I'm not convinced the title rules on HN are having a major impact on which stories get upvotes on a frequent basis, but that's just my intuition and you may be massively right.

In which case I urge you to, when you see an example where you think the policy has indeed had a negative effect (which I'd also suggest isn't quite as basic as "did it lower the expected number of upvotes" but also "and not because it removed clickbait from the title"), either comment mentioning dang's name and saying why you feel that, or send him an email to the same effect (hn@ycombinator.com)

Not only have I often seen him engage in discussion and be open to changes for a submission when people felt a title shouldn't exactly fit HN's usual rules, but I'd also expect him to be open to changing the rules themselves if your feedback leads to his agreeing that there's a trend of submissions having the meaning of their title unfairly changed due to the generally good rules.

All that said, it's not really an example of a "HN bubble", nor of an "idea" that isn't allowed on HN.

Depends, did they write the website in PHP?

Unless they wrote it in Rust, in which case it would be received with great praise

I think it would actually probably hit the top spot if it was a legitimate attempt that used crypto, E2E, provable security, maybe TOR. There's only one example in history AFAIK and it only lasted a short while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

People have a lot of sympathy here for Silk Road, which was in this business.

I can't think of any non-rulebreaking comments that would get you banned just for expressing a distasteful idea. Can you give some examples?

I’m not sure there are ideas that aren’t allowed so much as the way you speak, structure, and present them. I’ve tested many different ideas on topics here and some have received far more positive feedback than I’d imagine and some have been buried too.

I think so long as you follow guidelines generally and don’t outright attack individuals then you’re mainly ok. The community might downvote your idea to invisible but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t allowed - just that not enough people thought it was good. That’s fair.

What's hilarious is that this is still up three hours after posting with not even a reply. So much for censorship. You're totally allowed to post that here, even while conflating one charity with a continent-wide protest movement, one leader's out of context quote with the goals of that movement, and one enforcement action by Amazon Smile with an accusation of "fraud".

For those interested in whether there's any truth in those links (there is! though maybe not nearly as juicy as promised), Wikipedia has a great overview as always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter_Global_Netw...

To add to that, stating the fact that one of the tech titans of today, Bill Gates, was in cahoots with a convicted pedophile is either met with "this is just hearsay!" or "you're jumping to conclusions", when it's not ignored and down-voted altogether.

Even more important (not that many of us receiving our wages and dividends from probably pedophiles isn't important), the strong connection between Silicon Valley of days past, and, most importantly, from today, with the Military and Security Complex is also shunned.

The "trained Marxist" phrase is so strange to me - how does one become 'trained' in Marxism? Trained in guerilla warfare, perhaps. But to be trained in Marxism has the same meaning as being "trained in Platonism" or "trained in Hayekism". The other answers she gave in the interview also indicate to me that she doesn't really know what she's talking about, and is using this language either as a LARP to claim some theoretical legitimacy or basis, or as a way to attract on-the-fence old school Marxists.

At no point did any of this 'trained Marxism' show other than in a small handful of the organization's goals, generally the most neglected ones.