I've come to recognize over time that HN itself is not really censorship-heavy. But it relies heavily on ranking based on community effects, and for certain types of articles, that leads it interesting places.

For sure, Googlers downvote a lot of critical comments and surely flag posts they feel are inaccurate. There are a LOT of Googlers and quite a few of them are very active here. Some are even vocally opposed to disclosing their employer.

The other thing is that many posts critical of companies are extremely controversial here. HN is a weird mixing pot of startup folks from the Valley and hackers and code enthusiasts, so there are some very pro-business and very anti-business voices.

Where this plays in is that HN tends to push threads with a lot of argument and debate off the front page much faster. Announcements of new products aren't nearly as controversial as a post about say... James Damore's memo.

I haven't noticed heavy censorship. Who do you think is doing the censoring and how are they accomplishing it? Are there a few specific examples you can point to where that's happening?

Check out this story for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136918

It was censored by HN admins as a dupe.Even thought it's different from the other Google story about firing of a critic.

The content of that story and especially the HN discussion of that story was 95% similar to an already much larger and very active discussion on HN about the New York Times version of that story. In case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131370

The WaPo article adds nothing materially new to a conversation about Open Markets and Barry Lynn's firing.

Dozens of stories daily are marked as dupes to keep related conversations under one roof. I completely support marking the WaPo story as dupe and directing folks to the NYT discussion.

Or if this site was written properly, the moderators could merge the two together and edit in a note as to why.

Isn't this more the effect of Google employed engineers downvoting criticism of their beloved Google, and upvoting the Plex approved propaganda?