Palmer Luckey secretly funding meme army on Twitter, Reddit
reddit.com
reddit.com
(Not that the Daily Beast article is especially good, and I don't mean that in a political way - it's just hard to make out the course of events they're positing.)
It's been fine that company leaders take political positions because they have all been reasonably centrist (with leanings left/right). But Trump is the most provocative and polarising candidate we've seen in quite some time. And to not just support him but actively engage in this way is really unusual.
I can't imagine Zuckerberg is going to be at all impressed by this.
Think of this as a VC-Founder issue of differing politics with regards to social media. How do you balance this? Do you just shut up and acquiesce when the VC tells you to do something? Do you still voice your opinion?
Luckey sold his company to Facebook. Facebook's CEO is a Clinton supporter, and it appears that Palmer Luckey is a Trump supporter. How much say does Zuckerberg have over Luckey, considering that Luckey is still the "face" of Oculus (even if the company was sold)?
How do you balance these issues when there is a political rift(pun aside) like this?
The CEO of Renaissance Technologies is one of the biggest backers of the Republican party. It's been like this for a while. Life goes on.
If you think someone will get punished by their boss because of their political leanings, well that's exactly why "closet Republicans" who fear repercussions you their careers is now a real thing in the bay area.
It is clearly of interest to the community.
I've had the same reaction when I modified/hacked/made the python ML code to fix Thalmic Myo's armband so Linux and the rest of us could use it. 1
In that case, YC censors all articles about member companies with a script. Makes sense, to protect their income, but altogether sleezy without some sort of disclosure as to why (would have been nice to see "article not allowed due to YC ownership").
The only thing I can guess is there's some sort of fiduciary something, that caused the mods to dupe-delete.
1 http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free-...
Holy magoly, that is 100% untrue. The truth is the opposite: when there are articles critical of YC companies, we are careful to moderate them less, not more, than we normally would. That's the first principle of HN moderation and was literally the first thing pg said when he was showing me how to moderate the site. I hadn't even had a chance to grab a chair before he blurted it out.
We wouldn't dream of doing anything like what you describe—not because it wouldn't work (though it wouldn't), but because as members of the community ourselves, we wouldn't want to be treated that way.
It's always possible to get an answer to a question about a specific post. It's better to send such things to hn@ycombinator.com because (a) they're off-topic here, and (b) we might not see them otherwise. Please note that phrase specific post. Without specific links, it's harder to clear things up.
In my experiences, instant decisions like that are results of a script. Obvious assumptions were that it was HN's script, protecting HN's assets.
You've got one heck of a community here. I try to positively add... But I know we don't see eye-to-eye on quite many things.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kefka, it looks like your account lost story submission privileges in Feb 2014 after having posted a bunch of stories that weren't appropriate for HN. That was at least 9 months before you posted anything about Thalmic/Myo, so I'm sure that the latter had nothing to do with it. (I'm also sure because we'd never take submission privileges away for that reason.)
In Dec 2015 we restored story submission privileges to your account, probably because we saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10537529, which was a solid submission. If an account is posting the occasional substantive story—especially ones that other users aren't submitting—we err on the side of restoring privileges.
It was indeed a script that stopped those stories, but not in the nefarious way I suspected. I'm honestly not sure which stories triggered the "no submission" flag, but it does make sense.
I would like if we could personally see flags like that (say on our user page). I've never been a fan of hell-* removal of privileges, only to think of worse cases like this.
Thank you for being honest and frank about this.
-Josh
Which was flag-killed. No conspiracy, it's just that HN has:
- users that will flag anything to do with politics
- users that will flag anything that more properly belongs on mainstream media than HN
- users that will flag anything disparaging their 'tribe'. And although I think Donald Trump supporters are a minority on Hacker News, they're a significant minority. After all, they're almost 50% of Americans.
- users that will flag anything disparaging YC companies, especially if it's controversial
- users that will flag anything controversial
- users that will flag anything likely to encourage non-productive conversations
Some may be good reasons for flagging, some are not. But the flagging happens, and the story got flag-killed very quickly.
I've ran across a few of those, including Thalmic Myo, Double Robotics, and some early Uber posts (which the blocks now seem to have been removed).
Usually, on news sites (like... Hacker News), there is a disclosure when there's fiduciary connections to the news at large. Like "This object was provided gratis by company", or "News company is a subsidiary of parent company"... things like that. It's responsible reporting and news.
But yes, things can get user-flag killed. And things can get system-flag killed. And we have no clue which happened. Seems rather slimy and questionably ethical.
But I don't think HN also flags based on URL. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
But the evidence I have, is when I've posted things about (later find out) as YC funded companies, are killed on the spot.
I confirmed my beliefs by posting, and then going to my VPS and checking the page there. The title, content, and everything was stripped out like a sort of inverse hellban (on article, not user).
The only cite I can find any sort of corroboration is this https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Which states "Similarly, please don't use HN posts to ask YC-funded companies questions that you could ask by emailing them."
That sentence in the HN guidelines got put there because at one point people were using HN as a kind of customer support, which got irritating. Since that's not really common anymore, we can probably just take it out. We're about to add a bunch more guidelines so it would be nice to remove a few anyhow.
Actually I wonder if "Please don't make claims about HN moderation without links to the specific threads you're talking about" should be one of the new guidelines. We're happy to answer specific questions—and if we've done something bad, apologize and fix it—but the dark sinister stuff is always too vague to address directly.
Edit: btw we get that people sometimes arrive at the wrong conclusion in a completely well-intentioned way. In most cases it really is easy to clear up.
You do: if a story is dead and says [flagged], it's because users flagged it enough to kill it. If you see such a story and think it deserves discussion on HN, you can vouch for it.
If a story isn't DOA because it was submitted from a banned site or user, then it won't turn up dead unless by user flags because moderators don't kill stories and neither does the software at that point.
This story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12563192), as of now, is dead because of user flags.