Ask HN: Is flagging down YC/Thiel/Trump stories on HN a form of censorship? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is flagging down YC/Thiel/Trump stories on HN a form of censorship?

13 pointspesenti16 comments

In the past days, after the news of Thiel's donation to the Trump campaign, many related stories - the original announcement, the response from Pao's company, marco's shame post - have been submitted (as well as an annoying number of duplicates). Many made it to the front page quickly, then got flagged down, then got resubmitted, then flagged down, etc. A couple of times, the mod intervened to remove the flag filter, but because of algorithmic weights given to flags, the stories were removed from the front page quickly anyway.

The main reason suggested for flagging was the off-topic HN guidelines (though HN obviously does not require anybody to justify their flagging, so this is pure speculation) while many people would argue that given the relevance of these stories to YC and HN, these are very valid (and important) topics to debate here.

In a more worrisome twist, my previous Ask HN asking questions about why that was happening (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12716662) also quickly got promoted to the front page but got flagged down as well.

When a topic that a majority wants to debate but a vocal minority - whose motivation is unclear, are they Trump supporters? are they rule zealots? are they tired of political subjects? - manages to shut down (as well as shut down any discussion about that flagging down) one may wonder if it doesn't amount to some form of censorship. What do you think?

And please, don't flag this one down, this isn't about politics, it's about HN!

"Are flags censorship" isn't a factual question. "Censorship" is a pejorative that indicates you don't like something—so if a story you liked was flagged, it was 'censored', and if you disliked the story, then it was 'moderated', 'curated', or some such. The factual aspect, that user flags cause stories to fall in rank, is the same either way.

We reduce or turn off flags on YC-related political stories for a very specialized reason: the community's trust in HN is its most important asset and we don't want to jeopardize that. It doesn't make those stories and threads any better for this site than the usual flamewars; it means that the cost of letting those flames burn hotter than usual is smaller than taking risks with the community's trust.

At some point, though, enough is enough. For the latest barrage of political stories we should probably revert to normal moderation practice, unless significant new information appears.

This is a question, how can it be factual? And how many of the stories that make HN front page are actually "factual"?

The fact that you disabled flagging for some stories shows that you do care about the perception of censorship and acted upon it.

Automatically demoting stories based on flags is just a bad form of moderation. Moderation should be done by moderators who are clearly identifiable. But I guess we can't discuss this as this post got flagged...

[flagged] doesn't mean you can't keep discussing; that's what [dead] means.

I'm happy to keep discussing, because I appreciate your concern for the integrity of the content here. However, I'm having trouble following what your last comment is saying.

As a frequent HN user and an active member of this community, I think that these stories do not belong on HN. Even if they are technically relevant, I don't think that they improve the quality of this website and discussion.

Personally, I don't want to see any headline with the word "Trump" in it on HN. So far it's been the only place on the internet free of this nonsense.

I know that it's relevant and inflammatory, so it gets popular and upvoted, but I come here for "things that stimulate intellectual curiosity". Trump articles, on either side, only stimulate controversy and anger.

Let's talk about programming and science here guys, there's plenty of subreddits where you can discuss Trump!

I disagree because this community has a tendency to ignore other "soft" problems (like gender equality or diversity in tech) that are very relevant and important. If we keep it too narrow, then there is no hope to ever solve them.

While you may not feel concerned by the misogyny and bigotry of a Trump or Thiel, it's essential to minorities that already haven't felt very welcome in this community.

Are you familiar with the concept of 'entryism'?

It is where a political organization, among other things, puts headlines in the news to try and wrestle control away from the owners of a company.

This is not imaginary, in China this is explicitly done with the Communist party and small companies when they reach a certain size or amount of influence.

The right believe the left is doing this with Silicon Valley. Here social justice warriors are something like shock troops indirectly manipulated by higher level political organizations like the Clinton foundation. We know for example that Salon and Gawker were put up to specific stories in pay for play and they received mysterious anonymous donations when they did so.

You don't have to believe that, but perhaps this will explain to you the hesitancy of the other side in taking your proposition seriously.

When a right wing tech employer hires a person (esp. a woman or minority) they sometimes wonder if they are part of a leftist ideological struggle which is orthogonal to the business's interests. An example is that we see the CEO of Yahoo, a woman, firing large numbers of men to replace them with women for no conceivable reason relating to merit.

This sort of thing appears to be uncontroversial in Silicon Valley but it is very not OK elsewhere. Mayer is being sued for sexism against men with a class action lawsuit I believe.

I predict Silicon Valley bifurcates along leftist and rightist lines but there is also a chance political chicanery tears the industry apart.

All of this is to explain to you that we are very aware of this:

> community has a tendency to ignore other "soft" problems (like gender equality or diversity in tech) that are very relevant and important.

It's that if I were to start a company tomorrow I would explicitly make it clear that SJWism was something that would get you immediately fired for the same reason having a 'StormFront' club in the company would be bad news for the manager.

I already flag most political stories I see! I'll try to be even handed as I can. If there is an anti-internaut then most of them should be caught.

It's just that there's an unremitting tide of them, partly for the reason gus_massa pointed out to do with url filters.

Many popular stories in medium.com get reposted many many many times. I think I counted like 20 reposts once. The problem is that medium.com adds some tracking crap to the URL that confuses the deduplicator. (I hope the mod can fix this someday.) The latest non political were "Fuck You Startup World" and "I Peeked into My Node_Modules Directory and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next". (I hope that someone can post the total count of resubmissions of these post.) When it's not political, there are usually not so many complains because it's clear that it's a fault in the deduplicator. When the story is political then it looks like censorship.

Also, most political stories are flagged, this is even considered in the guidelines. There are elections in many countries per year and there are good, bad and worse candidates in each one. If tomorrow were an lection between Putin and someone else, do you think that it would on-topic? What about an election in Argentina? (Next year we have a midterm election and some people really hate the current president, and some people really hate the previous president, and some people hate both.) When the post is about a country you don't care, then you don't care and it looks like something to maintain the signal to noise ratio and filter the off-topic stories. When the post is about a country you care it looks like censorship.

This is a polite reminder to everyone that you can hide stories instead of flagging them now, if you simply don't want to see them, or comments about them.

The flagging is occurring because it doesn't take many people to flag a topic in order for it to disappear. So that is an issue of simple mechanics.

I do not recall any complaints about financial aid being given to Clinton from Silicon Valley. Compare that to the vitriol dedicated to one person going in the other direction. That there is bias is unmistakable.

If you want to talk censorship you should look at the fact that a right wing opinion will get you downvoted on HN.

If you don't believe it, try making an account and make some standard right of center statements. It's like playing with one hell of a golf handicap.

This is worse than censorship, is brainwash. So Trump has a lot of problems, but it looks like he is not corrupt. Hillary, on the other hand, is fully with corruption. I really don't like/agree with YC priorities (I'm not an American, which is even more disturbing to see someone that laughs about killing others country president been endorsed/elected)

You merely pasted and slightly edited this comment from a previous one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733234)

Please stop acting like a bot. Hacker News values insightful, thoughtful discussion, not copypasta.

If it was copy-paste across multiple live stories I would agree with you but here the the original story was flagged so reposting a comment seems forgivable and the only way the poster can have the thoughtful discussion you wish to see.

If the poster wanted to have thoughtful discussion, they could have put some thought into their second comment, but they didn't.

The boilerplate anti-Hillary spleen vent isn't even on topic here. It's exactly the sort of derailing tangent that gets these thread flagged to begin with.

We always talk "around" the story on HN. The topic is about censorship of views and excluding and silencing people because of their views. That means talking about the views too.

I am just a non-US outside observer so I give this to you as food for thought but your post looks like an attempt to silence views you don't agree with. You didn't downvote but went on the attack. Rather than a derailing tangent, its actually a case in point.

If it genuinely wasn't your intent then just take this as a friendly message that it is the appearance so a different approach might avoid this in future.

I wasn't trying to silence views I disagree with. I want to promote discussion.

It's just a matter of maintaining the signal to noise ratio - when it comes to political discussions here, there is already too little of the former and too much of the latter, and too many people grasping for the low hanging rhetorical fruit. But copying and pasting a comment isn't discussion.

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