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Thank you for your perspective. I strongly disagree that important truths are not being silenced, because I saw :multiple: stories about Gina Haspel get removed

Thank you for your perspective. I strongly disagree that important truths are not being silenced, because I saw :multiple: stories about Gina Haspel get removed while under heavy discussion on the front page. I don't have any idea what other important stuff got removed, because there is no way to know. I would have thought that a community of so called tech hackers and entepreneurs could demand some form of logs to know that censorship :really: isn't a problem. > If you want to criticize HN, I suggest that you do it outside of HN. That's truly awful advice. Disallowing criticism is step 1 of bad shit happening. At a minimum it stifles any possible improvement. And it's :always: step 1 of fascism.

wmf 7y ago
Gina Haspel sounds like "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I see some threads about her that are [flagged] but not deleted, so there is some level of accountability there. If your goal is to be the "paper of record" then you have to wade into every controversial topic; I appreciate the fact that HN is not trying to be that and by banning certain topics it allows us to focus our energy elsewhere. Log-based accountability (on the blockchain!) is an interesting idea; unfortunately HN suffers from the same problem as some open source projects where it's a high-profile thing that some people get tons of value from yet it doesn't generate any money to spend on cool new features. In principle I believe that internal criticism and governance are good things, but you absolutely have to separate it into a separate /meta/ section (which HN doesn't have and mods don't intend to ever add) so it doesn't overwhelm the rest of the site and even then it seems to always get flooded with crackpots and (more recently) culture warring. I agree that threads about mass surveillance, Snowden, Assange etc are pretty low-quality but I think it's very difficult to discuss those topics in general. How do you discuss actual conspiracies without opening the door to misleading conspiracy theories? There's no one I would trust, including myself, to moderate or set rules for such a discussion.
- Ackshully 7y ago
  Thank you - I think you've managed to point directly to the heart of the hypocrisy I am seeing. America put the lady who ran a torture center and deleted evidence meant for Congress in charge of the mass surveillance revealed by Assange and Snowden. If that's off topic, then Assange and Snowden ought have been too. As you say, who could we trust to moderate or set rules for discussions like that. At the moment, we are supposedly trusting dang, and I don't. And I can't say that here because it's "off-topic / meta"... Because dang said so. The logic is circular. And while solutions could exist (you mention blockchain logs), and HN is supposedly the community for those very people who would be able to create / understand those solutions (techy hacker entrepeneurs), talking about those solutions :here: is off topic. Is that not a glaring double standard?
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    > "If that's off topic, then Assange and Snowden ought have been too." Assange and Snowden have too many ardent fanboys for their stories to get flagged off the front page but Haspel (I actually had to look up the name to figure out why I was supposed to care about this individual.) doesn't. Mystery solved; case closed.

wmf 7y ago

Gina Haspel sounds like "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I see some threads about her that are [flagged] but not deleted, so there is some level of accountability there. If your goal is to be the "paper of record" then you have to wade into every controversial topic; I appreciate the fact that HN is not trying to be that and by banning certain topics it allows us to focus our energy elsewhere. Log-based accountability (on the blockchain!) is an interesting idea; unfortunately HN suffers from the same problem as some open source projects where it's a high-profile thing that some people get tons of value from yet it doesn't generate any money to spend on cool new features. In principle I believe that internal criticism and governance are good things, but you absolutely have to separate it into a separate /meta/ section (which HN doesn't have and mods don't intend to ever add) so it doesn't overwhelm the rest of the site and even then it seems to always get flooded with crackpots and (more recently) culture warring. I agree that threads about mass surveillance, Snowden, Assange etc are pretty low-quality but I think it's very difficult to discuss those topics in general. How do you discuss actual conspiracies without opening the door to misleading conspiracy theories? There's no one I would trust, including myself, to moderate or set rules for such a discussion.

Ackshully 7y ago
Thank you - I think you've managed to point directly to the heart of the hypocrisy I am seeing. America put the lady who ran a torture center and deleted evidence meant for Congress in charge of the mass surveillance revealed by Assange and Snowden. If that's off topic, then Assange and Snowden ought have been too. As you say, who could we trust to moderate or set rules for discussions like that. At the moment, we are supposedly trusting dang, and I don't. And I can't say that here because it's "off-topic / meta"... Because dang said so. The logic is circular. And while solutions could exist (you mention blockchain logs), and HN is supposedly the community for those very people who would be able to create / understand those solutions (techy hacker entrepeneurs), talking about those solutions :here: is off topic. Is that not a glaring double standard?
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  > "If that's off topic, then Assange and Snowden ought have been too." Assange and Snowden have too many ardent fanboys for their stories to get flagged off the front page but Haspel (I actually had to look up the name to figure out why I was supposed to care about this individual.) doesn't. Mystery solved; case closed.