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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

> That this article hasn't been flagged and remains on the front page is because of it's provenance

I'm not sure what you mean by provenance but people should know that HN moderators haven't touched this article (other than to turn off the flamewar detector, because the thread, against all odds, is not a flamewar). We're surprised that it made it to #1 and delighted that the discussion has mostly remained respectful, at least compared to the tire fires of the last couple weeks. IMO this has a lot to do with the care that Cadran and the other authors put into crafting the post.

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Could you please at least try to think how this looks to people with other opinions on this subject? This kind of attitude makes people move further in the other direction. I wish HN to still be a place for rational discussion.

Remember, the content here is made by the users. For free.

I'm afraid I'm not following you. I see plenty of opinions on this subject in this thread, as in the other threads. The main difference in this one is that the comments are more civil and substantive across the spectrum of opinions. That's a great thing.

Perhaps it feels to you like HN moderation is ideologically driven, but that's not so. It does feel that way, unfortunately, to most ideologically committed users. There doesn't seem to be anything we can do about it; everyone jumps to the conclusion that the deck is stacked against them, and the comments about this tend to be much the same regardless of the ideology of the commenter. Indeed the evils of HN moderation seem to be the only thing they all agree on! This bothered me for a few years but eventually there's little sense in being bothered by an optical illusion.

More about this in the many comments at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...

> I see plenty of opinions on this subject in this thread, as in the other threads

Funny, I see a dominant opinion in the other (flagged) threads and an another dominant opinion in this one.

1695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14952787

754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15009759

590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14968626

448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959601

Those threads were all extremely active and most if not all spent significant time on HN's front page, so I'm not sure what your point is? More generally: these perceptions are strongly in the eye of the beholder. I guarantee you that someone with opposite views to yours sees the opposite bias on HN. This obviously doesn't vary with HN, but it does vary with the perceiver—specifically with the perceiver's beliefs and their intensity. It comes down to sample bias and other cognitive biases. Even the most perfectly even-handedly moderated site (which I'm not saying HN is!) would get all the same perceptions and accusations.

Significant time? I don't recall it that way. Had to find them via algolia.

They might have been discoverable via the "comments" link (lots of active comments still going on) well after the stories have dropped off the front page.

I have also been checking the Algolia "Last 24h" view to find flagged discussions that I missed, however.

I found most of these threads via comments and active.

"Provenance" means origin, which in this case is the Ycombinator blog. It's very unlikely that anything from the ycombinator blog would get removed, given that this is itself a ycombinator site.

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