Ask HN: Who Are the HN Censors? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who Are the HN Censors?

7 pointsAlbertCory24 comments

If we look through "new" we see lots of stories that are already Dead. For some, there's no obvious reason why they needed to be killed (as opposed to just being not voted up). For example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41025897

So who are these users going through the New submissions and Flagging stories? Shouldn't they at least have a daily limit, or be charged some karma points, or something?

View on HN

[flagged] LOL

The responses could have been reasonable and calm, like OP was, e.g.

1) You know, he might have something there. Maybe we should be more transparent about the ways we moderate stuff. -- OR --

2) Let's just circle the wagons and attack this person with everything we have, except the actual data he asked for. This IS a little club, after all.

It's too bad that you choose (2).

([EDIT] Mere speculation but) The user account for the example you use has a history of self-promotional posting for that site (all of the postings for a site whose domain is denominations come from the user named denominations? Not very subtle.) and a couple of low quality comments. Seems like a legitimate [dead] by the HN moderators to me.

So it was you?

As others have pointed out, [dead] without [flagged] means that HN moderators killed the post. And, the last time I checked, I am not a moderator.

You didn't answer the question.

No problem, I'll simplify it for you: it was not me. [EDIT removed unnecessary sarcasm]

Maybe you haven't checked it recently enough. At this time and age truly everything is possible, maybe now you are a mod.

I do have the ability to flag and vouch. I'm pretty sure if there were a Leaderboard for that, I'd be WAY down the list.

I think stories which are marked "[dead]" right after posting (and not "[flagged] [dead]") were killed by algorithm - I guess possible reasons are shadow-banned user, shadow-banned domain, "bad" IP address, ...

Also, from the guidelines:

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

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

The first rule of censorship is: we don't talk about censorship.

Good thing none of this is censorship, then.

What do you call it?

Moderation.

Censorship assumes you have the constitutional right to free speech on this platform.

You don't.

Careful, you wouldn’t want this post to get flagged, would you?

Dang, and some other admins, and a few aLgOriTHmS

There are more users flagging things than algorithms and admins combined, I'd argue. The only things I see get auto-flagged are accounts that have likely been tagged as spammers on the server-side.

If the stats were published, we'd know that for sure.

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