Ask HN: Is HN Censoring Posts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is HN Censoring Posts?

41 pointsbdndndndbve29 comments

I saw a post about employees of Musk's companies and their reactions to his Nazi salute at the inauguration. The rise of fascism in America is definitely an interesting and pertinent question, but the post was insta-flagged into oblivion.

Is HN suppressing negative posts about Elon Musk?

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It appears HN users are flagging to suppress posts, yes, not HN or its mods.

https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals might be helpful for tracking some of this, feel free to bookmark.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39231537 is helpful to understand some mechanics of the above.

Let "You shouldn't flag things just because you don't like them, but you should flag them if they go against the site guidelines." be your guide.

(as pvg's links to dang's comments mention, this is not HN/mod action; this is user sourced moderation activity)

You can see some recent mod commentary on this. It's more or less how HN works and is supposed to work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42777298

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42775648

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42775535

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42775519

There's a lot of discussion here about work environment and startup culture and I thought it was a valid question to current SpaceX and Tesla employees. I am genuinely curious and thought HN would be the best place to ask this and get some genuine answers.

There isn't anything wrong with the question and the curiosity, it's just that lots of people (in my view, correctly) don't feel it's likely to produce interesting discussion and interesting discussion is what HN is ostensibly for.

So, avoid all transparency and accountability around moderation and then reference vague and subjective terms to dismiss those who rightly complain.

What is the transparency and accountability that ought to happen here that hasn't, specifically?

Any moderation should show who did it. Flagging should show who flagged.

Seems like a simple and transparent way to show how unbiased and well run HN is.

Flagging can be done by any user (above some karma threshold). This is well known and documented in the faq. A log of this would just make for more tiresome meta discussion. Which is also something the guidelines point out.

The richest plutocrat on Earth, now in charge of cutting government regulations, makes multiple emphatic Nazi salutes Day 1 at the inauguration...

Paul Graham: Censoring multiple rapidly popular posts of this is "how HN works and is supposed to work".

... Good to know.

That's not Paul Graham. Paul Graham hasn't been here for years.

That's a relief, thank you.

The interesting thing is that when the topic is "important," there are extreme measures taken by HN moderation.

These measures have previously included overriding user flagging of an arguably shady story, and more often pruning an entire branch of comments out of a post's comment thread.

What we have learned from this event is that HN moderation does not believe that the clear and obvious nazi salutes done by "the richest man in the world," behind the Presidential seal, is an important topic.

HN is a news org. This news event was a litmus test of news orgs. Only a few orgs passed for identifying "important" reality, and HN was not one of them.

I have been a fan of this website's moderation in the past, even when it went against my opinion. Now, I am sorry to say this, but I am truly disgusted.

It's obviously an excuse and not a real reason.

> I have been a fan of this website's moderation in the past

There's your mistake. I haven't for years.

When someone blatantly admitted to creating new accounts to reply to me and circumvent the throttling mechanism and the mods said that for that person it was OK I lost all trust in it.

OP: I just submitted a similar question, with a neutral title. While I think your topic is valid, the biased headline probably contributed to the flags.

Just to clarify: I'm OP of the post asking the question being discussed; I did not submit this question about censorship.

I use hn.algolia.com and flagging doesn't seem to have an effect. I still see top voted and commented stories.

HN works based on flagging. If a few users flag a story, it gets hidden. The algorithm errs on the side of being safe than sorry.

Did you see how the discussion went on the first submission of the video/clip/story? Not so well.

There isn't much room for discussion or any real 'question' to get into on that particular story. Many, perhaps most, would rather not lend validation to it and move on. And the rest, well, as mentioned, the discussion devolves into insults and weird 'othersideism' and well, doesn't go anywhere.

An alternative option is also you're welcome to bring it up/seek to address it further, or even flag, the numerous Musk/Telsa/X related stories that come up around here elsewhere.

I would readily believe "Not so well" but there is over a trillion dollars in enterprise value based largely on a cult of an unstable personality. The underlying business has stopped growing which almost always signals a collapse in valuation in high-growth tech companies.

Stock market bubbles that depend on temporary manias about whole tech sectors, like routers or e-commerce aren't that big. If BMW somehow got a valuation of over a trillion and their CEO was behaving erratically and using ketamine, that would be a big topic of discussion.

It's the bomb that could blow a big hole in tech, in general.

> > It's the bomb that could blow a big hole in tech, in general.

It already has in some sense, during the 20 years tenure of Bill Gates at the top of the Forbes 400, myself (and I suppose many other people) considered him the asshole dealer you'd have to bear with in order to get the goods and get high. But with some spells of being the total opposite of asshole and for example allowing piracy for those wise enough to exploit it. Same for however Bezos was at #1 .

This guy is like 1000x the asshole and is not bringing any quality of life to people. All his companies are performance art. 2005 Mercedeses are more durable and better designed than 2025 Teslas, some would say better looking (especialy the interiors) the Self Driving that should have been the first revolution in automotive since the Model T never came about.

SpaceX is performance art too, it's contentious that even African Nations would be better off using satellite Internes such as Starlink as opposed to invest in mobile 5G which has been working real well historically as a strategy when they ditched landline in the 90s

And quite frankly in the developed world nobody or almost nobody needs Starlink.

I for one lost faith in tech and I am trying to enjoy the variety of activities that a human can do today across millions of domains and are possible thanks to the tech progress UP TO NOW, from now on the progress will become less and less exponential . We'll never discover something more revolutionary than fire or the wheel anymore.

It seems like Peter Thiel was right with his theory about stasis in tech but ironically his buddy is one of the worst offender in that sense, even more ironic is that the very big leap of recent years (the mRNA vaccine which solved to COVID crisis) is barely talked about and the BS stuff promoted by Musk and Musk-a-like assholes is flying to the moon both financially and media exposure wise.

Aahh it's no longer worth getting mad about this shit, logging off to test the limits of my new mountain bike, a 300 year old tech that I never mastered though, so it's new for ME and that's the only thing that matters. As for the automotive side I'll keep enjoying my 2005 Mercedes and avoid being fooled by the hype pushed by conmen.

I'm flagging it on LinkedIn, here I don't care so much, I can dive in when I want (but I don't really), it's not in the way of me finding assignments.

Anyway, to me it's obvious Elon was overly enthusiastic and emotional ("My heart goes out to you"), as he was when that astronaut chided him. To some it's not. I guess we know when he keeps saluting in this way. Until that time, cool down everyone.

I suppose HN generally doesn't want political posts here, with exceptions

That's absolutely the kind of thing I would flag and I'm very much a left winger. The posting guidelines⁰ explicitly say: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." You don't need a conspiracy to account for this kind of thing disappearing swiftly.

⁰ https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not a left winger just anti-fascist; and I posted the question because I am curious about the thoughts of the employees. I don't want to discuss the gesture. There's a lot of discussion here about work environment and career decisions and this is what I was asking about. I think it was a valid question and a shame it got self-censored by part of the community.

edit: this was the OP btw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781509

You wouldn't find out, you'd just get to see a lot of people talking across each other. Those kinds of destructive conversations then colour the other non-political discussions.

> Those kinds of destructive conversations then colour the other non-political discussions.

How so? I honestly don't see what mechanism could lead to that. Are you saying that people would remember user names they disagreed with on political topics they care deeply about, hold a grudge, and then that would "color" their reply to someone (who is their "political enemy") about code etc.? I mean, I get the idea that people might be petty and personal, but how would they express that in an non-political topic? What is this "coloring"? Can you give an example?

I do see the opposite being possible, easily: if people aren't allowed to discuss something like Elon's Hitler salute in a dedicated topic freely, then they'll probably use the opportunity to bring it up in other topics about something else Musk/SpaceX/Tesla did. I see this all the time, for every topic where I'm bothered that discussion is flagged, it's a.) still discussed by people arriving there via search, and b.) brought up in orders of magnitude more unrelated threads, usually garnering approval rather than downvotes. It's HackerNews after all, not StartTheWizardAndClickOKNews after all.

They do the same hand waving in the news mostly. They are not "covering" it any more someone saying "install malware, it's fine!" would be "covering" the subject of computer security. They're covering it up more than covering it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42777716

^ And do you think this is covered in the news? Of course it is, the same is true for thousands of other topics discussed last year. You don't need a conspiracy to apply the generic verbiage in the guidelines arbitrarily, just double standards.

We ain't playing that game anymore.

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