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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

I've been wondering, why isn't /active in the top nav bar?

It's been under /lists practically since the site started, when /lists was just a dump of interesting rollups 'pg could think of. There's probably less thought put into its placement than you think.

HN is tries (and mostly succeeds) to discourage controversial topics.

Does it? The rules seem to suggest that the intent is to discourage arguments and grandstanding in favor of discussions, and many controversial topics and posts tend to end up as shouting matches in the comments.

I could name 10 widely held societal opinions that would instantly get flagged and likely your account banned if you mention a few times. Very hive mind place here

Can you cite any evidence of anybody being banned for the societal opinions they’ve expressed here?

HN wants polite discussion which lends itself well to science and technology topics. Get farther away into history or politics where opinion comes in, then it becomes impossible to debate because arguments that disagree with the hive mind (upper middle class, intelligent, center-left technology professionals) get downvoted and flagged because of popularity.

This just isn’t a site for arguing politics, if you do it too much with opinions different from the hive mind you get banned for disruptive behavior

Did you mean to post this as a reply elsewhere? You made the claim that people are banned for certain opinions and I asked for more information on that.

I’m not going to cite evidence, the evidence is my lived experience posting controversial opinions here for years. Try it yourself and see!

Except… you aren’t banned?

You will get banned if you speak too controversially, but the bigger issue is you get downvoted for wrong-think, but that’s the nature of HN and probably why it has survived so long

Can you cite any example of anyone being banned ever for voicing a controversial opinion?

These guys are never able to cite examples. Every time the conversation comes up, they fly in with a vague innuendo, "oh, you know those topics--I'm not going to say it!" plus a "trust me bro" and then fly off without actually getting specific.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

you'd have to do additional analysis to find which accounts stopped posting after the linked warnings though. It's not usually the opinion itself that's the problem, but that users with controversial opinions have other things going on, so the controversial opinion is often delivered in a “wake up sheeple” flamebait persecution complex “in smart and everyone here is an idiot” style, which isn’t conducive to constructive debate.

The evidence there seems to make my point? Those people aren’t being warned for the content of their opinions, they’re being warned not to engage in flamewars or insults or other forms of incivility.

My claim isn’t “nobody gets banned from HN”, it’s “nobody gets banned from HN for having unpopular opinions”.

The parallel comment has very nearly invoked Godwin’s law, so I guess I’ll concede that if your opinion is “a group of people should be killed”, then yea, expressing that opinion would likely end in a ban. We can debate how much of that ban is for the opinion vs calling for the murder of other humans.

HN has at least several almost occasionally "active" shadowbanned accounts that like to literally call for jews to be gassed.

I'd call that controversial.

If you don't have showdead on, you should.

What opinions do you want to share that are going to get you banned here?

Which controversial topic do you want to hear my hot take on?

My bet is that what gets people banned is repeatedly being disrespectful or rude, not the opinions they’re disrespectful or rude about.

We have a great example via the flagged reply in this comment tree, where somebody is complaining about being silenced and their example is full of rambling invective yelling at the moderator.

I'm just curious what opinions you hold that will get you banned for typing them out.

Religious wars like emacs vs vim are common, so that kind of controversy shows up, but for example anything related to Elon tends to get insta buried.

Basically the topics you might see in mainstream news are usually out.

> Basically the topics you might see in mainstream news are usually out.

Well yea, that’s officially part of the guidelines: “ 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.”

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

I meant before the DOGE stuff: the technical discussions on his claims about Tesla’s future capabilities, purchase of twitter and latter management, etc.

I am generally very happy with HN’s moderation, but I do feel some borderline topics that have been banned or buried missed interesting discussion. I don’t fault those responsible for not wanting to deal with the potential mess though.

It’s a shame. I distinctly remember a DOGE topic about assertions Musk was making that were easily explained by COBOL oddities. There was a great discussion about it here with knowledgable folks chiming in. And then it got flagged into oblivion. Mainstream news covered it but without any of the knowledge HN users had.

I tend to flag submissions about these kinds of political topics because it becomes clear in context that they're being submitted primarily to provide space for complaining about a political outgroup. This never leads anywhere productive. Best case, everyone agrees and they just stew about how awful the world supposedly is. Common case, people are forced to confront the fact that other people have different values, cultural assumptions etc. and can reasonably come to wildly different conclusions, even starting from the same evidence, because a lot of this is nowhere near as objective a matter as it appears. Worst case, the disagreeing people in the hated outgroup also feel that their position has been grossly misrepresented in the submission.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com