Comment by 23B1
1 year ago
I think you're probably generally correct, but "blaming the algorithm" sure smells to me like a whole lot of camouflage for censorship, which we ought to know by now has as much to do with 'quality' as it does 'shaping the narrative'
Generally speaking HN is a good site and a case study in successful community moderation, but you have to wonder 'who's watching the watchers' these days as the Overton window on free speech continues to be narrowed, almost entirely at the behest of big tech.
The simple solution would be to display a log of all removed/flagged/shadowbanned posts and comments, like Wikipedia does.
Preventing the site from being taken over by incessant meta debates is one of the moderation goals of the site.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(In many places there, obviously a lot of that is about Meta the company).
Periodic threads like this one are, I think, allowed as a sort of escape valve for pent up meta energy. Emph. on "periodic".
If you want a site that makes the opposite call here, Lobsters has a public mod log. You might like that system better!
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[flagged]
I don't care if its a right-wing talking point and I don't care if a company has given themselves permission to censor themselves.
My interest is broadly about the attitudes towards speech as they continue to be shaped by corporations who continue to privatize the public square. See Taibbi's 'Twitter Files' for ample examples.
Users are privatizing the 'public square'. We come to HN by choice. I'm sure others use Twitter by choice. And users subject themselves to the TOS by choice.
This is definitely one of those 'if you don't like it, build (or buy) it'. It has worked out disastrously in the conservative realm so far, but perhaps you have better ideas.
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