> And obviously, I'm under no obligation to not voice my concern about that.

Except... You are...

The guidelines [1] of the site outline that most discussion of politics is off-topic as it most often doesn't gratify one's intellectual curiosity. It's rather explicit, too: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.".

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

> The HN crowd is not your average layman - it's largely well read and educated people. Why not let them decide what is propaganda and what's not (as opposed to some arbitrary authority deciding this)?

That is at best a very naïve take. This is a public forum, not some secret society of like-minded intelligentsia.

> …some arbitrary authority deciding…

something tells me the team here is anything but arbitrary. i can assure you, keeping a community this healthy at this scale is pretty incredible.

what you’re suggesting is to raise the noise and for the users to wade through noise hunting for signal.

what rises to the top here is so much better than any of the noisy sites. on those sites, by the time you find a signal, the information is usually amateur-hour tier. to use an idiom i heard yesterday, sites with little moderation are like searching for a hymen in a whorehouse.

Because it's a service to us that makes the site more valuable. I have exactly zero interest in spending my time here deciding what is or isn't propaganda. I deeply appreciate "some arbitrary authority" providing that hard and mostly thankless service to me. Even if I miss a few things that I wouldn't consider to be spam / abuse / propaganda but which they did, that is a tiny price to pay for having a place to come read things that is mostly free of all that crap.

>The HN crowd is not your average layman - it's largely well read and educated people.

People need to stop thinking this. There's no filter in front of the HN sign up. The community here is the same as the community anywhere else on the internet. We aren't special

   I came to HN because it seemed to be a place of free dialogue.

It certainly does feel like a series of monologues at times.

> The HN crowd is not your average layman - it's largely well read and educated people.

It most certainly is the exact mixture of people as you’d find elsewhere. The only difference is they’ll (we’ll) foam at the mouth over something vaguely tangential to tech vs. some other topic.

Here's a recent example of the type of take you might find here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37113312