Cancel Culture in Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Cancel Culture in Hacker News

9 pointsheyheyhouhou10 comments

Since the start of the conflict I've seen how hackernews moderators have been flagging, down-voting and removing from the front page links that are not aligned with the western propaganda.

I was very naive with this community. There is brilliant people and brilliant discussions, but we are all afraid to the repercussions.

Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Stripe, Intel, Siemens, Sequoia Capital boycotting Web summit for a more than a reasonable post of the "resigned CEO" saying "war crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies" shows the hypocrisy of these companies.

We keep improving the technology but we are loosing all the humanity.

I'm very sad and hopeless

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I assume you are talking about the current conflict in the Middle East. That is generally off topic per the guidelines.

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

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Israel vs Palestine is an old conflict with few updates but troop movements and body counts.

I understand that there is certain guidelines to maintain sanity.

I totally agree with that. But I've seen very strange behavior in the last weeks with the submitted stories or even comments suddenly removed or shadowed.

How could this be flagged?

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37975898

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37997076

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38018995

Or why this very relevant story is not showing in the front page? It has considerably a lot of comments and upvotes

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38045514

Anybody can flag at any time. It only takes 4 sad people for a thread or comment to achieve flagged status. As an example anything with negative commentary about Julian Assange is instantly flagged because there is a cult that hangs on his every word.

It's a mechanism that makes sense to prevent flamewars and a lot of silly political discussion; however it's also an invaluable tool for anyone who doesn't want some topic discussed at all.

> It has considerably a lot of comments and upvotes

As of this comment it has 100 upvotes and 400 comments.

That alone, regardless of subject matter and guidelines keeps it from the front page as the placement algorithm favours posts with more upvotes than comments.

Threads that attract many many comments but relatively few upvotes in comparison are weighted down.

HN is nice as a place to have (sometimes) well-informed and moderated discussions about technical things. It would be great to have an equivalent forum for political subjects, but it doesn't exist and probably can't. I'm afraid HN is only hurt by trying to bring it here.

That said, HN is uneven in its treatment of political topics. Some pretty toxic posting is allowed if it follows certain lines while other things can be flagged for just a whiff of going against the grain.

> I'm very sad and hopeless

Well, the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh was driven out of the region by Azerbaijan as the world watched in utter silence.

These things happen.

Morality and ethics are purely theoretical constructs that are meant to be used against your opponent in order to get them to back down. At least that is how they are normally employed in the real world.

HN isn't the appropriate forum for political discussions (at least ones that aren't tech-focused). That's a good thing. We should have a place where we can just talk about tech issues. There's no shortage of other fora where political discussions and arguments are welcomed.

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