[flagged]
Commenters here need to follow the rules, and the rules don't go away when the topic is a tough one. On the contrary, they apply more, as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html makes clear.
That's understandable, because the people who feel passionately about any topic (call it X) always feel like X is vastly underrepresented, and even "censored aggressively", on HN. We can say things like "frontpage space is the scarcest resource" and "we can't have too much repetition" till the cows come home, but it won't take this feeling away. Even when X is literally the most discussed topic on HN, we get people claiming that X is being censored aggressively—it's not even uncommon [2]. This is a function of how people feel and nothing else.
[1] I'm not comparing this to the suffering of the people in the actual situation. That is obvious of course, but since someone will accuse me of doing that if I don't say this, I'm saying this.
[2] If you want an example, this one is engraved in my memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. How someone could turn the most-discussed topic on the entire site into "not any mention" and "censored aggressively" still boggles my mind.
Edit: I think it’s also important to be conscious of the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics. “Hackernews” is not a neutral zone. It is directly associated with the most powerful forces in the world today. I’m not casting judgment because I work in this industry to. But it undoubtedly raises serious questions about the moderation (automated or otherwise) of speech around these topics on here.
> maybe some additional transparency would be helpful.
No amount of transparency will help, alas, for two reasons: (1) people decide these things based on how they feel, and (2) the measure-zero internet law: no matter how often you repeat something, the set of users who receive the information has measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
> the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics.
I don't remotely believe that YC has played a "central role" in any of that, but even if it had, Hacker News is moderated by me and tomhow, and no one at YC has ever put any political pressure on us. If you're talking about HN moderation, that's who you're talking about—and we're quite accessible and willing to answer questions and address objections. (That's why I've posted 81k comments over the last 10+ years, what-am-i-doing-with-my-life-god-help-me.)
p.s. I've always felt that people being bored at work are HN's core constituency, so thank you!
I don’t want hacker news to become Twitter. I don’t want hacker news to become a 24/7 critical theory struggle session.
All I can do as one person, acting within the guidelines, is to exercise my ability to flag stuff too focussed on politics.
I have so many places I can go if I want to read and discuss Israel and Palestine. I don’t need another, and I especially don’t want to lose the one spot I have that’s relatively free of it.