You can't know the truth about a painful family situation by consuming internet drama. Internet users have their own reasons for engaging in such drama—no doubt rooted in their own painful family situations, and from that point of view their reasons make sense—but none of this discussion is reliable. It is frequently harmful though. Internet users don't pause to consider the harm they may be contributing to, but sometimes it's real.

Given that you can never find out the truth this way, and that the discussion is motivated by other things, and that it can have unintentionally harmful effects, I think the HN users who flag these posts are behaving responsibly.

Processes exist for bringing such topics into public discourse. For example, there's institutional journalism (which has many defects, but on a matter like this I think it's functional)—there are hurdles that have to be overcome to report on such things, and rightly so. And then of course there is the legal system, with its higher standards of due process.

I don't know anything about this specific situation and as mods we haven't been killing those posts, but the HN community has decisively deemed it off topic and I think that's a good call.

To read the claims charitably, it could be that fans of open AI, and Sam Altman jumped to his defense in the ways that toxic fandoms often do to women. It wouldn't surprise me if constant flagging and reporting suppressed her presence on social media.

It also wouldn't be the first time a victim of a public figure received employment backlash for coming forward with their abuse.

I think the real question is though, what did you hope to accomplish by asking your questions?

It's not that different to (substantiated) things I've heard from other people, so… personally, I believe it. The alleged sexual / medical / financial abuse is pretty typical, as is the account hacking. If it helps, New York Magazine has substantiated some of the minor details: https://archive.ph/j4lVw#60%.

Sam Altman is fairly influential, and worse abuses from social media companies are well-documented, so as conspiracy theories go, this "Sam-induced shadowbans" one is quite plausible.*

Technically, nobody is forced to become a sex worker to pay the bills. But people can be forced to choose between bad options in order to pay the bills, and it's not that rare that the other options are worse than online sex work. Especially if you have mental health issues, and a disability that prevents standing-up work. Colloquially, "had to become a sex worker" (or "survival sex work", Annie's actual words) wouldn't be a misrepresentation of that.

*: Devil's advocate: saying the wrong things in the presence of the black box can be enough to get shadowbanned. It's plausible that words involved in discussions of abuse might end up automatically censored by a badly-designed learning-from-user-reports ML system. It's also plausible that many similarly-designed systems would independently end up categorising the same sorts of things as "don't show this to other users". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40435430 (placing blame on user reports coming from Sam Altman's fans) is a stronger theory.

The results are outstanding. No matter what their marketing is, they have produced something incredible.

She posted about it on Twitter: https://x.com/anniealtman108/status/1635704398939832321

There may be other posts, but this is the one that was most widely shared AFAIK