https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I would think the death of a prominent business figure would be relevant to our community. But I guess not.
Only in the sense that every venue that chooses what news is in scope and out of scope for that venue (including every news outlets ever) is censoring news.
It's not, legally or effectively, prohibiting other people from publishing or distributing news, so it's not doing the thing that makes public censorship (and arguably widely dominant privately-run communication platform censorship) a problem.
Wouldn't you consider selective enforcement a type of censorship?
HN users get to vote what shows up on the front page. A certain ratio of votes-to-flags triggers removal. It's no more censorship than voting for a politician censors their opponent.
My theory:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776979 was on the front page for quite a while. HN users saw the very low quality of posts it attracted, and started flagging it and similar posts.
HN likes good conversation, not flame wars etc.