>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 t

>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.