, propaganda, selective leaking, anonymous sources, government pressure, basic human nature and numerous other factors prevent this ideal from ever being realized.

As it currently stands, people decide which news sources biases more closely match their own in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. This reinforces their biases, and makes them seek more of the same continuing a downward spiral. Hopefully, you seek sources that disagree with your current opinions in order to balance your perspective, but the vast majority of people don't have the time or energy to do so.

Oh, how I wish the news was as you describe!

Those topics are often interesting to me. Generally the discussions that they illicit are low quality relative to typical Hacker News discussions.

In a way, this thread sort of hits at two of the reasons I find them low quality:

1. Those topics generate a lot of meta-discussion about Hacker News rather than expertise.

2. Those topics tend to be interpreted as a license to insult people with whom one disagrees. My conclusions about the quality of those topics are both logical and based on empirical observation of many samples. That they diverge from someone else's makes them no less so.

Good luck.

To whoever is removing these types of posts...sincere thanks.

There's a karma threshold for flagging. I think it's reasonably low, about 30?

So, once you get that amount of karma you can help remove those stories (and comments) by clicking the timestamp and then clicking [flag].

Not a biggie IMHO but worth a discussion to clear the air, shouldnt be just flagged as it just adds weight to the argument for.

Users flagged it. We sometimes turn off user flags if there's a clear mandate for doing so, but meta discussions breed like rabbits so that's probably not a good idea.

Also, the community verdict on this question is super clear and isn't likely to change, so for better or worse people need to familiarize themselves with it. Mostly the arguments that get raised indicate a lack of familiarity with HN. Making such arguments more prominent would mostly irritate the community; the experienced users who do want to say their piece about it have a way of finding these threads, as here.

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