The one that sent me over the edge was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42917806
A US Bill proposed that could represent jail time for anyone importing AI software/models from China OR exporting AI software/models TO China.
This seemed huge to me, and I genuinely wanted to read the discussion. But when I went back to the post, it had been flagged.
It seems to me there is a concerted effort to stop speech related to certain topics on HackerNews lately.
Has anyone else noticed this?
It's a longstanding principle on HN that proposed bills aren't really on topic unless there's something to prove otherwise. The reason is simple: most proposed bills never amount to anything. (And oftentimes are political stunts.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If attempts to ban DeepSeek in the US actually get anywhere, you can be sure there will be plenty of discussion on HN.
For the first time in over a decade, I've turned on show dead, skip the front page and go directly to the new feed for my tech news.
The same story was discussed in "Proposed bill to make it a crime to download DeepSeek in the US" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904838 12 hours earlier. Some users flag when they see a comment "previously " because it's not easy to mark duplicates. I'm not saying it's a good model.
I don’t buy the “ we don’t talk politics here ” argument. This directly intersects the tech world on multiple levels
1. A subset of HN readers are uninterested in items outside a narrow range of topics and wish to keep HN focused instead of becoming like other forums that grew to cater to broader audiences.
2. Forum moderators may have a financial incentive to ensure that certain topics are discussed more often and other topics are discussed less often.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904838
Yes there been a lot of flagged Musk/Trump-related posts lately, partly due to an aversion of heavily political current events stories, but also there's been a number of discussions with lots of eyeballs, hundreds of upvotes and comments before getting flagged. And that's amidst ten different submissions of the same story about the treasury, USAID, CDC, tariffs, whatever. So it's not nothing. There is some engagement, the discussion maybe then devolved and that's it. Stuff moves fast round here, and there's been a particularly heavy influx of headlines lately, but amidst any influx of attempt to flag things to hell, all is not lost, there's still engagement and sharing.
Ask HN: What's with flagging articles criticizing Musk?
The core issue is that flagging is so much more powerful than upvotes. There isn't a good way to change that without causing other issues.
Before this thread is flagged, let me repost:
I think that what the world's richest tech billionaire is doing to the U.S. tech infrastructure with tech is highly relevant here. We DO have the ambivalent word "hacker" in the site name.
Here's a thread with my comment on "what technology wants", not what Bond Villain sociopaths want.