> if anyone else is surprised by the lack of coverage on the front page with regards to the recent wars
HN user for 10(?) years. It's not surprising at all to me. It's off-topic here. Plenty of other websites cover the stories, TV covers it. I come here to escape the 24/7 news cycle. Celebrity deaths hardly make the frontpage, if the inventor of an operating system dies you'll top spot and 2000 comments. It's not that users don't care, it's more the expectation that people get their news from multiple sources (websites, aggregator, forums) and not every forum needs to cover all topics.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Some have tried to argue that these stories gratify intellectual curiosity and are therefore on topic but this view does not seem to have been accepted by the site moderators or user base.
I mean here in the title, we have court, DOGE, data. Good comment to votes ratio. It should be a better source for intellectual gratification compared to most political news.
The first link delivers (how we handle leaked social security data and PII), the second doesn't.
There's some thoughtful comments at the bottom of the second link if you have showdead on, and these seem to get downvoted hard. I'm not American and don't have the context for DOGE. But rude responses are being upvoted and the polite calm ones are being downvoted to death. This feels a lot like censorship.
It might help to define censorship and specifically who is doing the censoring.
For example, a govt can censor things by imposing restrictions on media, or media access. Documents can be classified etc.
In that sense, no I font think Dang is deciding which articles make the front page etc. So if it's govt censorship then no.
But your last paragraph takes about "feeling like censorship". If a collective group chooses not to discuss some things, if they express disapproval when topics come up - is that "censorship"?
Personally I don't use votes to disagree with a point. I use them to indicate the quality of the post, disagree or not. Personally I upvote people I am responding to because their point was good enough to make me reply.
That said, most people still use votes as a form of agree or disagree. That's not censorship. (Flagging would be closer). Disagreement is not censorship.
Unpopular positions have consequences. (I know, I have many.) And yes, popularity does not mean truth. Sometimes you can be "rejected" because your truth is still ahead of its time. Turing was rejected for being gay.
Other times your opinion is just both unpopular, and gets worse either time. I have the right to express say my belief that the earth is flat, but I dont expect many to agree, or history to prove me right. People ignoring that discussion is not censorship, it's that it's a waste of time arguing with fools.
When discussing current affairs you can expect at least some folk to vote based on their worldview. That's fair enough, but its not censorship. Regardless of how it makes you feel.
I'd say "yes, totally". And that's not a bad thing. Some topics are, by their nature, inflammatory, and prone to spark low-quality, low-value discussions. And there's no particular reason why we need to have those discussions here. Nobody ever said HN was meant to be the "every thing to every one" forum of the Internet. Some things just belong on Reddit, or Slashdot,or 4Chan, or whatever.
of course there is censorship on HN but this is true in any space where people can publicly communicate with each other. It is a fantasy to believe free speech actually exists in any place, what is different is which topics are taboo, and the manner in which such taboos are enforced (de-ranked, shadow banned, public ban, post removal, de-platforming, gulag)
HN is not a general discussion forum. It is a subforum related to SDE. As such, it already hosts a very wide range of news. I would like to find a general forum where the same HN croud comments.
You click "flag" when off-topic shit shows up. Others do it too. Shit goes away. No moderators needed. Except when they disagree with the popular vote, then they make you swallow, whether you want it or not.
There doesn't seem to be any overt censorship, however the ranking algorithms play a role in making it appear that some stories are being deliberately buried.
The 'official' explanation that I got from Dang was that political posts hit automated software filters because of flagging and down voting which cause them to disappear from the front page.
Separately, sometimes the moderation team disables these filters on certain posts, but it's not often.
Turn on show dead then hit the more button. Eventually you'll see what either gets deaded/flagged by the system/community, and you'll start noticing themes. I started paying real attention to it around the Hong Kong handover and protests.
Same. I remember when the protesters killed Luo Changqing, a 70 year old street cleaner, I thought there would be huge discussions condemning the violence. Instead, all comments on it were basically flagged. Now I don’t even talk about anything related to China without using a throwaway.
most people here have apathy towards anything that involves emotions and beliefs
this place only tolerates content that nerds find interesting for a moment (driven by their adhd) only to be talked about for a bit then forgotten the day after.
hacker news is the watercooler of the internet. every line we write is formal way of dunking on each other's intellectual capacity and at end of day we smile nod agree because we are all only here to get paid or get our bare minimum intellectual or social fix
Yes, there is, and it's not as innocent as many commenters here seem to believe.
Have a look at my favorites [0], and you can see recent popular stories which I noticed were flagged (some were unflagged, some were just wiped off the page without being marked as flagged). A lot of those stories are supremely relevant to HN's supposed remit; from good sources and generating high quality discussion... There are some definite themes there - Musk, DOGE, etc.
And this thread will be flagged too, if people start getting into the discussion. Discussing HN censorship is not "generally" allowed as its own post, ie, [1, 2 etc]. This helps explain why so many people think there isn't censorship here at all - people don't see the people complaining, and don't see the flagged/disappeared posts, so they don't think it's happening.
It's very easy for a few users to flag any story they choose, which means that it's very easy for mods to blame users for the stories getting censored - "the community chooses, not us". Discussing how that works is not up for debate though, and posts about HN's flagging system are removed whenever they come up.
While this is going on a long time here for certain topics, ie, US torturers [3], it has ramped up wildly here in the last few months.
When you look at Garry Tan or Paul Graham's recent Twitter feeds, and read the weird support for the DOGE team, it's hard to imagine that there isn't top-down suppression of the stuff you'll see in [0] (which is just a list of stories I've personally noticed being censored - there's certainly far more).
Yes, there is censorship. That much is not a secret and IMO not controversial in itself. Not all censorship is bad. Most of users appreciate some amount of censorship (aka moderation).
As for your observations, it's a mixed bag of factors:
Some sources are by default flagged and need vouching (so penalized). For example 404 Media is penalized because of paywall practices. Meanwhile other apparently worse sites are not flagged. So you could argue there is bias from moderators there. I haven't seen evidence of any algorithmic bias beyond that and promotion of YC-affiliated ads and posts.
Supposedly political rallying is frowned upon and talk about industry role in murdering of civilians gets flagged as off-topic or inflammatory while dang descends from the mountain asking everyone to call their politicians about killing some tax bill stuck, top post on the front page...
Aside from that it seems most of the effective censoring you are seeing are from HN users. For example, there's a well-known anti-blockchain bias in the audience so anything perceived as "pro crypto" easily gets buried. Other certain themes get upvoted hard and fast. It's not hard to see the bias on Israel-Palestine and where it comes from. So some of it is genuine user bias of an echo chamber. Then we have astroturfing: People/organizations/bots actively flagging/downvoting/upvoting certain actors or views for political or anticompetitive purposes. No doubt this happens from all directions (individuals,corps,govt agencies,ngos) and the discrepancies are a difference in numbers and strength. Someone seems to be driving LLM FOMO beyond the organic. Certain moguls in particular seem to have an army of puppets to obstruct and cast smoke to prevent certain things from trending.
I believe at the end of the day while there is certainly at least indirect govt involvement via astroturfing and there are subversive forces manipulating the front page and comments, more than anything else we censor each other and ourselves. The real war is in and of our minds.
I don’t think there’s a conspiracy afoot. Lots of stuff gets flagged, and hot political topics quickly turn into absolute garbage threads, so I think there’s a lot of us who simply won’t upvote such things. I’d rather read about tech.
Turn on "showdead" in your user settings and you see pretty much everything, unless the mods invoke some special power to totally delete a post. But things that go [dead] due to flagging or whatever will be visible to you.
I don't think government influence/mandate is required to earn the name 'censorship'.
Certainly, government censorship is more worrisome than private censorship. I would be upset if a government imposed a list of disallowed topics on a forum such as HN; however, I do not wish to participate on a forum without a list of disallowed topics. That the admins (and the users, through flagging norms) prohibit certain topics is clear, and I think it qualifies as censorship, especially where admins are actively supressing certain topics (which they do).
the far more accurate word in this case is "moderation". the choice of "censorship" is always to invoke a sense of abuse of extraordinary power and victimhood. you wanna talk freely about whatever you want, without risk of being kicked out of someone else's house, go to your house. half the things i do here get my account put in timeout, I wouldn't equate it to being arrested for talking.
No. You can talk about anything, like tech, or ******** or for example discuss what happened in **** at ********* when the ******* brought ****** down.
> if anyone else is surprised by the lack of coverage on the front page with regards to the recent wars
HN user for 10(?) years. It's not surprising at all to me. It's off-topic here. Plenty of other websites cover the stories, TV covers it. I come here to escape the 24/7 news cycle. Celebrity deaths hardly make the frontpage, if the inventor of an operating system dies you'll top spot and 2000 comments. It's not that users don't care, it's more the expectation that people get their news from multiple sources (websites, aggregator, forums) and not every forum needs to cover all topics.
There is a link at the bottom of the page to the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) which says:
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Some have tried to argue that these stories gratify intellectual curiosity and are therefore on topic but this view does not seem to have been accepted by the site moderators or user base.
Many of them violate this guideline:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I'll try to pull a random recent example that isn't flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44204767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44205060
I mean here in the title, we have court, DOGE, data. Good comment to votes ratio. It should be a better source for intellectual gratification compared to most political news.
The first link delivers (how we handle leaked social security data and PII), the second doesn't.
There's some thoughtful comments at the bottom of the second link if you have showdead on, and these seem to get downvoted hard. I'm not American and don't have the context for DOGE. But rude responses are being upvoted and the polite calm ones are being downvoted to death. This feels a lot like censorship.
It might help to define censorship and specifically who is doing the censoring.
For example, a govt can censor things by imposing restrictions on media, or media access. Documents can be classified etc.
In that sense, no I font think Dang is deciding which articles make the front page etc. So if it's govt censorship then no.
But your last paragraph takes about "feeling like censorship". If a collective group chooses not to discuss some things, if they express disapproval when topics come up - is that "censorship"?
Personally I don't use votes to disagree with a point. I use them to indicate the quality of the post, disagree or not. Personally I upvote people I am responding to because their point was good enough to make me reply.
That said, most people still use votes as a form of agree or disagree. That's not censorship. (Flagging would be closer). Disagreement is not censorship.
Unpopular positions have consequences. (I know, I have many.) And yes, popularity does not mean truth. Sometimes you can be "rejected" because your truth is still ahead of its time. Turing was rejected for being gay.
Other times your opinion is just both unpopular, and gets worse either time. I have the right to express say my belief that the earth is flat, but I dont expect many to agree, or history to prove me right. People ignoring that discussion is not censorship, it's that it's a waste of time arguing with fools.
When discussing current affairs you can expect at least some folk to vote based on their worldview. That's fair enough, but its not censorship. Regardless of how it makes you feel.
Wars are off topic for Hacker News, this is not a general news site. So they're probably being removed quickly.
I'd say "yes, totally". And that's not a bad thing. Some topics are, by their nature, inflammatory, and prone to spark low-quality, low-value discussions. And there's no particular reason why we need to have those discussions here. Nobody ever said HN was meant to be the "every thing to every one" forum of the Internet. Some things just belong on Reddit, or Slashdot,or 4Chan, or whatever.
of course there is censorship on HN but this is true in any space where people can publicly communicate with each other. It is a fantasy to believe free speech actually exists in any place, what is different is which topics are taboo, and the manner in which such taboos are enforced (de-ranked, shadow banned, public ban, post removal, de-platforming, gulag)
HN is not a general discussion forum. It is a subforum related to SDE. As such, it already hosts a very wide range of news. I would like to find a general forum where the same HN croud comments.
Yes and I'm quite appreciative of all the work the moderators here do. Keeping the signal to noise ratio high is hard work.
Nobody is perfect, and even if they were, they'd never match expectations precisely.
You click "flag" when off-topic shit shows up. Others do it too. Shit goes away. No moderators needed. Except when they disagree with the popular vote, then they make you swallow, whether you want it or not.
There doesn't seem to be any overt censorship, however the ranking algorithms play a role in making it appear that some stories are being deliberately buried.
The 'official' explanation that I got from Dang was that political posts hit automated software filters because of flagging and down voting which cause them to disappear from the front page.
Separately, sometimes the moderation team disables these filters on certain posts, but it's not often.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487014
Turn on show dead then hit the more button. Eventually you'll see what either gets deaded/flagged by the system/community, and you'll start noticing themes. I started paying real attention to it around the Hong Kong handover and protests.
Same. I remember when the protesters killed Luo Changqing, a 70 year old street cleaner, I thought there would be huge discussions condemning the violence. Instead, all comments on it were basically flagged. Now I don’t even talk about anything related to China without using a throwaway.
this is not the place for it
most people here have apathy towards anything that involves emotions and beliefs
this place only tolerates content that nerds find interesting for a moment (driven by their adhd) only to be talked about for a bit then forgotten the day after.
hacker news is the watercooler of the internet. every line we write is formal way of dunking on each other's intellectual capacity and at end of day we smile nod agree because we are all only here to get paid or get our bare minimum intellectual or social fix
Yes, there is, and it's not as innocent as many commenters here seem to believe.
Have a look at my favorites [0], and you can see recent popular stories which I noticed were flagged (some were unflagged, some were just wiped off the page without being marked as flagged). A lot of those stories are supremely relevant to HN's supposed remit; from good sources and generating high quality discussion... There are some definite themes there - Musk, DOGE, etc.
And this thread will be flagged too, if people start getting into the discussion. Discussing HN censorship is not "generally" allowed as its own post, ie, [1, 2 etc]. This helps explain why so many people think there isn't censorship here at all - people don't see the people complaining, and don't see the flagged/disappeared posts, so they don't think it's happening.
It's very easy for a few users to flag any story they choose, which means that it's very easy for mods to blame users for the stories getting censored - "the community chooses, not us". Discussing how that works is not up for debate though, and posts about HN's flagging system are removed whenever they come up.
While this is going on a long time here for certain topics, ie, US torturers [3], it has ramped up wildly here in the last few months.
When you look at Garry Tan or Paul Graham's recent Twitter feeds, and read the weird support for the DOGE team, it's hard to imagine that there isn't top-down suppression of the stuff you'll see in [0] (which is just a list of stories I've personally noticed being censored - there's certainly far more).
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=mandmandam
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43054368
2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781604
3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569
Censorship is rampant on HN. Whether that's a good or bad thing is a matter of perspective.
Yes, there is censorship. That much is not a secret and IMO not controversial in itself. Not all censorship is bad. Most of users appreciate some amount of censorship (aka moderation).
As for your observations, it's a mixed bag of factors:
Some sources are by default flagged and need vouching (so penalized). For example 404 Media is penalized because of paywall practices. Meanwhile other apparently worse sites are not flagged. So you could argue there is bias from moderators there. I haven't seen evidence of any algorithmic bias beyond that and promotion of YC-affiliated ads and posts.
Supposedly political rallying is frowned upon and talk about industry role in murdering of civilians gets flagged as off-topic or inflammatory while dang descends from the mountain asking everyone to call their politicians about killing some tax bill stuck, top post on the front page...
Aside from that it seems most of the effective censoring you are seeing are from HN users. For example, there's a well-known anti-blockchain bias in the audience so anything perceived as "pro crypto" easily gets buried. Other certain themes get upvoted hard and fast. It's not hard to see the bias on Israel-Palestine and where it comes from. So some of it is genuine user bias of an echo chamber. Then we have astroturfing: People/organizations/bots actively flagging/downvoting/upvoting certain actors or views for political or anticompetitive purposes. No doubt this happens from all directions (individuals,corps,govt agencies,ngos) and the discrepancies are a difference in numbers and strength. Someone seems to be driving LLM FOMO beyond the organic. Certain moguls in particular seem to have an army of puppets to obstruct and cast smoke to prevent certain things from trending.
I believe at the end of the day while there is certainly at least indirect govt involvement via astroturfing and there are subversive forces manipulating the front page and comments, more than anything else we censor each other and ourselves. The real war is in and of our minds.
I don’t think there’s a conspiracy afoot. Lots of stuff gets flagged, and hot political topics quickly turn into absolute garbage threads, so I think there’s a lot of us who simply won’t upvote such things. I’d rather read about tech.
Tangential: is there a way to see all flagged posts?
Turn on "showdead" in your user settings and you see pretty much everything, unless the mods invoke some special power to totally delete a post. But things that go [dead] due to flagging or whatever will be visible to you.
Titles with Trump or Musk are often very quickly flagged for sure, other related topics that cast them in a negative light, often in under one minute.
Who or how, I've no idea.
How many times do you need it explained to you?
I do not know what that means.
No, HN is not run by a government.
I don't think government influence/mandate is required to earn the name 'censorship'.
Certainly, government censorship is more worrisome than private censorship. I would be upset if a government imposed a list of disallowed topics on a forum such as HN; however, I do not wish to participate on a forum without a list of disallowed topics. That the admins (and the users, through flagging norms) prohibit certain topics is clear, and I think it qualifies as censorship, especially where admins are actively supressing certain topics (which they do).
the far more accurate word in this case is "moderation". the choice of "censorship" is always to invoke a sense of abuse of extraordinary power and victimhood. you wanna talk freely about whatever you want, without risk of being kicked out of someone else's house, go to your house. half the things i do here get my account put in timeout, I wouldn't equate it to being arrested for talking.
*that we know about
Can't forget that the CIA ran Star Wars fan-sites, on the internet nobody knows you're a dog.
No. You can talk about anything, like tech, or ******** or for example discuss what happened in **** at ********* when the ******* brought ****** down.