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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

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Facebook is a corporation and can 'censor' whoever they like. They are not 'the US'.

Part of the reason why they moderate content is the same reason that a bar owner turfs out people who are rowdy and threatening the other patrons: because the normies will leave and you're left with a bunch of nasty, loud people.

That is, after all, why this site we're on right now is so heavily moderated: it makes for a better user experience.

It turns out that “normies” were people who have the kinds of normal, mainstream beliefs that Facebook has spent the past four years censoring.

The only thing that "turns out" is they wish to curry favor with the incoming administration. FB hasn't been censoring much of anything as far as I can tell; there are all kinds of vile, nasty comments all over it. Just unfriendly, unkind stuff, not even political things. It's probably one reason it's kind of struggling as a platform - that kind of thing isn't much fun.

But is it currying favor? Could just as well be "kiss the ring or you'll see your life's work AT&Ted into oblivion"

Perhaps both: might have started as a pragmatic offer to bury the hatchet, then quickly turned into the never ending firehose of demands of an extortionist who just realized that he still all the cards after the extortee has given in.

The parent's point, is that the incoming administration won the popular vote... they are the 'normies' now.

Most voters don't care much about any of the details of this. They're not terribly unhappy with FB because they're using to keep track of people from high school back in the 90ies, or their families, or local recreation groups or something. Or they're not using it at all because it's for old people like me.

This is all just loud, performative subjugation to the incoming administration, that does take things like attacking trans people and immigrants as good stuff.

I would actually offer they Facebook is changing because their base has grown tired of their antics. My normy friends and family have complained of censorship increasingly over the last year. When I asked why we still use the platform one friend replied: “birthday reminders.” Then I thought that actually does summarize what I use the platform for. Not a great prospect for a company.

What sorts of conversations are you attempting to engage in that it is 'censoring' you? It seems pretty rare to me - even in heated exchanges.

There is a campaign to capitalize on the idea that right wing people are censored.

And therefore all Americans are censored.

This fight has been fought before, at the dawn of moderation. It’s been fought here on HN. Back when people used to hold libertarian beliefs openly. “The best ideas rise to the top”. No, they frikking dont. The most viral ideas, the most adaptive ideas - those are the ones that survive.

Everyone learned that moderation is needed, that hard moderation is the only way to prevent spaces from attracting emotional arguments, harassment, stalking, and hate speech.

Maybe this time its different.

Moderation is both thankless, soul crushing, and traumatic. Mods r/neworleans effectively became first responders on Jan 1st. I know mods see everything from dead baby pictures, burning bodies, accidental deaths, to worse.

IF this works, and reduces the need for mods, great! My suspicion is that it’s going to radicalize more people, faster. Its going to support the creation of more demagogues, and further reduce our ability to communicate with each other.

49.8% to 48.3% of the popular vote.

That's a pretty thin advantage, and still barely not an outright majority.

Nearly all the levers of control of the US government to almost no control over the US government: that's a massive advantage. I can't help believing this, not the popular vote, is the motivation.

Exactly. Particularly the power of the incoming President to create bad PR (with 50% of the country) and the House to haul people into public testimony and yell at them.

Not to mention the federal money spigot.

Big companies aren't stupid and are largely amoral.

That's the silver lining through all of that: when right-wing ideologues start imposing their own groupthink model on social media, it stops being fun and people start to leave. Just look at Twitter. It's just not as fun anymore on there.

I see what you’re saying, but I also think the user demographics of Hacker News reduce the likelihood of moderation to begin with.

I don’t know if that’s true. SV culture has always been a very big tension between monied military-industrial types and (eventually also monied) antiwar hippies.

It’s well-documented in SV’s military history, as well as recently, where Apple wasn’t involved in FAA702 illegal spying on americans (PRISM) until after the famously anti-establishment Jobs died.

The SV culture seems to have shifted a bit rightward (as has the whole country, tbh) but the tension is still there, and the social conflict remains (although I think there are other factors, not the least of which is the skill and grace of @dang, that keep people on the better side of their behaviors here).

I agree with what you're saying about SV, especially the military-industrial types. I'm not entirely sure what the makeup of HN demographics is, and would like to know. I have a suspicion that it's not just folks in SV. I also should have clarified more. In my opinion, the discourse here is more civil than on other platforms. I would suggest that has something to do with a combination of education and niche interests that attract a different user base. So maybe not in terms of factual correctness, but certainly in terms of the ability to have a civil conversation.

I think you are like a fish who isn't aware of the water it's swimming in.

HN doesn't need much moderation, because the discourse is so civil here [narrator voice: because of the good moderation].

At scale, the long term community civility balance point is likely dominated by the average user's willingness to change their behavior as a result of peer feedback.

The HN userbase, feedback tools, karma-level-locked tools, and new users' personalities seem to create decent outcomes.

Which is to say, if someone acts like an asshat, folks let them know (either through downvotes, flags, or replies), and they modify their behavior to be closer to the community norm.

That said, I'm aware I don't see a lot of the most egregious stuff the Good Ship Dang torpedoes. Or what I expect are non-zero repeat trolls.

And honestly, the fact is that outside of very nerdy street cred, there's little incentive to actively manage discourse for commercial purposes on HN.*

* Outside of, you know, cloudflare tailscale rust (any other crawler alarms I can trip)

That’s a rather reductionist and slightly disparaging point of view. Moderation has its place I never said it didn’t, but do you really think that moderation is the only thing keeping this place from being 4chan? I think you have one deeply entrenched opinion and are ignoring that these are very different platforms.

HN is heavily moderated through a number of mechanisms: explicit community guidelines, community moderation (through voting), and active automated and manual moderation.

I think all of this working in conjunction is why it has remained a pretty great community for almost two decades. And I think that's a really impressive feat. I don't think it was accomplished via "a combination of education and niche interests that attract a different user base".

Indeed, I think HN has gotten better over time, even somewhat so in absolute terms, but very starkly relative to the deterioration of everything else. For example, back in the day, when twitter was first getting big in tech, a lot of people felt that it was a healthier place to discuss those topics than HN. I was never completely convinced of that, and have always been more active here than on twitter, but it was at least a very reasonable thing to think for awhile, IMO. But now I think it would be pretty crazy to think that twitter is healthier than HN. Similarly with similar communities on reddit.

I dunno, maybe there are some healthier spaces on mastodon or blue sky or threads or something now, but at least to me, HN has maintained a fairly stable fairly decent level of discourse for a very long time, and I don't think it is a result of luck or magic, but rather of hard and tireless work moderating the community.

Yea, I’ve become more aware of this since yesterday. I also think I should have provided way more context to what I was saying. I believe I came off as being against moderation but I’m not, I do think there is something unique about the user base just from the quality of content I see compared to other spaces, but I digress. I appreciate your thoughts and it gave me something to think about.

Yeah, and I probably should have figured out a more tactful way to make the point I was making. I wanted it to be more like a "you're one of today's lucky 10,000!"[0] to point out that I think you've been swimming in water without knowing it[1], but I think it ended up just being condescending.

0: https://xkcd.com/1053/

1: https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ (kind of blog spam, but this is the only place I found that has the full transcript, the audio, and other useful links)

I thought that’s what the reference was. I think it all worked out in the end.

Last I ran the numbers, which was quite a few years ago, about 10% of HN posts were coming from IP addresses correlated to Silicon Valley (well, the Bay Area with a relatively wide radius). About 50% were coming from the US, and so on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16633521 (March 2018)

I should check again.

Thanks @dang. Turned on showdead. I will say that I was completely unaware of the moderation efforts here and appreciate having this pointed out to me. I like this option too. As far as transparency goes I don’t think it gets much better than this.

Showdead doesn’t work on stories AFAIK, just comments.

For stories on the front page, I made https://orangesite.sneak.cloud.

Of course it works on stories. There are eight right now on https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Oh, I meant on the frontpage. I am quite curious about stuff “popular” enough to make it out of newest and into the top30, but off topic/rulebreaking enough to get nuked (either by mods or by flags).

Thanks for this!

i'm not from silly valley, but its the dominant voice here.

some of my downvotes are from bad tone, overreaction, hyperbole... some are because of the silly valley culture not realising they are a bunch of deluded maniacs, or just producing absolute garbage products.

its mostly the former.

as for demographics... well, i'm a single data point, but HN has a wide reach. its why a lot of us are here imo.

Do you have showdead on? There is definite moderation going on, but a lot of it is collectively imposed (down votes, flagging). But, if you have your HN account set to show dead posts, you’ll see that even with this demographic there are still a good number of low quality posts.

I read with showdead on. I feel like people don't get modded for opinions here. Usually if the comments are dead it's because something is perceived as ad hominem, hostile, aggressive, violent, etc. It's usually the tone that gets them modded out and the content of the message, and a polite version of the same statement would stand.

There are outliers of course, but that's the general vibe.

> I feel like people don't get modded for opinions here.

Agreed. That's why I used the term "low quality". The comments that get downvoted or flagged are usually either blatant spam/trolling or rude. If someone makes a quality argument, regardless of the opinion, it generally sticks around. I'll even up-vote comments I disagree with, if the author is making a good-faith effort. Not everyone does that, but enough people do and do so often enough that it helps to keep a complete hive-mind at bay (about most topics...).

But, I think that it's that simple level of moderation (which, I consider to still be moderation) that helps to keep discourse around here civil and interesting...

Yes, there are some threads that start where you just know nothing good will come from it, and in those cases we do see some admin moderation (hi @dang!). But, even then, I think the idea is that when discussing some topics, the thread will invariably end up going sideways. Those are the topics that end to get immediately flagged. And that's okay with me, because who has time for that, when we have so many other, more interesting things to argue (civilly) about?

I do now. Good point. I haven’t been on here very long and should have been more aware before saying something thats incorrect.

That user has six karma and therefore does not have showdead on.

There's no karma threshold for turning showdead on.

That is correct. Possibly would change my perspective. Honestly a lot of these comments have and I do appreciate the input.

Facebook has said it was pressured by the Biden administration to censor topic like covid. This is as clear cut first amendment case as you will ever find.

If it's so clear cut then why did SCOTUS throw that case out?

>Writing for a liberal-conservative coalition of six justices, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that neither the five individuals nor the two states who sued the government had legal standing to be in court at all.

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/26/nx-s1-5003970/supreme-court-s...

I short: because it wasn't Facebook that brought the case.

>She said they presented no proof to back up their claims that the government had pressured social media companies like Twitter and Facebook into restricting their speech. “Unfortunately,” she said, the Fifth Circuit court of appeals “relied on factual findings that are “clearly erroneous.”

Those next two sentences from your article seem to contradict your assertion that it was because it wasn't Facebook that brought the case.

And we all know that the first amendment can never be immoral, not even when a tidal wave of deliberate propaganda is causing millions of people to die.

Yes, the lies the administration told about masks are one of the worst things done this century. There should be a reckoning for officials who lie to us for our own good.

Your being down voted is amazingly ironic for a topic on the politicization of fact checking. There are hundreds of comments here talking about how objective facts exists and the correctness of fact-checking. You reiterate the statement of the Facebook CEO and what that statement entails and you are moderated.

But facts are facts right?

Zuckerberg did say Facebook was pressured by the Biden administration to censor covid misinformation, and the Hunter Biden laptop story [0], [1], [2] (multiple left-wing references for good measure). If Zuckerberg is telling the truth, that is a clear cut first amendment violation.

A private company can censor whatever it wants (mostly) but not at the behest of the government, there's law against that.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxlpjlgdzjo

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/m...

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