However, I have a feeling that not all news make it to the top of HN and I was wondering whether this is just a coincidence or there's chance that specific posts are being buried on purpose by the moderators and/or any algorithms.
I know this might sound like conspiracy theory. This is not my intention. I just want to know if anyone else is surprised by the lack of coverage on the front page with regards to the recent wars.
Who or how, I've no idea.
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.
Can't forget that the CIA ran Star Wars fan-sites, on the internet nobody knows you're a dog.
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).
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.
Per the guidelines, this is not exactly true. The guidelines make exceptions for political stories that are "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
It is up for debate whether stories about a country the entire tech industry and VC apparatus relies on sliding into autocracy is "evidence of some interesting phenomenon". An argument can certainly be made. If the bond markets are wobbling and tech stocks are being manipulated due to said phenomena I think it's silly to claim it's off-topic as a whole. Someone said a few years back that nearly half of the yc batch were non-US. It would be ridiculous to claim that the stories that make them reconsider starting a company in the US is strictly "off-topic".
Based on the guidelines, I see no reason why the official moderators would object to stories that show the naked intent of the executive branch to destroy any checks on its power coming from all other branches of government and consistently displaying admiration for autocratic goverments and leaders across the world while doing so, as stories that show evidence of US regime change would be "evidence of some new interesting phenomenon".
I think the main reason is not the stories being off-topic by themselves but moreso that the moderators believe they will trigger flamewars and low-value comments, so they act preemptively, as flamebait is also against guidelines. This clearly shows that the moderators do not trust the HN community with these stories. This is not surprising as "previous behavior predicts future behavior" is an oft-repeated YC adage. If those threads were filled with substantive comments from lawyers, fired federal workers, scientists, immigrants personally affected by the policies, I think the moderators would reconsider their status.
I can't help wonder though if and when it becomes clear that the longterm and second-order effects of the current admin have detrimentaly dented the US's innovative edge, whether the HN moderators will be satified with their muting of the discussion when they look back on their moderation. As Saul Bellow once said, "if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."
And, it's not the moderators, or at least not mostly. It's the users who are flagging stories, because the users have seen them turn into flamefests too often.
In fact, the moderators (at least sometimes) rescue such stories from the user flags.
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
Nobody is perfect, and even if they were, they'd never match expectations precisely.
"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.
"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.
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.
Let's define censorship as the suppression of speech, ideas, communication, and information in general.
Some people would say censorship is done by an authority. Let's define authority as a unit of administrative power and control. This is dang. This is also the group of people who have the power of downvotes. It's not the majority. But even if it were the majority (e.g. reddit), it doesn't matter. There's a bias. There is always a bias, whether it's HN, FB, reddit, X, Threads, Mastodon, Discord - all these websites are self-selective by design.
Authority (e.g dang/YC) builds a system (e.g. downvotes) to destroy bad content. As dang puts it, they're white blood cells.
But back to censorship. Censorship is the suppression of communication. If something hits -4 downvotes, it is hidden unless you have showdead on. It only needs 4 people to disagree. And I find myself being hit with this whenever I praise a Chinese company, for example. I mean people will upvote if I praise Microsoft, but certain Chinese companies or perhaps Russian ones will get me hit with downvotes to -4.
I do believe trolls should be censored. If anyone goes around asserting the world is flat, that's in bad faith and should be deleted.
What of the guy who brings up the idea that certain vaccines are not properly scienced with evidence? In HN, that gets downvoted to a -2 or so. But systems can be corrupt. I've done corrupt research but frankly nobody would listen to a high schooler's word against professors. I tend to be sympathetic to these, even though very often, it's just more trolls. These are still visible, but out of the way. Bringing a discussion to the bottom of the page brings attention to it, so it's the opposite of censorship IMO.
Now the big thing is anti-corruption agencies. Because ironically, they're a nest of corrupt individuals. You know in a movie that the Ministry of Truth is always the corrupt one, lol. The ones in my country are a mixed bag - they catch the corrupt, but sometimes they kill the people who report corruption too. They're effectively inquisitors; they step above the lines of justice by having a high error rate but they catch the criminals who use red tape as a shield.
If you were corrupt, you would 100% want to censor anti-corruption agencies, and this is the line where censorship should be held back.
What people generally censor on HN is the idea that wages could be lower, that jobs could be outsourced, that tech which reduces employment is profitable. Or that their cushy job causes environmental and ontological damage. This kind of information should be challenged too, otherwise you end up with people insisting that you should be paid a bazillion dollars for level 63 like they do on Blind and Instagram. Lack of censorship also leads to false information.
I feel like your definition and mine are too far apart to meaningfully determine if HN is censored or not.
By your definition all speech is equal and should carry equal weight, regardless of truthfulness. Whereas I regard truthfulness as a key factor in whether suppression equals censorship.
Equally there's no requirement for every idea to be spread with equal enthusiasm. Ignoring rubbish isn't censorship, it's simply ignoring rubbish.
When it comes to altering cultural norms, lots of ideas are rejected simply because their time has not come. And may never come. But again, disagreeing with you, even dowvoting you is not censorship.
Being ignored is not the same as bring censured.
As society changes, so ideas that were once radical become main stream. Usually not because of internet forum posts, but because specific actions demonstrate outcomes. If I think wages should be lower then I'm free to take a lower wage, or to pay my staff a lower wage (and see if they agree.) If I believe in outsourcing I can find someone somewhere else to do my job and save my company money. And so on.
I do agree some ideas should not be spread eagerly. My bad, I thought downvotes would autoflag, but apparently some people will downvote and flag as well, which leads to the effect.
But flagging is effectively deletion and thus censorship. There are vouch buttons, but I do not find them effective - the window is too narrow. Bad submissions should be made invisible, that's fine, the site is about boring news. But I think flags get abused on comments a lot.
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.
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
People that do not live within the accepted majority world views will feel isolated, ostracized, ignored and censored. As an example I self-censor 98% of my views here. Instead I share them on smaller semi-private sites that research and discuss this site and a handful of other sites. In my opinion that is a decent path to balance ones experience and help avoid being gas-lit and face smacked. One can create their own private or semi-private bubbles and onboard people that feel ostracized and censored. Some use Mastodon for this. Some create their own self hosted chat and forum servers. I know, more echo chambers. People can build their identity on their own servers and use sites like Facebook, Tweeter, Reddit, HN as a public disposable cache to share specific thoughts and then discuss the responses on their own servers. People can choose whether or not to permit search engines, AI and other bots on their own servers. People can also permit or block any topics they wish on their own servers.
I think it can good for ones mental health to not try to fit entirely into a majority demographic especially when so many cultures are trying to mold themselves to fit a shared community. I think this is especially important when sites like HN become popular enough to attract paid agent provocateurs and state level actors along with their victims that either consciously or sub-consciously attempt to keep narratives on a specific and popular "acceptable" path.
Hypothetically speaking in Minecraft a worse scenario be malicious UI front-ends to HN that could subtly manipulate votes and flags using legitimate accounts without their knowledge given the majority here are on cell phones. Even dang would not detect this behavior. This is just one reason why people should review their flag and vote history and why phone apps should be de-compiled rather than just trusting source code. One should not trust sandbox analyzers as the code can detect what it is running on. This is one reason I like to MitM my own traffic.
That said, if you want to catch active posts that don’t make it to the front page or don’t stay long, then I strongly recommend:
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
I have actually made this my HN bookmark, as it has a higher concentration of discourse that I’m personally interested in.
On top of that, personally, I saw plenty of evidence for a clearly biased approach, even despite them claiming otherwise. Why won’t they claim it, after all?
For a little while a few years ago a lot of people got banned for talking about politics too much and that's calmed down now. If anything HN has become more opened not less.
christophilus•7mo ago
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