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Comment by whatev84583 | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure? Are you aware that people are shadowbanned on a daily basis for having wrong viewpoints? HN is only a good discussion forum as long as you do nothing more than fidget with the frills of narratives that have been decided elsewhere to be correct.

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.

View on HN

You're not banned because of your "viewpoints" but because you've created dozens of accounts to break HN's rules with. That's not cool, and something this community would strongly disapprove of if people knew about it.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> You're not banned because of your "viewpoints" but because you've created dozens of accounts to break HN's rules with.

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?

> Not sure what this is supposed to mean

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 know, this place feels like the last haven of real conversations going on besides blind. I think people here do a good job with disagreements and provide good evidence to convince others.

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?

I've a good example for you:

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.

You can have a forum for "lively and active" discussion or you can have a forum for curated, high-quality discussion. You can't have both, and to have the latter you need aggressive moderation. And the bigger and more diverse the userbase gets, the more aggressive the moderation has to be to prevent Eternal September from eating everything.

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.

The question was, are there off limit topics here and active censorship of such; I think we both agree that there is.

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.

>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.

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.

I don't know what's sadder - that you would say this, or that you would accept it.

> I would have some difficulty thinking of a more important topic.

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".

Whoever flagged that story didn't make a good case for doing so in the comments (nor have you).

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.

> didn't make a good case for doing so in the comments (nor have you).

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.

> Pay me.

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.

My favourite thing to bring up is ngate, a critique site of HN

At first, I enjoyed reading it for the different perspective. But it got boring and repetitive after a while.

So does Hacker News after a while.

I mean, 90% of the political threads here could probably be written by an AI, they're so repetitive.

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