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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

Why is this propaganda bullshit on the front page. I gotta ask about moderation on HN here.

This is literally moderation, "the twitter files" my ass. They pretext political contributions and falsley connect legitimate moderation to that. Of course they should have blocked that story and still should. Oh, but get this, it's their platform they get to do what they want. They are not an impartial government agency.

In this case there is no evidence of political bias, they saw danger and erred on the side of caution.

What I'm dumbfounded by is why there are so many upvotes and comments of all places on HN.

View on HN

>Oh, but get this, it's their platform they get to do what they want.

now it's Musk's platform and he gets to do whatever he wants

you're cool with that, right?

> you're cool with that, right?

Yes. Just as I don’t watch Fox News, I don’t read Twitter now

And it’s not because they are just biased. It’s because instead of the essence, and discussing using logical arguments, they care more about “owning the libs”.

Plenty of left wing media do this too, not as successfully, and I tend to avoid those as well.

What I’m not cool with are people that idolize corrupted, divisive, self centered, entitled folks like Musk. But I guess HN has many wanna-be-Musks.

Of course. I’ve never heard anyone say otherwise. It’s his to do as he pleases (without breaking laws).

In Twitter’s previous incarnation as a NASDAQ-listed company, Republicans were asking for more government control over it and other social media. Now that it’s a private company, that seems to have stopped.

Sure, but i am free to avoid twitter as well. Long as he does't break the law or cause social harm.

Not really. One thing Mastodon allows is for us to have 1000s of admins with the power of Musk instead of one. You might think this is just as bad, but at least it provides people with choice.

Man, this 2-party system in the US really made some brains rot away, it seems.

We have close to 2 main parties here in Australia too, and I thought our politics could get bad, but Americans seem to take thing to the extreme.

The US just needs preferences and compulsory voting and it would probably be fine. Australian election this year had 32% of the vote outside the 2 main parties, in the US this is more like 2%.

My country has a defacto two party system. It's pretty poo but stateside these guys take it to another level.

We're all human, we probably agree on far more than we disagree on. Let's all be a little kinder to each other

> Let's all be a little kinder to each other

from what I’ve noticed in the states (and other places) it’s much easier making money when everyone’s mean.

Compared to a couple of years back there are a lot more clearly right-leaning, neither well-read nor well-informed voices on HN. This is not the first thread with a very questionable hivemind leading the conversation.

(It exploded over COVID, from my perspective)

The other somewhat unspoken bit about Hacker News in recent years is that it shifted from "people who want to build cool things" to "people who want to complain about everything".

It's pretty much every thread now, from politics to Rust to... throw a stone, it's the same tone and tired mindset. The HN I remember from years ago was tons of founders and people who actually wanted to do something interesting.

More and more people are getting captured by their echo chambers, and as we get older it's almost impossible to get out for some reason. Case in point Elon, who like Trump seems now to be completely addicted to the dopamine hits from his most devoted fans' tweet replies. They are steering him further and further off the rails.

Users are sick of the bias social media companies have.

Yeah, one of the many reasons I deleted my Facebook account (which I'd had since they required an .edu email address to sign up) was because all of their engagement and clickbait was pushing far-Right content.

Maybe it's gotten better over the last 2 years, but in 2020 the top-10 pages by engagement were consistently Dan Bongino, Fox News, Breitbart, Ben Shapiro, and various unofficial Trump fan accounts.

Only some that are complaining. Most are happy to have propaganda removed.

That is just your opinion. Many people disagree.

Particularly, a congressman requested tweets to be removed through special channel is interesting.

Twitter determined that the article from an established news outlet is a hacked material, even though that should have been determined by law enforcement is interesting.

If you don't like it, you can just skip the post.

I'm sure there are hundreds of posts on front-page that you are not interested.

Because most of the moderation has given up as stories like this become more and more popular. It's easier to just let people burn out than delete it and be accused of being part of the FBI or whatever, even though it makes the problem worse because it becomes normalized here.

Like I will keep mentioning: This whole drama is partially based off the fact that people are complaining Twitter removed dick pics from twitter as a form of 'censorship'. I don't think dick pics belong anywhere on HN, but apparently people here disagree.

When it coordinates moderation decisions with government, it's not a private platform anymore

It's on the front page because the majority wants it to be.

> it's their platform they get to do what they want

And so is HN.

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