You're staring at one right now :-)
If you fundamentally disagree with some important narrative, even if you're polite and provide evidence, you'll get voted down. Get voted down enough, and HN will rate-limit you, and even trying to continue to participate will be taken as hostile activity, and you'll be shadowbanned.
Submit an article that's timely, informative, well-sourced, etc., but goes against the narrative? It'll be flagged without justification. Submit it again? It'll be marked as a dupe, and you're at risk of being shadowbanned.
Talking about any of this is against the rules. They think it's "boring" to hear numerous indisputably true examples of their misbehavior. Do it, and you'll be flagged, or shadowbanned.
Btw, goatse ascii art is not a "viewpoint". Well, I suppose it is in one sense.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you could try the approach that I've recommended to another user with a similar history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28191897.
I only have to create new accounts because I get unjustifiably banned. Or, if you consider simply telling the truth to be grounds for banning someone, I consider my point that HN is not actually a good place to discuss things made.
> something this community would strongly disapprove of if people knew about it
That's an interesting idea. Have you asked users what they think of shadowbanning people?
How many comments just in this thread are hidden? How many of those hidden comments actually contain anything objectionable? Have you asked users what they think about hiding comments that don't contain anything objectionable? Shouldn't we make sure users approve of it? That was a good enough standard to apply to my conduct -- shouldn't it be good enough to apply to yours, and HN's in general?
> Btw, goatse ascii art is not a "viewpoint".
Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Have you been punishing me for what somebody else has been doing?
Oh, I'm sorry—I just realized I confused you with someone else on that point. It's unrelated to the other issues though, and not affecting moderation.
I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned.
Could you provide an examples of where this happened and one of the important narratives?
Can you define wrong viewpoints and give an example?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 , and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715
Both these posts reached front page, with lively and active discussions. Both were quickly flagged.
I would have some difficulty thinking of a more important topic.
This post on it was also flagged, then unflagged once it would never reach front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219
Dang's comment was that the links "didn't fit site guidelines". This is despite the fact that people clearly found the story important, interesting, and were having constructive discussion about it.
Posts about this censorship quickly rose, attracted discussion, and were then flagged and deleted. Posters were banned.
What other stories are treated like this? How would we even know?
If this post somehow reached front page, I'd expect it to be flagged too; as off-topic, or too meta, or against site guidelines. People would pop up like clockwork to defend the decision, praise the site's moderation, etc.
Its either that or ban all accounts made after, say, 2015 and have membership be invite only as Lobste.rs does.
I can understand the opposition to this - i've clashed with the mods, been flagged and slowbanned, I get downvoted to oblivion every time I give an opinion that goes against the zeitgeist of a thread - but Hacker News is what it is.
If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue. But if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of, and eventually it will.
And to answer the dead comment below: a lot more political stories probably need to be flagged here than are - I think the bar for "interesting new phenomenon" needs to be a bit higher. I don't see the value in threads about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, for instance. It's a worthwhile news story, but the threads are generating more smoke and heat then light.
Second; CIA torture is American torture. It's important to discuss it, here and elsewhere, until it stops. But it's an off-limit topic. Not cool.
Many other people who voted the story to the top three times in one hour agree that it's worth discussing here, and they voted the story about its removal to the top as well.
You may feel this isn't the proper venue, and dang may feel that way too. But there's no evidence that's the majority view; in fact there's quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
The purpose of this forum is to gratify intellectual curiosity. Righteous, even justifiable, anger about American war crimes or anything else doesn't satisfy that goal. Most political threads don't lead to any insights, rather they tend to degenerate into cynical piss-takes and partisan rancor. That may satisfy the impotent rage one feels about an unjust world or grant an endorphine hit by dunking on one's ideological enemies, but as far as content goes, they're usually an intellectual wasteland.
Hacker News isn't going to solve the world's problems. This is mostly a place for bored tech nerds to waste time avoiding the real world. If you want speech to lead to practical results, get involved in political activism.
>You may feel this isn't the proper venue, and dang may feel that way too. But there's no evidence that's the majority view; in fact there's quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
For better or worse (I think it's both,) the majority doesn't rule here. Hacker News isn't a democracy, it's an oligarchy - rule by elites. The majority getting what it wants is practically the definition of Eternal September.
That's why downvotes and flags are weighted more heavily than upvotes, so the few can override the will of the many. And when the elite minority gets it wrong, the mods step in and start turning knobs.
That doesn't matter. HN isn't for everything, no matter how important that thing may be. Flagging a story doesn't mean "I think it's unimportant", it means "it doesn't belong here".
Many people commented on why that story was important, and of interest to the tech community.
As I've pointed out, the story was upvoted to the front page, and removed, three times in an hour.
That all shows the story was clearly of interest to the community, but overruled by a very small number of people who decided they know better.
While some people can apparently argue that helping to censor discussion of war crimes is good for this forum, against the expressed will of this forum, it's telling that no debate or discussion was allowed.
Pay me.
> why that story was important, and of interest to the tech community.
Neither matters. Set up your own forum and do it your style.
I'm genuinely not interested in your take.
> Neither matters. Set up your own forum and do it your style.
OP asked for evidence of censorship and "wrong viewpoints"; I gave it.
I mean, 90% of the political threads here could probably be written by an AI, they're so repetitive.