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I thought this quote summed it up nicely: > Bradbury was right that people would choose self-censorship, led into ignorance by technological innovations that m

I thought this quote summed it up nicely: > Bradbury was right that people would choose self-censorship, led into ignorance by technological innovations that make open discourse and thought unpalatable. Were it a government that imposed such a rule, there would be an uproar, at least in Western societies. But gently coaxed by algorithms, people have voluntarily gravitated towards simple, comfortable ideas and begun to reject complexity, nuance, and the possibility that contrary opinions are not necessarily immoral or even incorrect. Pretty much captures what I see on just about everywhere that isn't HN. You can't have a sensible discussion on FB anymore, for instance, the place is made just for shouting.

pinephoneguy 5y ago
HN people are very much for censoring ideas they don’t like too. You could get banned last year for grumping too much about the COVID vaccines.
- walterbell 5y ago
  Do you have an example? Contested topics can be flagged by users, but it's possible to appeal to HN moderators. Has anyone been banned from HN for a topic? Over the last couple of years, HN has been one of the few places where debate was even possible.
  - swamp40 5y ago
    The site doesn't ban, the users gang downvote you into oblivion for political views unpopular with west coast liberal values. Oh well - 95% of posts aren't political anyway. And other than that, the discussions are fantastic.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  Mostly only for certain definitions of "grumping" that are poisonous to substantive conversation. I find on HN that [user] moderation is largely irrelevant to the subject, which is a small miracle even despite its imperfect application.
- dang 5y ago
  We don't ban people for that sort of reason. Comments like this need to come with links so people can make up their own minds.
  - lyingliar 5y ago
    Oh another gross lie among the very many you've told
    - dang 5y ago
      > Comments like this need to come with links so people can make up their own minds.
      - WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
        Are you being a weasel about the word "ban"? Do you place users in a special status where their comments are hidden by default and they are subject to strict rate limits based on things they say? Yes, of course. And I can't link people to examples, because HN hides the comments in question from everyone but me. You know that.
        dang 5y ago
        We generally tell people we're banning them and why, but there are two major exceptions: spammers and serial trolls. By serial troll I mean someone who we banned at least once already and who shows up again and again with new accounts to break the site guidelines, knowing perfectly well what they're doing. When people do that, it no longer makes sense to post a "we're banning you" comment every time—they've already made quite clear that they don't want to use HN as intended. Your account, if I'm not mistaken, is very much in the latter category. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, you've done it dozens of times by now. That's why we shadowban the new ones. None of this is new (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadowban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and you guys aren't likely to get very far with the community about this.
- l-_l-_l-_lo_ol 5y ago
  The recent Joe Rogan extravaganza brought this all out as well. I know nothing about virology. I listened to that controversial virologist on his podcast and still know so little. But then on HN it seems there are apparently numerous experts on the subject, or so they think, who are dead sure censoring of the dangerous Dr. Malone is necessary. It seemed every bit as tribal as twitter, but with a better vocabulary.
  - dang 5y ago
    That's to be expected with any divisive topic on the internet, which that one certainly is. > It seemed every bit as tribal as twitter The active ingredient there is the word 'seemed'. If you look closer and deeper, you'll see that HN is an experiment in a completely different sort of site—not just from Twitter, but from all the other major ones. This is partly because of the values it was founded with*, but equally because of the initial conditions of its design—primarily the fact that it's non-siloed, meaning there are no follow lists or social graphs or any of the other devices that online communities use to partition themselves. That has profound effects. I've written about this many times. The most in-depth attempt was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. There are others at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all... * Primarily intellectual curiosity. Note: when I say HN was founded on that value I am not saying that it always, or even mostly, lives up to it. Just that it's in the DNA and that makes a difference.
  - mojzu 5y ago
    Science vs. did a good episode on why that episode was dangerous bullshit, and unlike Rogan they cite sources/talk to experts in the field That's not to say laypeople shouldn't be able to interview potentially controversial subjects, but to my mind preventing a celebrity from using their platform to spread information when they're not doing any good faith investigation as to whether that information is accurate is not equivalent to censorship
    - DeusExMachina 5y ago
throwaway894345 5y ago
Agreed. Not that there's any dearth of slap fighting on HN, but it always perplexes me when people on Twitter and r/programming talk about "the orange hellsite" as though the quality of HN isn't dramatically higher than any other sizable web forum or social media network.
- walterbell 5y ago
  Seconded. If those people have HN accounts, it might be interesting to see how their earlier HN discussions could have lead to this viewpoint.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  "Orange site bad" is just a meme, AFAICT. They hate HN because they all congregate elsewhere, there not much else to it.
  - WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I think a lot of people congregate elsewhere because they don't like HN (specifically because HN moderation and norms limit toxicity compared with proggit and Twitter).
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  I would like to argue that if you don’t consider this a place hostile, you might only feel that way because you are the audience that this site caters to. This is the sort of cognizant bubble-popping that is important to recognize. (To be clear: I also think I have high quality discussions on HN… but only for certain subjects. Anyone who, for example, advocates for wealth taxes or wealth redistribution or any other positions that wealthy people and people interested in accumulating wealth don’t like often are not given the time of day to intelligently talk about their positions.)
  - 5y ago
jeroenhd 5y ago
While the situation here is better than elsewhere, don't be fooled. There's plenty of group think and (self) censorship going on around here too. Give any human the ability to down vote and a reputation number, and comments will automatically converge to some kind of social standard. HN is mostly filled with people with an interest in tech, finance, and getting rich off tech. That allows for deeper discussions on technical topics and startup finances, but when it comes to politics there's not that much difference between HN and your average subreddit. Facebook is a "shouting into the void" platform, kind of like Twitter but without the length requirement. In my experience it's never been possible to have any kind of reasonable discussion on there.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Yeah I recognise some of that, but politically I see both lefty and righty opinions here, with a fair bit of nuance. You can also bring in concepts that an economics undergrad would know and people will recognise it, rather than act like you just made it up and ignore it, like it happens everywhere else. Basically I feel like a somewhat educated view is worthwhile to put forward here, rather than on FB where it really is just memes that work. But you're right, some opinions are still more popular here than others, and some opinions are immediate karma bombs.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  There's also aggressive pruning of anything not on topic and a much stricter code of behavior than a place like Reddit or Facebook. I think it's important to do, and while I've been on the wrong side of content removal before and I don't begrudge it at all, but I don't know how people could look at this community and think it's intrinsically better by being freer of censorship just because that censorship is higher brow.
birracerveza 5y ago
I've noticed that people are increasingly incapable of having nuanced opinions. There is no more gray, it's either black or white. For example, crypto is either a new dawn for humanity or it's a useless scam whose only purpose it to destroy the planet. There is no in-between. Same for the vaccine or anything related to politics. Some websites are better than others of course, but still, I've seen an increasing amount of this kind of extremely polarized opinions even on websites I thought were "safe" from this lack of nuance. Every website is a memetic warzone. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to wonder more and more often whether the person I'm replying to is capable of rational thought or if they're bots, paid actors, or if they're simply unable to understand that there is a reason why "the other side" thinks the way it does (aside from reductive, simple answers). It's bad. It wasn't like this before, and people being fed custom realities by algorithms was certainly one of the many reasons this is happening.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  The ones replying are mostly the ones that want to respond to the same conversation over and over again. The majority gray zone just doesn't care about eg. Crypto and are boostered, depending on their country rules. What's left to talk about? The more interesting subjects that are new(s) and more applicable here.
- theclansman 5y ago
  It's something I've seen a lot all over the internet in the last few years, but the reason it stops any insightful discussion is that people think that if you disagree with them you must be on the other extreme. After they decided that, there's no way to convince them you're not. This only leads to people getting more and more extreme with their opinions, kinda like if you're not an extremist nobody will listen to you. I'm mostly talking about politics here but the crypto example you gave applies perfectly too, everyone is either a poorfag seething because they missed the train or an evil capitalist that has a huge farm of computers mining 24/7 that he calls his polution machine to make money.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
tharne 5y ago
> Pretty much captures what I see on just about everywhere that isn't HN. HN is one of the few places where I regularly upvote comments that I disagree with, because they've frame an issue in a way I hadn't considered, or add new information to the discussion. As President Obama once said, "We can disagree without disagreeable".
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  Sometimes I upvote just so I can read the faded comment. It’s seriously annoying and I think a sentiment gauge based on basic emotions would work much better.
kilito 5y ago
Unfortunately, even in HN there is a lot of auto-censorship. I have seen several articles make it to the front page and promptly disappear, flagged to death, just because they were against woke culture or the predominant points of the left. Most recent one I can remember is “How Harvard went woke” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29906329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29906329
abeppu 5y ago
That quote jumped out at me too, but ... isn't it a mischaracterization of Bradbury? In the book, isn't book-censorship imposed by the government? I think the distinction is important b/c in so many conversations about de-platforming, one side wants to express firm commitment to the first amendment but retain the distinction that it applies only to states.
- wnoise 5y ago
  It's a both/and. The government takes advantage of the popular sentiment. And it's not directly censoring ideas, but forms of media, no matter the ideas they contain.
archi42 5y ago
I'd be careful with this assessment. HN isn't immune to these effects. Especially with the approach towards quality. Maybe that's just me, but I often end up not submitting comments on HN, or reducing them*). This self-censorship has multiple reasons: First, I often ask myself if the comment adds some value to the discussion; or if it just ends up being one of these fly-over comments that's just the tenth repetition of the same musing/opinion/question/thought. Second, if I evaluate that some discussion ends up being to polarized or too exhausting (if I make an argument, I should be prepared to defend it and not just run away), I don't hit that reply button as well. That's not to say that this is inherently evil. Do we need low quality comments? I think no. Should I/others always write ten paragraph comments instead of condensing their thoughts? Doesn't sound like an inherently bad idea, but maybe some things get lost/censored that way. And thanks to a lot of effort put into productive discussion by most people here nice discussion can be had, but to pick some examples: I myself would still be careful joining a discussion about RMS here, or on some areas of politics (e.g. taxing), or on vaccination (let alone something complex as mandated vaccination). Even though I think that some of these should be had (not necessarily on HN). Yes, FB is worse and, to stick to the current theme, dead-end discussion about vaxing are probably running rampant there and I am happy that I only get some rare glimpses of that when a friend is acting like Don Quijote and posting on it on our Discord; but essentially I think that's a dangerous whataboutism. *) I was actually considering cutting the comment there, even after writing the rest. But I think some more elaboration doesn't hurt in this case ;-)
nootropicat 5y ago
>Pretty much captures what I see on just about everywhere that isn't HN HN is extremely restrictive in what you're allowed to say without getting flagged. At the same time, discussion in the allowed spectrum are indeed of higher quality. Unless you fit in the narrow spectrum constant self-censorship is required. The design encourages this more than reddit, because unless you manually enable showdead, rejected comments are gone instead of collapsed. Then there are apparently forced conformity patterns like inverting votes of users that consistently disagree with the majority - which I have seen mentioned several times in comments, but nothing official, so no real way to confirm or deny. "If you frequently vote against the prevailing opinion, then your votes get disabled and/or inverted. I have spoken with Dang about this multiple times to confirm. Some call it an echo chamber, others call it "consensus"." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29730125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29730125 During the peak of vaccine hype pretty much anything other than establishment's view was immediately flagged and removed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168789 I remember this one because I wrote a semi-long comment. The story was getting upvotes fast. I look a while later - flagged, gone, title edited to be less interesting. It doesn't show [flagged] now (because it's old?) but you can see the submitter complaining it was flagged.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Then there are apparently forced conformity patterns like inverting votes of users that consistently disagree with the majority - which I have seen mentioned several times in comments, but nothing official, so no real way to confirm or deny. I'm not so sure about "inverting votes" but yesterday there was a thread where multiple people claimed to have been "shаdоwbаnned" from voting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317059
- nekcihc 5y ago
  It explains more, than what I have discovered. And sadly that makes NH another "shit place"(no offence to moderators), where bots can thrive and where I have no intention to invest(and care) and where for me HN is just another nicotine patch, that is replacing FB.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> people have voluntarily gravitated towards simple, comfortable ideas and begun to reject complexity, nuance, and the possibility that contrary opinions are not necessarily immoral or even incorrect. Isn't it ironic that that concept was already well know and had been discussed for decades, but we keep falling for it and encourage the new generations to "become what they want to be" regardless of the consequences while we also help them to chose meaningless fights against what is simply annoying to us, but harmless in general, reducing the public discourse to bubbles of anger that can only lead to less dialogue and more divisions? “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pinephoneguy 5y ago

HN people are very much for censoring ideas they don’t like too. You could get banned last year for grumping too much about the COVID vaccines.

walterbell 5y ago
Do you have an example? Contested topics can be flagged by users, but it's possible to appeal to HN moderators. Has anyone been banned from HN for a topic? Over the last couple of years, HN has been one of the few places where debate was even possible.
- swamp40 5y ago
  The site doesn't ban, the users gang downvote you into oblivion for political views unpopular with west coast liberal values. Oh well - 95% of posts aren't political anyway. And other than that, the discussions are fantastic.
happytoexplain 5y ago
Mostly only for certain definitions of "grumping" that are poisonous to substantive conversation. I find on HN that [user] moderation is largely irrelevant to the subject, which is a small miracle even despite its imperfect application.
dang 5y ago
We don't ban people for that sort of reason. Comments like this need to come with links so people can make up their own minds.
- lyingliar 5y ago
  Oh another gross lie among the very many you've told
  - dang 5y ago
    > Comments like this need to come with links so people can make up their own minds.
    - WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
      Are you being a weasel about the word "ban"? Do you place users in a special status where their comments are hidden by default and they are subject to strict rate limits based on things they say? Yes, of course. And I can't link people to examples, because HN hides the comments in question from everyone but me. You know that.
      - dang 5y ago
        We generally tell people we're banning them and why, but there are two major exceptions: spammers and serial trolls. By serial troll I mean someone who we banned at least once already and who shows up again and again with new accounts to break the site guidelines, knowing perfectly well what they're doing. When people do that, it no longer makes sense to post a "we're banning you" comment every time—they've already made quite clear that they don't want to use HN as intended. Your account, if I'm not mistaken, is very much in the latter category. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, you've done it dozens of times by now. That's why we shadowban the new ones. None of this is new (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20shadowban&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and you guys aren't likely to get very far with the community about this.
l-_l-_l-_lo_ol 5y ago
The recent Joe Rogan extravaganza brought this all out as well. I know nothing about virology. I listened to that controversial virologist on his podcast and still know so little. But then on HN it seems there are apparently numerous experts on the subject, or so they think, who are dead sure censoring of the dangerous Dr. Malone is necessary. It seemed every bit as tribal as twitter, but with a better vocabulary.
- dang 5y ago
  That's to be expected with any divisive topic on the internet, which that one certainly is. > It seemed every bit as tribal as twitter The active ingredient there is the word 'seemed'. If you look closer and deeper, you'll see that HN is an experiment in a completely different sort of site—not just from Twitter, but from all the other major ones. This is partly because of the values it was founded with*, but equally because of the initial conditions of its design—primarily the fact that it's non-siloed, meaning there are no follow lists or social graphs or any of the other devices that online communities use to partition themselves. That has profound effects. I've written about this many times. The most in-depth attempt was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. There are others at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all... * Primarily intellectual curiosity. Note: when I say HN was founded on that value I am not saying that it always, or even mostly, lives up to it. Just that it's in the DNA and that makes a difference.
- mojzu 5y ago
  Science vs. did a good episode on why that episode was dangerous bullshit, and unlike Rogan they cite sources/talk to experts in the field That's not to say laypeople shouldn't be able to interview potentially controversial subjects, but to my mind preventing a celebrity from using their platform to spread information when they're not doing any good faith investigation as to whether that information is accurate is not equivalent to censorship
  - DeusExMachina 5y ago

throwaway894345 5y ago

Agreed. Not that there's any dearth of slap fighting on HN, but it always perplexes me when people on Twitter and r/programming talk about "the orange hellsite" as though the quality of HN isn't dramatically higher than any other sizable web forum or social media network.

walterbell 5y ago
Seconded. If those people have HN accounts, it might be interesting to see how their earlier HN discussions could have lead to this viewpoint.
zozbot234 5y ago
"Orange site bad" is just a meme, AFAICT. They hate HN because they all congregate elsewhere, there not much else to it.
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I think a lot of people congregate elsewhere because they don't like HN (specifically because HN moderation and norms limit toxicity compared with proggit and Twitter).
SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
I would like to argue that if you don’t consider this a place hostile, you might only feel that way because you are the audience that this site caters to. This is the sort of cognizant bubble-popping that is important to recognize. (To be clear: I also think I have high quality discussions on HN… but only for certain subjects. Anyone who, for example, advocates for wealth taxes or wealth redistribution or any other positions that wealthy people and people interested in accumulating wealth don’t like often are not given the time of day to intelligently talk about their positions.)
- 5y ago

jeroenhd 5y ago

While the situation here is better than elsewhere, don't be fooled. There's plenty of group think and (self) censorship going on around here too. Give any human the ability to down vote and a reputation number, and comments will automatically converge to some kind of social standard. HN is mostly filled with people with an interest in tech, finance, and getting rich off tech. That allows for deeper discussions on technical topics and startup finances, but when it comes to politics there's not that much difference between HN and your average subreddit. Facebook is a "shouting into the void" platform, kind of like Twitter but without the length requirement. In my experience it's never been possible to have any kind of reasonable discussion on there.

lordnacho 5y ago
Yeah I recognise some of that, but politically I see both lefty and righty opinions here, with a fair bit of nuance. You can also bring in concepts that an economics undergrad would know and people will recognise it, rather than act like you just made it up and ignore it, like it happens everywhere else. Basically I feel like a somewhat educated view is worthwhile to put forward here, rather than on FB where it really is just memes that work. But you're right, some opinions are still more popular here than others, and some opinions are immediate karma bombs.
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
There's also aggressive pruning of anything not on topic and a much stricter code of behavior than a place like Reddit or Facebook. I think it's important to do, and while I've been on the wrong side of content removal before and I don't begrudge it at all, but I don't know how people could look at this community and think it's intrinsically better by being freer of censorship just because that censorship is higher brow.

birracerveza 5y ago

I've noticed that people are increasingly incapable of having nuanced opinions. There is no more gray, it's either black or white. For example, crypto is either a new dawn for humanity or it's a useless scam whose only purpose it to destroy the planet. There is no in-between. Same for the vaccine or anything related to politics. Some websites are better than others of course, but still, I've seen an increasing amount of this kind of extremely polarized opinions even on websites I thought were "safe" from this lack of nuance. Every website is a memetic warzone. It's getting to the point where I'm starting to wonder more and more often whether the person I'm replying to is capable of rational thought or if they're bots, paid actors, or if they're simply unable to understand that there is a reason why "the other side" thinks the way it does (aside from reductive, simple answers). It's bad. It wasn't like this before, and people being fed custom realities by algorithms was certainly one of the many reasons this is happening.

NicoJuicy 5y ago
The ones replying are mostly the ones that want to respond to the same conversation over and over again. The majority gray zone just doesn't care about eg. Crypto and are boostered, depending on their country rules. What's left to talk about? The more interesting subjects that are new(s) and more applicable here.
theclansman 5y ago
It's something I've seen a lot all over the internet in the last few years, but the reason it stops any insightful discussion is that people think that if you disagree with them you must be on the other extreme. After they decided that, there's no way to convince them you're not. This only leads to people getting more and more extreme with their opinions, kinda like if you're not an extremist nobody will listen to you. I'm mostly talking about politics here but the crypto example you gave applies perfectly too, everyone is either a poorfag seething because they missed the train or an evil capitalist that has a huge farm of computers mining 24/7 that he calls his polution machine to make money.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

tharne 5y ago

> Pretty much captures what I see on just about everywhere that isn't HN. HN is one of the few places where I regularly upvote comments that I disagree with, because they've frame an issue in a way I hadn't considered, or add new information to the discussion. As President Obama once said, "We can disagree without disagreeable".

kordlessagain 5y ago
Sometimes I upvote just so I can read the faded comment. It’s seriously annoying and I think a sentiment gauge based on basic emotions would work much better.

kilito 5y ago

Unfortunately, even in HN there is a lot of auto-censorship. I have seen several articles make it to the front page and promptly disappear, flagged to death, just because they were against woke culture or the predominant points of the left. Most recent one I can remember is “How Harvard went woke” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29906329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29906329

abeppu 5y ago

That quote jumped out at me too, but ... isn't it a mischaracterization of Bradbury? In the book, isn't book-censorship imposed by the government? I think the distinction is important b/c in so many conversations about de-platforming, one side wants to express firm commitment to the first amendment but retain the distinction that it applies only to states.

wnoise 5y ago
It's a both/and. The government takes advantage of the popular sentiment. And it's not directly censoring ideas, but forms of media, no matter the ideas they contain.

archi42 5y ago

I'd be careful with this assessment. HN isn't immune to these effects. Especially with the approach towards quality. Maybe that's just me, but I often end up not submitting comments on HN, or reducing them*). This self-censorship has multiple reasons: First, I often ask myself if the comment adds some value to the discussion; or if it just ends up being one of these fly-over comments that's just the tenth repetition of the same musing/opinion/question/thought. Second, if I evaluate that some discussion ends up being to polarized or too exhausting (if I make an argument, I should be prepared to defend it and not just run away), I don't hit that reply button as well. That's not to say that this is inherently evil. Do we need low quality comments? I think no. Should I/others always write ten paragraph comments instead of condensing their thoughts? Doesn't sound like an inherently bad idea, but maybe some things get lost/censored that way. And thanks to a lot of effort put into productive discussion by most people here nice discussion can be had, but to pick some examples: I myself would still be careful joining a discussion about RMS here, or on some areas of politics (e.g. taxing), or on vaccination (let alone something complex as mandated vaccination). Even though I think that some of these should be had (not necessarily on HN). Yes, FB is worse and, to stick to the current theme, dead-end discussion about vaxing are probably running rampant there and I am happy that I only get some rare glimpses of that when a friend is acting like Don Quijote and posting on it on our Discord; but essentially I think that's a dangerous whataboutism. *) I was actually considering cutting the comment there, even after writing the rest. But I think some more elaboration doesn't hurt in this case ;-)

nootropicat 5y ago

>Pretty much captures what I see on just about everywhere that isn't HN HN is extremely restrictive in what you're allowed to say without getting flagged. At the same time, discussion in the allowed spectrum are indeed of higher quality. Unless you fit in the narrow spectrum constant self-censorship is required. The design encourages this more than reddit, because unless you manually enable showdead, rejected comments are gone instead of collapsed. Then there are apparently forced conformity patterns like inverting votes of users that consistently disagree with the majority - which I have seen mentioned several times in comments, but nothing official, so no real way to confirm or deny. "If you frequently vote against the prevailing opinion, then your votes get disabled and/or inverted. I have spoken with Dang about this multiple times to confirm. Some call it an echo chamber, others call it "consensus"." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29730125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29730125 During the peak of vaccine hype pretty much anything other than establishment's view was immediately flagged and removed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28168789 I remember this one because I wrote a semi-long comment. The story was getting upvotes fast. I look a while later - flagged, gone, title edited to be less interesting. It doesn't show [flagged] now (because it's old?) but you can see the submitter complaining it was flagged.

gruez 5y ago
>Then there are apparently forced conformity patterns like inverting votes of users that consistently disagree with the majority - which I have seen mentioned several times in comments, but nothing official, so no real way to confirm or deny. I'm not so sure about "inverting votes" but yesterday there was a thread where multiple people claimed to have been "shаdоwbаnned" from voting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30317059
nekcihc 5y ago
It explains more, than what I have discovered. And sadly that makes NH another "shit place"(no offence to moderators), where bots can thrive and where I have no intention to invest(and care) and where for me HN is just another nicotine patch, that is replacing FB.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

> people have voluntarily gravitated towards simple, comfortable ideas and begun to reject complexity, nuance, and the possibility that contrary opinions are not necessarily immoral or even incorrect. Isn't it ironic that that concept was already well know and had been discussed for decades, but we keep falling for it and encourage the new generations to "become what they want to be" regardless of the consequences while we also help them to chose meaningless fights against what is simply annoying to us, but harmless in general, reducing the public discourse to bubbles of anger that can only lead to less dialogue and more divisions? “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]