4 ms·
Would you consider the greying out and eventual hiding of comments to be censorship? Because then it's not apparent and obvious that the content is there.
by brodouevencode 5y ago
Would you consider the greying out and eventual hiding of comments to be censorship? Because then it's not apparent and obvious that the content is there.
- danShumway 5y agoNo, I don't think so, for the same reason that I don't think it's a violation of free speech or something if I kick someone out of my Discord channel. In fact, it's better than the Discord channel situation, because HN rankings aren't only not determined by a single moderator (votes reflect the people who are on HN and voting at any given moment), you can also still get to the content and post, it's just not by-default visible or promoted. It's censorship in the most technical sense of the word, we are technically repressing someone's voice in a community, but the 1st Amendment guarantees communities and individuals a right to censor through their freedom of association, and downvoting and hiding comments is probably one the least extreme examples of that I can think of. This only becomes a problem with market domination. It's not a problem that Google puts some search results on the 1st page and some on the 2nd, even though most people don't click through to the 2nd page or even think about the fact that it exists. There's literally no other way to do search. It's only a problem because Google controls 90% of the search market.