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Are you sure? Are you aware that people are shadowbanned on a daily basis for having wrong viewpoints? HN is only a good discussion forum as long as you do noth

Are you sure? Are you aware that people are shadowbanned on a daily basis for having wrong viewpoints? HN is only a good discussion forum as long as you do nothing more than fidget with the frills of narratives that have been decided elsewhere to be correct. If you fundamentally disagree with some important narrative, even if you're polite and provide evidence, you'll get voted down. Get voted down enough, and HN will rate-limit you, and even trying to continue to participate will be taken as hostile activity, and you'll be shadowbanned. Submit an article that's timely, informative, well-sourced, etc., but goes against the narrative? It'll be flagged without justification. Submit it again? It'll be marked as a dupe, and you're at risk of being shadowbanned. Talking about any of this is against the rules. They think it's "boring" to hear numerous indisputably true examples of their misbehavior. Do it, and you'll be flagged, or shadowbanned.

k4ch0w 5y ago
I don't know, this place feels like the last haven of real conversations going on besides blind. I think people here do a good job with disagreements and provide good evidence to convince others. I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned. Could you provide an examples of where this happened and one of the important narratives? Can you define wrong viewpoints and give an example?
- whatev84583 5y ago
  > I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned. That's fair, but I'm not actually new. If you really joined in 2017, then you're many years newer than I am. Yes, I've been shadowbanned many times. I've lost count. Maybe thirty times? Most of the time it's hard to link to the evidence in such a way that you could see it for yourself. I'd like to link you to submissions of mine that got upvotes and had conversations going on, but were then anonymously flagged without justification, but it's not possible to link to them. It's not possible to see from the outside that an account has been shadowbanned without comparing the behavior of logged-in and non-logged-in accounts. Example of a wrong, unacceptable viewpoint: humanity is not actually on the brink of climate catastrophe due to CO2 emissions. Recently there was a fearmongering article from Nature about climate doom, and I linked to sea level graphs generated by NOAA that showed linear, rather than accelerating change in sea level, and was apparently shadowbanned for that. Obviously, linking to NOAA in support of a climate doom comment would not be a bannable offense. Edit: oh, and I've apparently already been placed in some kind of slow-play mode. I responded about an hour ago, but you can't see it. Are most people aware stuff like this goes on on HN?
- mandmandam 5y ago
  I've a good example for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 Both these posts reached front page, with lively and active discussions. Both were quickly flagged. I would have some difficulty thinking of a more important topic. This post on it was also flagged, then unflagged once it would never reach front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 Dang's comment was that the links "didn't fit site guidelines". This is despite the fact that people clearly found the story important, interesting, and were having constructive discussion about it. Posts about this censorship quickly rose, attracted discussion, and were then flagged and deleted. Posters were banned. What other stories are treated like this? How would we even know? If this post somehow reached front page, I'd expect it to be flagged too; as off-topic, or too meta, or against site guidelines. People would pop up like clockwork to defend the decision, praise the site's moderation, etc.
  - krapp 5y ago
    You can have a forum for "lively and active" discussion or you can have a forum for curated, high-quality discussion. You can't have both, and to have the latter you need aggressive moderation. And the bigger and more diverse the userbase gets, the more aggressive the moderation has to be to prevent Eternal September from eating everything. Its either that or ban all accounts made after, say, 2015 and have membership be invite only as Lobste.rs does. I can understand the opposition to this - i've clashed with the mods, been flagged and slowbanned, I get downvoted to oblivion every time I give an opinion that goes against the zeitgeist of a thread - but Hacker News is what it is. If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue. But if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of, and eventually it will. And to answer the dead comment below: a lot more political stories probably need to be flagged here than are - I think the bar for "interesting new phenomenon" needs to be a bit higher. I don't see the value in threads about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, for instance. It's a worthwhile news story, but the threads are generating more smoke and heat then light.
    - 5y ago
lloydatkinson 5y ago
My favourite thing to bring up is ngate, a critique site of HN
- gtirloni 5y ago
  At first, I enjoyed reading it for the different perspective. But it got boring and repetitive after a while.
  - krapp 5y ago
    So does Hacker News after a while. I mean, 90% of the political threads here could probably be written by an AI, they're so repetitive.
whatev84584 5y ago
So, I actually made three other comments besides the one above, but they were all censored. I guess that account is shadowbanned already for telling the truth. That's the way it goes on HN every day, but the evidence is quickly hidden, supporting the illusion that HN is a good place to discuss things, when it's actually only a good place to discuss things for people who basically already agree. Doesn't it just feel bad to be dishonest?
dang 5y ago
You're not banned because of your "viewpoints" but because you've created dozens of accounts to break HN's rules with. That's not cool, and something this community would strongly disapprove of if people knew about it. Btw, goatse ascii art is not a "viewpoint". Well, I suppose it is in one sense. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you could try the approach that I've recommended to another user with a similar history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28191897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28191897. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- whatev84584 5y ago
  > You're not banned because of your "viewpoints" but because you've created dozens of accounts to break HN's rules with. I only have to create new accounts because I get unjustifiably banned. Or, if you consider simply telling the truth to be grounds for banning someone, I consider my point that HN is not actually a good place to discuss things made. > something this community would strongly disapprove of if people knew about it That's an interesting idea. Have you asked users what they think of shadowbanning people? How many comments just in this thread are hidden? How many of those hidden comments actually contain anything objectionable? Have you asked users what they think about hiding comments that don't contain anything objectionable? Shouldn't we make sure users approve of it? That was a good enough standard to apply to my conduct -- shouldn't it be good enough to apply to yours, and HN's in general? > Btw, goatse ascii art is not a "viewpoint". Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Have you been punishing me for what somebody else has been doing?
  - dang 5y ago
    > Not sure what this is supposed to mean Oh, I'm sorry—I just realized I confused you with someone else on that point. It's unrelated to the other issues though, and not affecting moderation.

k4ch0w 5y ago

I don't know, this place feels like the last haven of real conversations going on besides blind. I think people here do a good job with disagreements and provide good evidence to convince others. I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned. Could you provide an examples of where this happened and one of the important narratives? Can you define wrong viewpoints and give an example?

whatev84583 5y ago
> I don't want to discount you, but I'm skeptical. You are new and I'm guessing you got banned. That's fair, but I'm not actually new. If you really joined in 2017, then you're many years newer than I am. Yes, I've been shadowbanned many times. I've lost count. Maybe thirty times? Most of the time it's hard to link to the evidence in such a way that you could see it for yourself. I'd like to link you to submissions of mine that got upvotes and had conversations going on, but were then anonymously flagged without justification, but it's not possible to link to them. It's not possible to see from the outside that an account has been shadowbanned without comparing the behavior of logged-in and non-logged-in accounts. Example of a wrong, unacceptable viewpoint: humanity is not actually on the brink of climate catastrophe due to CO2 emissions. Recently there was a fearmongering article from Nature about climate doom, and I linked to sea level graphs generated by NOAA that showed linear, rather than accelerating change in sea level, and was apparently shadowbanned for that. Obviously, linking to NOAA in support of a climate doom comment would not be a bannable offense. Edit: oh, and I've apparently already been placed in some kind of slow-play mode. I responded about an hour ago, but you can't see it. Are most people aware stuff like this goes on on HN?
mandmandam 5y ago
I've a good example for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569 , and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578715 Both these posts reached front page, with lively and active discussions. Both were quickly flagged. I would have some difficulty thinking of a more important topic. This post on it was also flagged, then unflagged once it would never reach front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579219 Dang's comment was that the links "didn't fit site guidelines". This is despite the fact that people clearly found the story important, interesting, and were having constructive discussion about it. Posts about this censorship quickly rose, attracted discussion, and were then flagged and deleted. Posters were banned. What other stories are treated like this? How would we even know? If this post somehow reached front page, I'd expect it to be flagged too; as off-topic, or too meta, or against site guidelines. People would pop up like clockwork to defend the decision, praise the site's moderation, etc.
- krapp 5y ago
  You can have a forum for "lively and active" discussion or you can have a forum for curated, high-quality discussion. You can't have both, and to have the latter you need aggressive moderation. And the bigger and more diverse the userbase gets, the more aggressive the moderation has to be to prevent Eternal September from eating everything. Its either that or ban all accounts made after, say, 2015 and have membership be invite only as Lobste.rs does. I can understand the opposition to this - i've clashed with the mods, been flagged and slowbanned, I get downvoted to oblivion every time I give an opinion that goes against the zeitgeist of a thread - but Hacker News is what it is. If you want to discuss CIA torture, this isn't the proper venue. But if you want to color outside the guidelines, you have to realize you've become the problem that this culture wants to rid itself of, and eventually it will. And to answer the dead comment below: a lot more political stories probably need to be flagged here than are - I think the bar for "interesting new phenomenon" needs to be a bit higher. I don't see the value in threads about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, for instance. It's a worthwhile news story, but the threads are generating more smoke and heat then light.
  - 5y ago

lloydatkinson 5y ago

My favourite thing to bring up is ngate, a critique site of HN

gtirloni 5y ago
At first, I enjoyed reading it for the different perspective. But it got boring and repetitive after a while.
- krapp 5y ago
  So does Hacker News after a while. I mean, 90% of the political threads here could probably be written by an AI, they're so repetitive.

whatev84584 5y ago

So, I actually made three other comments besides the one above, but they were all censored. I guess that account is shadowbanned already for telling the truth. That's the way it goes on HN every day, but the evidence is quickly hidden, supporting the illusion that HN is a good place to discuss things, when it's actually only a good place to discuss things for people who basically already agree. Doesn't it just feel bad to be dishonest?

dang 5y ago

You're not banned because of your "viewpoints" but because you've created dozens of accounts to break HN's rules with. That's not cool, and something this community would strongly disapprove of if people knew about it. Btw, goatse ascii art is not a "viewpoint". Well, I suppose it is in one sense. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you could try the approach that I've recommended to another user with a similar history here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28191897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28191897. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

whatev84584 5y ago
> You're not banned because of your "viewpoints" but because you've created dozens of accounts to break HN's rules with. I only have to create new accounts because I get unjustifiably banned. Or, if you consider simply telling the truth to be grounds for banning someone, I consider my point that HN is not actually a good place to discuss things made. > something this community would strongly disapprove of if people knew about it That's an interesting idea. Have you asked users what they think of shadowbanning people? How many comments just in this thread are hidden? How many of those hidden comments actually contain anything objectionable? Have you asked users what they think about hiding comments that don't contain anything objectionable? Shouldn't we make sure users approve of it? That was a good enough standard to apply to my conduct -- shouldn't it be good enough to apply to yours, and HN's in general? > Btw, goatse ascii art is not a "viewpoint". Not sure what this is supposed to mean. Have you been punishing me for what somebody else has been doing?
- dang 5y ago
  > Not sure what this is supposed to mean Oh, I'm sorry—I just realized I confused you with someone else on that point. It's unrelated to the other issues though, and not affecting moderation.