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Comment by vdaniuk | Hacker News Reader

Do you also consider HN voting and flagging system to be nothing more than instruments of persuasion and control?

Facebook's personalisation and content filtering is managed by a central authority that chooses what gets filtered and what gets broad circulation. They have also demonstrated a willingness to use that capability to pursue their own agenda, such as in order to perform experiments in behaviour manipulation to determine exactly how much control they can exert.

A voting system based on free and fair participation by the users is in no way similar or equivalent to that.

How about the shadowbanning or comment curation that admins do?

I dislike shadowbanning, but it's not necessarily triggered by moderator action; it's often the result of voting and flagging.

Comment curation?

You can show shadowbanned people's contributions by setting showdead to true in your profile. I haven't seen too much admin/mod abuse lately.

As I understand it the admins very rarely shaddowban or curate comments.

Users with karma over 750(?) can downvote and so it's entirely users who are greying out comments or flag-killing comments.

Sure it is. The influence of HN is unavoidable, like any media, especially since it is a leader in the sector. It is even publically said that content will be edited according to YCombinator's choices.

- If you've spent more than 6 months on HN, you probably know the rules (and they are not a secret), - I'm myself a French entrepreneur and I'm glad I have been influenced towards start-up creation by HN, - HN is both capitalizing on SV's leadership and reinforcing it.

Of course I wish I were influenced by my country's start-up material, but I'm not. Now that we've confirmed HN has influence, what would you do differently?

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