Comment by dang
2 days ago
What you call "taking finger off scale" would turn HN into a politics / current affairs site. I know that some of you want that, and a few even wonder how we can possibly be so evil as not to do it, but it is simply not the kind of site that HN is. That is the case regardless of what terminology you use - fingers on scales, curation, moderation, - which are different ways of describing the same thing.
I'm not sure why you need to invoke cynical motives for us running HN this way, since the reasons we give for this (which are quite real) explain things better. (for example, if we only cared about suppressing this stuff, why would HN be having frontpage threads about it at all? that doesn't make much sense.) But that's just me.
I think it would help you guys to understand that most of the HN community, even most who agree with you politically, do not want us to throw in the towel and let HN become like the rest of the internet. Only a small portion of users want this, though they do post intense (and sometimes even aggressive) comments about it. Given that HN has always stuck to its mandate and that the community wants us to keep doing so, I don't see this as a close call.
Most of the social spaces that I frequent don't have the amount of political topics posted as HN.
Would you like to know the difference between those spaces and here? It's that in those spaces, regardless of if the members are left right or center, the community is on the same page in terms of authoritarians, and authoritarian apologia will get you tossed.
Therefore, there isn't the same sort of desire - or need - to point out the obvious and show the uncomfortable realities to the crowd.
Refusing to take a stand on this sort of thing and leaving it for the community to sort out will only make things worse. It's functionally no different than the kind of combative environment you get on major social media networks; the only difference is the amount of tone policing caused by the user-facing moderation tools.
Currently there is not a single remotely political post on the front page, as the moderators intended. But yes I should believe you and not my lying eyes
Not only could you not allow the article posted, but even my comment on your actions was flagged. Stop censuring criticism because it makes you uncomfortable
> Currently there is not a single remotely political post on the front page, as the moderators intended. But yes I should believe you and not my lying eyes
This was on the frontpage for 18 hours yesterday: ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The third to comment on that post is:
Glad to see this post didn't get flagged like the one that was posted yesterday on a similar topic about ICE data mining and user tracking.
Obviously I'm not the only one noticing the one sided censorship. If you want to ban political discussion, just be honest about it.
You called my parent comment false, yet this post is still flagged... Add gaslighting to the list. I better hush up before my whole account gets banned...
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