It doesn't feel like it's suppressing the news. Can you give examples of suppression? I'd say hacker news is very open to contrary ideas and disagreements.
Everything is not political, and this statement itself is flamebait. Take a look at posts on the current homepage. Most are pure tech with no politics. Some are political with a tech angle but not flame wars.
It simply isn't the frontpage, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. How you guys turn this into sinister suppression continues to escape me.
Edit: perhaps this will help:
HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister. It's essential to the operation of the site.
(copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46366656)
Edit: since I can’t reply because my account was throttled for “posting too past” with a whopping 5 comments in the last 24 hours. Allow me to paste it here…
It would probably help if I were to bring a bit more specificity to my accusations here so we aren’t just talking about an abstract concept.
I’m making the claim:
1. The active page (what people are actually engaging with) and the front page (mods choice) regularly are regularly out of sync not just in general but in very specific and consistent ways.
2. There is a small group of people who intentionally use the flagging functionality in ways that have absolutely zero to do with the rules as they are written. People are incredibly open about this on a regular basis.
3. We are left with a de facto situation where that same small group are able to effectively censor what the rest of the community is allowed to talk about.
4. The moderation team seems to operate on the idea that everyone is just acting in good faith despite evidence to the contrary.
5. When the discrepancies between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality occur they are very rarely corrected by the moderation team and I don’t know what other conclusion to draw other than you seem to think that things are going great as they are and there’s no need to change anything.
6. You say the active page isn’t a secret but people are always saying they had no idea it existed. Surely you have some actual hard analytics numbers to show what percentage of logged in users visit the active page? I presume it’s in the single digits percentage wise but I’m open to being told otherwise.
The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. In fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.
But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.
When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.
From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.
I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.
I haven't looked up the number of users who visit the /active page because I don't accept the premise of your question. Of course fewer users look at it than the frontpage; otherwise it would be the frontpage. This is just another variation of the mandate argument.
I’m going to wrap this up here. You unfortunately responded in exactly the way I’d expected to just hand wave away everything, find reasons to not respond to any of the points and then seemed to misrepresent what I was even asking for.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.
Life is hard enough already and I’m not looking to make it worse for you. I hope you have a nice holiday season and good luck out there.
I'm not disinterested in answering your questions—that's why I've been replying repeatedly! Nor am I interested in making hand-wavey responses; that would be a waste of time. We must be working with different assumptions, though, because I feel like I'm answering your questions and you feel like I'm not.
If you want to try again, I'd be happy to, but maybe we could take a different approach? I would like to know what principle you care about here. What principle are we failing to abide by, that you think we ought to?
That's kind of the point of having different pages; if they were expected to be the same thing, there would just be one page.
Footers are very rarely useful and I don't know anyone who habitually reads them. They usually contain useless but technically required legal information. Meanwhile the lists you actually want people to use are in the header.