Mods haven't touched any of these stories. If they're getting flagged, it's by users.

In terms of HN user behavior for flagging a submission on this topic, this is how I would see it:

- pure news story about the event? I can find this on any news site and it should not be on HN. Flag.

- second order impact of this event on something relevant to HN's mission (specifically, how Reddit as an organization and mods of a subreddit react)? Highly relevant and do not flag.

That is because HN is for technology based news.

Whilst the shooting is tragic - it is not relevant to this news service.

These types of stories are regularly removed from HN by the mods.

> That is because HN is for technology based news.

HN is for more than technology based news. From the HN 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.

Edit: Note: this comment is not meant to imply or offer an opinion on whether this particular submission is on topic for HN. It is just meant to counter the assertion that it not being a technology story disqualifies it.

But is this story stimulating our intellectual curiosity, or our morbid curiosity? I'd say it's the later. Any news coming out now will be shallow and repetitive. If, after more research and reflection a long-form story is written exploring the event's social, political, and statistical relevance then perhaps it will be suitable for HN.

But right now, context-free sound bites, unconfirmed rumors, and banal opinions are just noise that you can read everywhere else on the internet.

HN facilitates rational and typically civil discourse. As such it seems like an appropriate place to discuss non-tech issues which are of interest to a large portion of the user-base.

True, but:

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Same-Sex Marriage Is a Right, Supreme Court Rules

1905 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9784470

David Bowie Has Died

1484 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879262

Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation

1459 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6233646

Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

1373 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416928

How I Ended Up In Solitary After Calling 911 For Help

1249 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7233730

and more...

The Panama Papers story is arguably tech related.

The guidelines also say:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

Mass shootings in the US are not a new phenomenon. This is a mainstream news story, it doesn't belong here.

This isn't a story about a mass shooting. It's a story about how a very large internet site is responding to the story.

I would agree with you about this particular thread, and I don't think it should be flagged, even though there's no new or interesting phenomenon to stories about Reddit "censorship" either.

But the stories about the shooting itself do deserve to be flagged. A line has to be drawn somewhere, otherwise Hacker News becomes Reddit without subreddits.

But Reddit already exists and is better at being Reddit than HN will ever be.

Meta is death, and this type of speculative meta about some other website is particularly dull.

EDIT: And it's not even about the website, it's about a handful of mods in a handful of subreddits.

Really the answer to this is set up your own subreddit, or use Voat.

Relevant example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563540

> These types of stories are regularly removed from HN by the mods.

No, they're removed by users flagging them.

I see non-tech stories on the front page all the time.

So, first, there is a difference between HN (mods) censoring it, and HN (community flagkill) censorsing it.

More importantly, what is the utility of showing it here?

If the community flags it dead, I wouldn't consider that censoring, but it could be construed as censoring if a mod shuts a submission down.

People construe things as censorship regardless of what we do.

The only thing HN moderators have done on any of these threads is unkill this one, so the discussion (such as it is) can continue.