
Ask HN: Does HN censor some topics by removing them from the list of posts? - Scapeghost
Case in point: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21626321<p>It was rising at the time with a lot of discussion before it disappeared from the list of posts.<p>I cannot see it on any page. The only way to access it is via a direct link or the search:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastWeek&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=instagram&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story<p>but now I guess they&#x27;ll remove it from there too. Why?
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muzani
From the guidelines:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic."

The thing is that this "sex vs free speech" topic has been going on for a long
time. There are plenty of other sites to discuss it.

It is also the kind of thing that people would be unnaturally attracted to,
and yet is low quality content - it has sex, and also seems to be about
challenging human rights.

I think it's good that this kind of thing is buried quickly, because more news
of this type are not very interesting.

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Firerouge
I noticed this too, it vanished from New Posts right after I viewed it,
thought it was deleted until you posted this...

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gus_massa
HN has a penalty for post with more comments than upvotes. I guess it was the
main cause of the drop in the rank of that post.

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krapp
I've always thought that was a ridiculous metric, since it's entirely possible
for a thread to have more comments than votes without being a flamewar, and
for bad comments to be upvoted. Implicitly, it penalizes users who choose to
comment rather than upvote (which is probably the majority,) which is
penalizing engagement.

Maybe there's data backing the validity of it up though, I don't know.

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SamReidHughes
If you want a good website, you need good users, and if you want good users,
you have to limit content that attracts bad users.

