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Ask HN: Recent censorship on HN?
I've noticed that a lot of stories regarding a certain US political figure (who I won't mention here) have been silently killed recently.
Is this HN mods enforcing policy, a rogue agent abusing their power, an organized attempt to limit discourse (as happens in Russia) or something else entirely?
In any case it's not very transparent what's occurring. What are people's thoughts?
- onion2k 11y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Political discussion online pretty much always tumbles in to a flamewar. HN is better off without it in my opinion.
- detaro 11y agoAt least those in your submission history are flagkilled, -> enough users clicked the flag link on them, as you can see from the [flagged] in the title (if you have showdead enabled in your profile, they still appear in listings). Not everything is a conspiracy.
- jsingleton 11y agoSo I guess the question is if this is organic and these are real users or if they are bots controlled by someone with an agenda. BTW you don't see [flagged] on your own posts. They look normal but are simply absent if not logged in. Similar to hell-banning.
- mtmail 11y agoIt's real users. I frequent the new submissions page a lot and I would've flagged all three submission (I wasn't online then). My reasoning is that Drumpf is not HN material. Same with Leonardo not winning an Oscar, Kane tweeting about his new studio album or the superbowl. Even with school shootings and terrorist attacks only very few articles make the frontpage. It's not disagreement with the campaign (I enjoyed the show on youtube) or political agenda, just trying to keep quality up. My guide is https://news.ycombinator.com/best https://news.ycombinator.com/best [edit: on slow work day (weekend) I probably look at 75% of submissions and flag 5 maximum. Flagging comments is very very rare. It needs several users to flag to become active, I don't know personally or collaborate with others users on flagging.]
- detaro 11y agoThere are 9 Trump-related submissions in the last 24 hours alone that haven't been flagged. And at least for the flags I set (I flagged some drumpf-browser-extension at least once), I can tell you that I'm not a bot and don't have a particular agenda ;) I don't think there is any reason to believe those to be not organic.
- seren 11y agoIt could also be people flagging. The US presidential elections certainly have a worldwide impact but not everyone outside of US is interested by the minutia of the campaign, especially when reading HN. Edit : I interpreted that you were talking about Trump (or Clinton) but I might be wrong...
- stray 11y agoSomething else entirely. HN is not reddit. US political figures are uninteresting here -- unless they've invented a new geospatial-temporal database or something.