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Ask HN: Why does HN censor content?
I recently submitted a link to HN:
Seattle Workers Pay for the Minimum Wage (wsj.com)
It was from a reputable source, the WSJ, and the study it references was conducted by the University of Washington.
The article was upvoted quite a few times but then flagged and locked for comments.
Can someone tell me the reasoning behind HN censoring this article?
- swampthinker 9y agoThere was an article that Reid Hoffman wrote about supporting women in VC that was flagged. It was incredibly irritating.
- chatnati 9y agowhich part was? the article or...? :P
- ximeng 9y agoWould be helpful for transparency if it was possible to see a list of flagged articles somewhere.
- detaro 9y agoYou can at least turn on "showdead" in your profile, which doesn't give you one handy list of everything flagged, but flagged (and otherwise killed) submissions and comments are then still visible to you.
- anonymousiam 9y agoI noticed that article disappear just as I tried to promote it. HN moderators have previously expressed support for universal income so it's probably a case of reality interfering with their world view. Thus they deny reality to maintain their world view.
- chatnati 9y agoIf you actually consider the financial implications of this, where is the money coming from? There was a write-up a while ago, an economist dug into the possibility, and did some simple income projections vs amount taken in tax each year. I don't have the URL available but the summary was - you'd pay people for 3 months out of the year - and the country would be bankrupt.
- anonymousiam 9y agohttps://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2017/07/03/busted-emails-show-seattle-mayor-worked-with-berkeley-to-preempt-study-criticizi-n2348804 https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2017/07/03/busted-em...
- detaro 9y ago[Flagged] is done by user flags, and while I of course can't know why other users flagged something, here are possible reasons: a) WSJ has a paywall where the Google workaround often doesn't work b) political topics always are at risk, especially if repeated: c) That there have been 5 submissions with together >300 comments on that topic in the last week: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=seattle+Minimum+Wage&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=seattle+Minimum+Wage&sort=byDa... , which seem to discuss the same study, making your submission clearly a duplicate (at least from what I can see from the text teaser, thanks to a) I can't actually read the full content)
- pcarolan 9y agoThanks, a) doesn't seem like it should matter, that's the way the web is going. b) i saw this article as more scientific than political. This is the closest thing you get to a controlled experiment in economics research. c) Fair. I didn't catch that this had been posted. I did a simple search with the 'past' link and didn't find anything.It seems like a flagging should require a rationale from the flagger.
- pliny 9y agofrom the FAQ[1]: >Are paywalls ok? >It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. The implication is that paywalls without workarounds (like WSJ) aren't OK. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- tomhoward 9y agoI can always read WSJ articles by searching for the title in Facebook search then clicking through from the official WSJ posting. That workaround is often mentioned in the HN discussion threads, so it's fairly well known.
- majewsky 9y agoIf this method accessible for people who don't want to use Facebook? If not, then I would not consider it a general circumvention measure.
- pcarolan 9y agoSo this doesn't come off as pithy, I'd like to explain that the reason I submitted this article to HN is that 1) a lot of startups hire minimum wage workers and will be affected by these policies and 2) I wanted to get the HN crowd's $.02 on the debate. It is clearly not clear cut as to the general or specific effects implementing a minimum wage would have, but I was hoping the debate would bring out the nuance. This seemed like a good study with findings contradictory to my original theory of what would happen, in other words a good scientific debate.
- krono 9y agoI always flag these types of posts because I'm so done with US specific political posts
- rhapsodic 9y agoIt's anyone's guess. My guess, based on what I've seen, is that things that stories that serve to debunk left-wing shibboleths are hammered with flags. And then either a moderator or built-in rules kill the submission.
- franciscop 9y agoFrom what I've seen in HN and IMHO, a well expressed opinion on both sides is welcome. If you do have something to add on the other side of a topic those are way better on a comment. Then a civilized discussion happens many times. That is one of the great things of HN! However, any article/comment insulting anyone or any political opinion has its well deserved downvotes. I would expect that on both left-wing and right-wing opinions. I've downvoted comments I agree with and upvoted comments I disagree with, based solely on the respect shown and the quality of them. Note: there are of course always exceptions, my description above is when comparing HN to the rest of the web
- DanBC 9y ago[flagged] means users flagged it. Some people have started flagging anything from WSJ because of the paywall. This topic has been previously discussed on HN.
- lxrbst 9y agopaywall?
- SimonaPaloma 9y agoI am sure this article has touched all the internet people, its really really nice piece of writing on building up new web site http://www.y8gold.com/ http://www.y8gold.com/
- scarface74 9y agoI flag anything from WSJ because of the paywall that can't easily be worked around. Besides that, this topic has been discussed as nauseum on HN.
- RickJWag 9y agoIMHO, Hacker News does not do enough censoring. I'd like HN to be about programming issues. I'd love that. Instead, too often it's about news issues with some political angle, seldom to do with programming. Enough of that and I'll pull it from my RSS reader. I can find my own political content easily enough, I don't need it everywhere.