This post went from mid 20s on the front page to 37 on 2nd page in a matter of less than 5 minutes. What would cause that? Total points didn't go down. It isn't flagged.
“Of these four interventions (deleting, killing, burying, and downweighting), the only one that moderators do frequently is downweighting. We downweight posts in response to things that go against the site guidelines, such as when a submission is unsubstantive, baity or sensational. Typically such posts remain on the front page, just at a lower rank.”
My personal encounter with the situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44939626
There isn’t some secret cabal of MAGA types censoring you.
Thanks for deciding that without asking.
Stories about the Therac-25 - badly using a computer to control a radiation machine - are fine and often end on the front page. It killed 6 people.
Stories about DOGE - badly using computers, big data, AI to save "trillions" of USD - are apparently not fine. DOGE is killing tens of thousands of people, put Musk is close to Trump, so talking about it is "political" and therefore there is no interest in showing on the front page that DOGE's claims are wrong by several orders of magnitude.
Stories about Theranos - badly using computers to automate lab diagnostics - used to be fine. We talked at length about how Elizabeth Holmes was hailed as a genius, then how fishy it seemed, then the whistleblowers came and blew the lid off the deception that was going on. Holmes was condemned and sent to detention.
Will we be forbidden to talk about Theranos once she gets her pardon from Trump[0]? Because it would be "political"?
Are we forbidden to talk about Trevor Milton - co-founder and CEO of bankrupt electric truckmaker Nikola Motors, pardoned in March - was a fraudster[1], when he will inevitably launch a new startup? Will any mention of it be flagged because "we don't want no political flame wars"?
[0]https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/06/27/310688... [1]https://www.axios.com/2025/03/31/trump-pardons-bitmex-crypto...
Talk about it all you want. Don’t be surprised when people start rolling their eyes at you like we roll our eyes at the weird uncle who always ruins family gatherings by bringing up politics at the dinner table.
This is the same tired melodramatic trope that’s played out every time anyone even remotely to the right wins an election in the United States.
It should be no surprise that many people, myself included, aren’t interested in “discussion and debate” that amounts to “anyone who is disagrees with me is cartoonishly evil”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615336
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614018
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38532483
"The beam of thine eye", heh.
But you don't live in areas where masked armed people disappear people in vans while shouting "ICE", so I guess you don't notice - and as you blank out any discussion of it as "political", as long as it doesn't happen to you personally, you will keep refusing to admit anything is happening.
Anything like that list:
Plenty of these hackers are aiding and abiding the slide. If not actively greasing the skids personally. Thiel and Musk are minor gods here.
There are enough MAGA adherents on HN with flagging privileges for this to be an actual problem. HN just does not aggressively police such brigading.
It takes only five flags for an article to be pushed down far enough that it might as well not exist and less than 10 for it to be killed entirely.
I think a lot of people don’t come here for politics and would like to filter some of the noise out.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43837358
Whoever was in the shadows pulling the puppet strings however is another story...
To be fair though: Biden should have stepped down halfway his term and handed the reins to Harris. That would have gotten the USA used to a woman as president and it might have saved a lot of misery. But we are where we are. Whoever voted for this grifter owns it wholly. Of course they'll all pretend they never had those yardsigns in the first place.
I'm not convinced that Harris would've been much better. She was given essentially one job: border Czar and she failed miserably at that. Although, I guess the open borders policy that encouraged unprecedented illegal immigration was intentional. and probably part of the greater globalist agenda. She is a DEI hire, chosen only because of her gender and skin color. Biden literally said he was going to choose a woman of color to be his vice president. Bear in mind that Harris was the first major Democrat candidate to be forced out of the primary, so she was not at all chosen on merit.
Despite what you hear, Trump is a much more popular president than Biden was here and he is mostly doing what people elected him to do. He's had a few missteps for sure, for example he needs to just release the Epstein files already and please stop talking shit about annexing Greenland and Canada. He also needs to stop licking Israel's boots so much. That being said, he's doing a fantastic job with securing the border, foreign policy (he's helped to secure several peace agreements... https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-where-donald-trump-has-he...), and so far the economy has been noticeably better than under Biden. Also, the way he handled the assassination attempt (that the media has done their best to memory hole) was incredible. He jumped up, blood dripping from his ear shouting fight, fight, fight! That picture of him with his fist raised and the secret service agents holding him back is just so powerful and iconic, just very Presidential. (https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/conte...)
He's also much more transparent than the previous administration. Biden would give extremely rare, short, scripted interviews with the press where he literally had maps of who to call on and what to reply back to their scripted questions. Even then, he would often botch the press interviews. In contrast, Trump gives frequent, lengthy, off the cuff unscripted interviews. He also, for good or for bad, posts frequently to social media with his real honest opinions and positions. People like that he has a certain air of authenticity about him. He's not the typical American politician that dances around questions and speaks only with perfect, politically correct, focus group tested language.
The news media in America is heavily biased towards the left and does everything they can to cast him in a negative light, so it is important to view everything you hear about him through that lens.
We’ll see what happens in 6 months as you said, but so far I don’t regret my vote.