
Ask HN: Is flagging down YC/Thiel/Trump stories on HN a form of censorship? - pesenti
In the past days, after the news of Thiel&#x27;s donation to the Trump campaign, many related stories - the original announcement, the response from Pao&#x27;s company, marco&#x27;s shame post - have been submitted (as well as an annoying number of duplicates). Many made it to the front page quickly, then got flagged down, then got resubmitted, then flagged down, etc. A couple of times, the mod intervened to remove the flag filter, but because of algorithmic weights given to flags, the stories were removed from the front page quickly anyway.<p>The main reason suggested for flagging was the off-topic HN guidelines (though HN obviously does not require anybody to justify their flagging, so this is pure speculation) while many people would argue that given the relevance of these stories to YC and HN, these are very valid (and important) topics to debate here.<p>In a more worrisome twist, my previous Ask HN asking questions about why that was happening (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12716662) also quickly got promoted to the front page but got flagged down as well.<p>When a topic that a majority wants to debate but a vocal minority - whose motivation is unclear, are they Trump supporters? are they rule zealots? are they tired of political subjects? - manages to shut down (as well as shut down any discussion about that flagging down) one may wonder if it doesn&#x27;t amount to some form of censorship. What do you think?<p>And please, don&#x27;t flag this one down, this isn&#x27;t about politics, it&#x27;s about HN!
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dang
"Are flags censorship" isn't an interesting question because it isn't factual.
"Censorship" is a pejorative that indicates you don't like something—so if a
story you liked was flagged, it was 'censored', and if you disliked the story,
then it was 'moderated', 'curated', or some such. The factual aspect, that
user flags cause stories to fall in rank, is the same either way.

We reduce or turn off flags on YC-related political stories for a very
specialized reason: the community's trust in HN is its most important asset
and we don't want to jeopardize that. It doesn't make those stories and
threads any better for HN than the usual flamewars; it means that the cost of
letting those flames burn hotter than usual is smaller than taking risks with
the community's trust.

At some point, though, enough is enough. For the latest barrage of political
stories we should probably revert to normal moderation practice, unless
significant new information appears.

~~~
pesenti
This is a question, how can it be factual? And how many of the stories that
make HN front page are actually "factual"?

The fact that you disabled flagging for some stories shows that you do care
about the perception of censorship and acted upon it.

Automatically demoting stories based on flags is just a bad form of
moderation. Moderation should be done by moderators who are clearly
identifiable. But I guess we can't discuss this as this post got flagged...

~~~
dang
[flagged] doesn't mean you can't keep discussing; that's what [dead] means.

I'm happy to keep discussing, because I appreciate your concern for the
integrity of the content here. However, I'm having trouble following what your
last comment is saying.

------
rayalez
As a frequent HN user and an active member of this community, I think that
these stories do not belong on HN. Even if they are technically relevant, I
don't think that they improve the quality of this website and discussion.

Personally, I don't want to see any headline with the word "Trump" in it on
HN. So far it's been the only place on the internet free of this nonsense.

I know that it's relevant and inflammatory, so it gets popular and upvoted,
but I come here for "things that stimulate intellectual curiosity". Trump
articles, on either side, only stimulate controversy and anger.

Let's talk about programming and science here guys, there's plenty of
subreddits where you can discuss Trump!

~~~
pesenti
I disagree because this community has a tendency to ignore other "soft"
problems (like gender equality or diversity in tech) that are very relevant
and important. If we keep it too narrow, then there is no hope to ever solve
them.

While you may not feel concerned by the misogyny and bigotry of a Trump or
Thiel, it's essential to minorities that already haven't felt very welcome in
this community.

~~~
internaut
Are you familiar with the concept of 'entryism'?

It is where a political organization, among other things, puts headlines in
the news to try and wrestle control away from the owners of a company.

This is not imaginary, in China this is explicitly done with the Communist
party and small companies when they reach a certain size or amount of
influence.

The right believe the left is doing this with Silicon Valley. Here social
justice warriors are something like shock troops indirectly manipulated by
higher level political organizations like the Clinton foundation. We know for
example that Salon and Gawker were put up to specific stories in pay for play
and they received mysterious anonymous donations when they did so.

You don't have to believe that, but perhaps this will explain to you the
hesitancy of the other side in taking your proposition seriously.

When a right wing tech employer hires a person (esp. a woman or minority) they
sometimes wonder if they are part of a leftist ideological struggle which is
orthogonal to the business's interests. An example is that we see the CEO of
Yahoo, a woman, firing large numbers of men to replace them with women for no
conceivable reason relating to merit.

This sort of thing appears to be uncontroversial in Silicon Valley but it is
_very_ not OK elsewhere. Mayer is being sued for sexism against men with a
class action lawsuit I believe.

I predict Silicon Valley bifurcates along leftist and rightist lines but there
is also a chance political chicanery tears the industry apart.

All of this is to explain to you that we are very aware of this:

> community has a tendency to ignore other "soft" problems (like gender
> equality or diversity in tech) that are very relevant and important.

It's that if I were to start a company tomorrow I would explicitly make it
clear that SJWism was something that would get you immediately fired for the
same reason having a 'StormFront' club in the company would be bad news for
the manager.

------
gus_massa
Many popular stories in medium.com get reposted many many many times. I think
I counted like 20 reposts once. The problem is that medium.com adds some
tracking crap to the URL that confuses the deduplicator. (I hope the mod can
fix this someday.) The latest non political were "Fuck You Startup World" and
"I Peeked into My Node_Modules Directory and You Won’t Believe What Happened
Next". (I hope that someone can post the total count of resubmissions of these
post.) When it's not political, there are usually not so many complains
because it's clear that it's a fault in the deduplicator. When the story is
political then it looks like censorship.

Also, most political stories are flagged, this is even considered in the
guidelines. There are elections in many countries per year and there are good,
bad and worse candidates in each one. If tomorrow were an lection between
Putin and someone else, do you think that it would on-topic? What about an
election in Argentina? (Next year we have a midterm election and some people
really hate the current president, and some people really hate the previous
president, and some people hate both.) When the post is about a country you
don't care, then you don't care and it looks like something to maintain the
signal to noise ratio and filter the off-topic stories. When the post is about
a country you care it looks like censorship.

------
krapp
This is a polite reminder to everyone that you can hide stories instead of
flagging them now, if you simply don't want to see them, or comments about
them.

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internaut
The flagging is occurring because it doesn't take many people to flag a topic
in order for it to disappear. So that is an issue of simple mechanics.

I do not recall any complaints about financial aid being given to Clinton from
Silicon Valley. Compare that to the vitriol dedicated to one person going in
the other direction. That there is bias is unmistakable.

If you want to talk censorship you should look at the fact that a right wing
opinion will get you downvoted on HN.

If you don't believe it, try making an account and make some standard right of
center statements. It's like playing with one hell of a golf handicap.

------
meira
This is worse than censorship, is brainwash. So Trump has a lot of problems,
but it looks like he is not corrupt. Hillary, on the other hand, is fully with
corruption. I really don't like/agree with YC priorities (I'm not an American,
which is even more disturbing to see someone that laughs about killing others
country president been endorsed/elected)

~~~
krapp
You merely pasted and slightly edited this comment from a previous one
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733234](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733234))

Please stop acting like a bot. Hacker News values insightful, thoughtful
discussion, not copypasta.

~~~
duncanawoods
If it was copy-paste across multiple live stories I would agree with you but
here the the original story was flagged so reposting a comment seems
forgivable and the only way the poster can have the thoughtful discussion you
wish to see.

~~~
krapp
If the poster wanted to have thoughtful discussion, they could have put some
_thought_ into their second comment, but they didn't.

The boilerplate anti-Hillary spleen vent isn't even on topic here. It's
exactly the sort of derailing tangent that gets these thread flagged to begin
with.

~~~
duncanawoods
We always talk "around" the story on HN. The topic is about censorship of
views and excluding and silencing people because of their views. That means
talking about the views too.

I am just a non-US outside observer so I give this to you as food for thought
but your post looks like an attempt to silence views you don't agree with. You
didn't downvote but went on the attack. Rather than a derailing tangent, its
actually a case in point.

If it genuinely wasn't your intent then just take this as a friendly message
that it is the _appearance_ so a different approach might avoid this in
future.

~~~
krapp
I wasn't trying to silence views I disagree with. I want to promote
discussion.

It's just a matter of maintaining the signal to noise ratio - when it comes to
political discussions here, there is already too little of the former and too
much of the latter, and too many people grasping for the low hanging
rhetorical fruit. But copying and pasting a comment isn't discussion.

