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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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.

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.

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