Do you think there's censorship on HN?

> if anyone else is surprised by the lack of coverage on the front page with regards to the recent wars

HN user for 10(?) years. It's not surprising at all to me. It's off-topic here. Plenty of other websites cover the stories, TV covers it. I come here to escape the 24/7 news cycle. Celebrity deaths hardly make the frontpage, if the inventor of an operating system dies you'll top spot and 2000 comments. It's not that users don't care, it's more the expectation that people get their news from multiple sources (websites, aggregator, forums) and not every forum needs to cover all topics.

There is a link at the bottom of the page to the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) which says:

"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."

Some have tried to argue that these stories gratify intellectual curiosity and are therefore on topic but this view does not seem to have been accepted by the site moderators or user base.

Wars are off topic for Hacker News, this is not a general news site. So they're probably being removed quickly.

Turn on show dead then hit the more button. Eventually you'll see what either gets deaded/flagged by the system/community, and you'll start noticing themes. I started paying real attention to it around the Hong Kong handover and protests.

Of course there is. Why won’t they censor stuff they might not like? It’s a private website of a private entity monetising all of us. The more you post here, the more value you create for them. So they try to balance here, but since there’s no moderation log, things can be hid on a whim.

On top of that, personally, I saw plenty of evidence for a clearly biased approach, even despite them claiming otherwise. Why won’t they claim it, after all?

Let the front page algo do its thing. It has a purpose, and that’s a purpose that a lot of people like.

That said, if you want to catch active posts that don’t make it to the front page or don’t stay long, then I strongly recommend:

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

I have actually made this my HN bookmark, as it has a higher concentration of discourse that I’m personally interested in.

I'd say "yes, totally". And that's not a bad thing. Some topics are, by their nature, inflammatory, and prone to spark low-quality, low-value discussions. And there's no particular reason why we need to have those discussions here. Nobody ever said HN was meant to be the "every thing to every one" forum of the Internet. Some things just belong on Reddit, or Slashdot,or 4Chan, or whatever.

of course there is censorship on HN but this is true in any space where people can publicly communicate with each other. It is a fantasy to believe free speech actually exists in any place, what is different is which topics are taboo, and the manner in which such taboos are enforced (de-ranked, shadow banned, public ban, post removal, de-platforming, gulag)

HN is not a general discussion forum. It is a subforum related to SDE. As such, it already hosts a very wide range of news. I would like to find a general forum where the same HN croud comments.

Yes and I'm quite appreciative of all the work the moderators here do. Keeping the signal to noise ratio high is hard work.

Nobody is perfect, and even if they were, they'd never match expectations precisely.

Censorship is rampant on HN. Whether that's a good or bad thing is a matter of perspective.

Yes, there is, and it's not as innocent as many commenters here seem to believe.

Have a look at my favorites [0], and you can see recent popular stories which I noticed were flagged (some were unflagged, some were just wiped off the page without being marked as flagged). A lot of those stories are supremely relevant to HN's supposed remit; from good sources and generating high quality discussion... There are some definite themes there - Musk, DOGE, etc.

And this thread will be flagged too, if people start getting into the discussion. Discussing HN censorship is not "generally" allowed as its own post, ie, [1, 2 etc]. This helps explain why so many people think there isn't censorship here at all - people don't see the people complaining, and don't see the flagged/disappeared posts, so they don't think it's happening.

It's very easy for a few users to flag any story they choose, which means that it's very easy for mods to blame users for the stories getting censored - "the community chooses, not us". Discussing how that works is not up for debate though, and posts about HN's flagging system are removed whenever they come up.

While this is going on a long time here for certain topics, ie, US torturers [3], it has ramped up wildly here in the last few months.

When you look at Garry Tan or Paul Graham's recent Twitter feeds, and read the weird support for the DOGE team, it's hard to imagine that there isn't top-down suppression of the stuff you'll see in [0] (which is just a list of stories I've personally noticed being censored - there's certainly far more).

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=mandmandam

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43054368

2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781604

3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569

There doesn't seem to be any overt censorship, however the ranking algorithms play a role in making it appear that some stories are being deliberately buried.

The 'official' explanation that I got from Dang was that political posts hit automated software filters because of flagging and down voting which cause them to disappear from the front page.

Separately, sometimes the moderation team disables these filters on certain posts, but it's not often.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487014

There is censorship but not in the traditional sense. Submissions and comments are down-voted and flagged based on the beliefs and world views of the majority HN crowd and this creates an echo chamber of sorts based on the majority demographics of HN and has little to do with community guidelines of which are rarely followed. For example is something is political yet aligns with the majority strong political views it will be upvoted.

People that do not live within the accepted majority world views will feel isolated, ostracized, ignored and censored. As an example I self-censor 98% of my views here. Instead I share them on smaller semi-private sites that research and discuss this site and a handful of other sites. In my opinion that is a decent path to balance ones experience and help avoid being gas-lit and face smacked. One can create their own private or semi-private bubbles and onboard people that feel ostracized and censored. Some use Mastodon for this. Some create their own self hosted chat and forum servers. I know, more echo chambers. People can build their identity on their own servers and use sites like Facebook, Tweeter, Reddit, HN as a public disposable cache to share specific thoughts and then discuss the responses on their own servers. People can choose whether or not to permit search engines, AI and other bots on their own servers. People can also permit or block any topics they wish on their own servers.

I think it can good for ones mental health to not try to fit entirely into a majority demographic especially when so many cultures are trying to mold themselves to fit a shared community. I think this is especially important when sites like HN become popular enough to attract paid agent provocateurs and state level actors along with their victims that either consciously or sub-consciously attempt to keep narratives on a specific and popular "acceptable" path.

Hypothetically speaking in Minecraft a worse scenario be malicious UI front-ends to HN that could subtly manipulate votes and flags using legitimate accounts without their knowledge given the majority here are on cell phones. Even dang would not detect this behavior. This is just one reason why people should review their flag and vote history and why phone apps should be de-compiled rather than just trusting source code. One should not trust sandbox analyzers as the code can detect what it is running on. This is one reason I like to MitM my own traffic.

No, HN is not run by a government.

Political stuff tends to sink quickly for a number of reasons. I don't think its censorship.

For a little while a few years ago a lot of people got banned for talking about politics too much and that's calmed down now. If anything HN has become more opened not less.

I don’t think there’s a conspiracy afoot. Lots of stuff gets flagged, and hot political topics quickly turn into absolute garbage threads, so I think there’s a lot of us who simply won’t upvote such things. I’d rather read about tech.

Titles with Trump or Musk are often very quickly flagged for sure, other related topics that cast them in a negative light, often in under one minute.

Who or how, I've no idea.

Yes, there is censorship. That much is not a secret and IMO not controversial in itself. Not all censorship is bad. Most of users appreciate some amount of censorship (aka moderation).

As for your observations, it's a mixed bag of factors:

Some sources are by default flagged and need vouching (so penalized). For example 404 Media is penalized because of paywall practices. Meanwhile other apparently worse sites are not flagged. So you could argue there is bias from moderators there. I haven't seen evidence of any algorithmic bias beyond that and promotion of YC-affiliated ads and posts.

Supposedly political rallying is frowned upon and talk about industry role in murdering of civilians gets flagged as off-topic or inflammatory while dang descends from the mountain asking everyone to call their politicians about killing some tax bill stuck, top post on the front page...

Aside from that it seems most of the effective censoring you are seeing are from HN users. For example, there's a well-known anti-blockchain bias in the audience so anything perceived as "pro crypto" easily gets buried. Other certain themes get upvoted hard and fast. It's not hard to see the bias on Israel-Palestine and where it comes from. So some of it is genuine user bias of an echo chamber. Then we have astroturfing: People/organizations/bots actively flagging/downvoting/upvoting certain actors or views for political or anticompetitive purposes. No doubt this happens from all directions (individuals,corps,govt agencies,ngos) and the discrepancies are a difference in numbers and strength. Someone seems to be driving LLM FOMO beyond the organic. Certain moguls in particular seem to have an army of puppets to obstruct and cast smoke to prevent certain things from trending.

I believe at the end of the day while there is certainly at least indirect govt involvement via astroturfing and there are subversive forces manipulating the front page and comments, more than anything else we censor each other and ourselves. The real war is in and of our minds.

this is not the place for it

most people here have apathy towards anything that involves emotions and beliefs

this place only tolerates content that nerds find interesting for a moment (driven by their adhd) only to be talked about for a bit then forgotten the day after.

hacker news is the watercooler of the internet. every line we write is formal way of dunking on each other's intellectual capacity and at end of day we smile nod agree because we are all only here to get paid or get our bare minimum intellectual or social fix

No. You can talk about anything, like tech, or ******** or for example discuss what happened in **** at ********* when the ******* brought ****** down.