I'm curious why this is left up but another post containing a similar link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJeDVgmcKJI) was almost immediately removed earlier today.
Are political topics allowed/removed based on personal preference?
Are political topics allowed/removed based on personal preference?
I have no clue how it went down, I'm just a rando HN commenter, but don't ascribe to careless human moderation that which can be adequately explained by automated moderation.
There's definitely a sizable crowd that prefers HN to be more about hacking and less about politics, let alone divisive discussions about intelligence services, the person of Glenn Greenwald and so on. Also I wouldn't be surprised if HN has a lower flag->dead threshold for video links.
I'm newish to HN so it's a genuine question, I've not observed enough moderation here to really know how it works. It's the first time I've seen a post disappear and since this is the kind of topic that gets censored on other social media sites it made me suspicious.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
3 letter agencies can be interesting, though spying is not news in general.
I'm pretty sure being-on-the-front-page-of-HN is not a measure of moral judgment.
Many people here consider politics categorically off topic (which it really isn't) and will flag such articles on principle.
>and it takes very little effort to flag an article, by design.
I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone on HN how such a design can be easily abused. A single entity could get undesirable submissions removed by running multiple accounts.
Nothing is really removed from HN, only marked invisible. You can see it if you turn the showdead option on in your profile.
And you can contact the mods in the email field below but they tend not to give specific details.
>A single entity could get undesirable submissions removed by running multiple accounts.
Sure, but this forum is so aggressively moderated that it really wouldn't matter. If the mods feel a story doesn't deserve to be flagged, they'll unflag it. If they feel it doesn't deserve to be as popular as it is, they'll sink it. Users will flag and downvote for any number of reasons (since there are no guidelines for voting here.) There are so many invisible strings being pulled on these threads that it's impossible to read any specific motive into anything.
He does not do news, he does biased opinion pieces. And in my experience he often does them dishonestly. He also has a tedency to hint at conspiracy.
Hence I generally do not trust what he says. And I think that Tucker Carlson saying that the CIA is spying on politicians actually weakens the message. Even though in this case the message is true.
If you see an A which goes one way and B which goes another way, don't forget randomness as a possible explanation—it's actually the leading factor.
Not all political submissions are off topic on HN, but most are. Many past explanations of how we approach this question are at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....