
Ask HN: Why is censorship rampant on HN? - mankash666
Dear HN Users -<p>I&#x27;ve found certain stories getting censored more than other on HN.<p>1&gt; Anything that&#x27;s critical of the GPL gets flagged
2&gt; Ongoing terror attacks get censored (For example https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12145106 )<p>As practitioners of evidence based science, censorship simply doesn&#x27;t hold a place in HN - where logic should trump any divisiveness.<p>I implore HN to be more receptive to these kind of topics, while not turning this into a reddit kind of non-evidence based banter.<p>More power to the scientific method - less mind control.<p>Cheers
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jacquesm
Ongoing terror attacks get flagged, not censored because they are 'normal
news'. I personally don't flag those and don't agree with those that do the
flagging because there are lots of other 'local news' stories such as stories
about BART (the public transport) that only appeal to a small portiton of HN
(it is essentially local news) that do make it to the homepage but strictly
following the guidelines neither of those belongs on HN.

As for anything critical of the gpl, do you have an example of what you mean?

> while not turning this into a reddit kind of non-evidence based banter.

Indeed.

> Ask HN: Why is censorship rampant on HN?

That title also presumes that censorship is rampant on HN, it isn't. It may be
in your view but that's just your opinion.

~~~
PaulHoule
Also ongoing terror attacks are not a good subject in a lot of ways.

I remember when redditors decided they were going to "solve" the boston
bombing and they just ended up harassing innocent people and distracting law
enforcement.

It is like the stupid idea that people are going to fight terrorists with
handguns. Really when the shooting starts you don't know what the hell is
going on and if you see some guy with a gun you are going to think they are
the shooter and maybe they are just somebody like you who wants to help.

For instance when Gabrielle Giffords got shot, the hero who wrested the gun
away from the shooter when he was reloading was holding the gun so he could
keep it away from the shooter and then somebody showed up with a gun and
demanded that he drop the gun, and they argued about this. Here you had people
who were trying to do the right things and did not know the facts and could
have added to the tragedy. I think of that crazy scene were a bunch of
wastoids were shooting at each other in Waco.

You don't want to be part of that either in real life or cyber life.

~~~
jacquesm
Something like that happened the other day with the police shooting someone
giving aid to another person.

Weird world we live in.

[http://www.wcnc.com/news/attorney-cop-said-he-didnt-know-
why...](http://www.wcnc.com/news/attorney-cop-said-he-didnt-know-why-he-shot-
man-lying-on-ground/278972828)

~~~
PaulHoule
Yes, for all the problems of racism, militarization of police, etc. the nature
of the job is that police officers have to make split second decisions that
can have awful consequences.

It is hard enough when the people involved are trained professional
gunfighters, but even worse when it is just some average person who decides to
pack a piece. There you are dealing just with competence at actual gun
fighting, but even people who are so bad at just operating a gun that they
shoot themselves on the way home from a gun safety class.

(Oddly, the first thing I learned about gun safety is go to the range, load
the gun there, shoot all the bullets, don't carry or leave a loaded gun
around)

------
jasonkester
It's not censorship, it's curation. There is a distinct difference.

Here's what I had to say about this a few years back when (ironically) Reddit
first started having to deal with this:

[1] People tend to think of online communities as democracies where the
freedoms they're accustomed to from their normal lives apply.

So when a post gets deleted by a moderator, people tend to think of it as a
freedom of speech issue. There's a whole constitution out there specifically
defending anybody's right to create a pro-Nazi subreddit, and to otherwise
post anything they please on the site so long as it's not illegal, right? Not
really.

Not at all, in fact. Reddit is not the United States. It's Reddit. Online
communities are not democracies any more than your back garden is a democracy.
You pull weeds, plant seeds, and otherwise encourage the plants in your garden
to comport themselves in a manner that ends up with a pleasing result. It's
your garden, so you have the absolute right to pull weeds. The weeds get no
say.

Reddit seems to have forgotten this for a while, and as a result they started
sliding until they became, well, Reddit. The community we're currently
discussing this in, on the other hand, has been a lot more conscientious in
cultivating the type of garden it would like to see. And I think we can all
say the result is a lot more pleasant than a less tended place such as Reddit
or 4chan.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3586667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3586667)

~~~
jacquesm
> Reddit is not the United States.

I'd substitute 'the world' for 'The United States'.

Both Reddit and HN have an audience that transcends the borders of any one
country, including the USA.

~~~
titanomachy
The United States is given as a particular example of a country that has
strong freedom-of-speech rights. "The world" includes many countries that
don't.

------
whamlastxmas
Many people come to HN because its user base often has interesting and
insightful opinions about and experiences related our commonly shared
interests. Hardware, software, tech jobs, startups, etc.

When it comes to topics outside of those areas, the discussion can largely be
boiled down to what your morals are about a particular topic. Discussing
morals is boring and you will rarely change anyone's mind. Because of this, I
don't really see the point of discussing it unless you care specifically about
the person you're discussing it with.

I think a lot of HN users agree, and so these topics get flagged and hidden.

------
nekitamo
One man's censorship is another man's spam filter.

------
jimrandomh
This is not censorship in the way the word is usually used. The contents of
HN's front page are mostly determined in a democratic, automated manner based
on users' upvotes and flags. Some topics are, in the eyes of the people voting
and flagging, not suitable for the front page. It has to be this way because
the amount of content submitted is many many times greater than the amount of
space.

~~~
falcolas
I'm not sure Democratic is quite the right word, since it takes much less than
a majority of people flagging an article to effectively bury it.

------
JshWright
I don't understand your reference to "evidence based science" and the
"scientific method"...

If you want to discuss stuff, that's fine, but suggesting that "posting
ongoing terror attacks is appropriate" is somehow supported by "evidenced
based science"... well... show me the study.

~~~
mankash666
News is basically fact reporting. HN is the opinion layer on top of that,
where opinions are expected to be derived independent of ideologies. That's in
contrast to Reddit where ideological debates are encouraged

~~~
wkw3
Ideally, news is objective factual reporting, but editorial bias, conflicts of
interest, emotional manipulation, propaganda, selective leaking, anonymous
sources, government pressure, basic human nature and numerous other factors
prevent this ideal from ever being realized.

As it currently stands, people decide which news sources biases more closely
match their own in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. This reinforces their
biases, and makes them seek more of the same continuing a downward spiral.
Hopefully, you seek sources that disagree with your current opinions in order
to balance your perspective, but the vast majority of people don't have the
time or energy to do so.

Oh, how I wish the news was as you describe!

------
brudgers
Those topics are often interesting to me. Generally the discussions that they
illicit are low quality relative to typical Hacker News discussions.

In a way, this thread sort of hits at two of the reasons I find them low
quality:

1\. Those topics generate a lot of meta-discussion about Hacker News rather
than expertise.

2\. Those topics tend to be interpreted as a license to insult people with
whom one disagrees. My conclusions about the quality of those topics are both
logical and based on empirical observation of many samples. That they diverge
from someone else's makes them no less so.

Good luck.

------
wkw3
To whoever is removing these types of posts...sincere thanks.

~~~
DanBC
There's a karma threshold for flagging. I think it's reasonably low, about 30?

So, once you get that amount of karma you can help remove those stories (and
comments) by clicking the timestamp and then clicking [flag].

------
boznz
Not a biggie IMHO but worth a discussion to clear the air, shouldnt be just
flagged as it just adds weight to the argument for.

~~~
dang
Users flagged it. We sometimes turn off user flags if there's a clear mandate
for doing so, but meta discussions breed like rabbits so that's probably not a
good idea.

Also, the community verdict on this question is super clear and isn't likely
to change, so for better or worse people need to familiarize themselves with
it. Mostly the arguments that get raised indicate a lack of familiarity with
HN. Making such arguments more prominent would mostly irritate the community;
the experienced users who do want to say their piece about it have a way of
finding these threads, as here.

