I am actually surprised by what appears to be HN's explicit censorship of this topic.

Just two days ago this NYT editorial [1] was on the front page of HN with 20+ upvotes IIRC, and before there were more than 1 or 2 comments the post was deleted and unviewable. (And didn't show up as flagged either -- just totally deleted.)

I'm not sure how many people on HN are aware of what appears to be admin censorship of this topic. And it's not like it's some incendiary blog post -- it's an Op-Ed from the nation's traditional "newspaper of record", part of the national conversation, and relevant to our industry.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame...

I believe you're mistaken. Do you know that item ids are just incrementing integers? We're making it bloody hard on ourselves to get away with censorship that way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403488

Other recent threads on the subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16759138

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16250371

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327774

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334733

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17325778

The post is there, just flagged. Had plenty of (mostly terrible) discussion.

I don't believe that it is hacker news admins that are doing the censorship. There is a flag feature and any post that is flagged is automatically hidden. There is a dedicated contingent of users that will flag anything that goes against their narrative.

This happens for articles that discuss China, diversity, etc.

It would be prudent to let "controversial" subjects stand before the court of public opinion rather than be automatically censored, regardless of how riled up the comments section can get.

Hm, what if it was "anything goes" but buttons to hid things you personally find offensive? If you analysed enough hide-clicks you could perhaps start to softly predict what to hide automatically for that person. By softly I mean blurring it, and not hiding it outright. I actually kind of like the Fb filter allowing quite disturbing material, but blurring it and in effect telling you that, "Hey, you might not want to see this, but it's here if you change your mind." Oftentimes I just scroll past those, because - wow - I really don't need stuff like that in my life, and I'm grown up enough to make that decision for myself. On so select occasions I still look at them, for reasons. But then I at least had a reason! So it's beyond complaining, and I can really only thank myself for looking at it, if I didn't like it after all.

I’ve observed a similar phenomena on articles about the wrongdoings of the US government. Well cited high quality articles about historical or contemporary US aggression overseas disappear quickly even when they had been getting upvotes.

I noticed a similar trend on Facebook. My posts about the tragedy occurring right now in Yemen got almost no traffic on Facebook, despite being worded and cited similarly to my other popular posts.

Isn't it possible that what's happening in Yemen, just but its nature, is a turn-off for most of FB's user base?

Yes and that’s the rub. Previously a journalist decided what stories people should hear. Now an algorithm tuned to people’s engagement levels decides what we should see. It may have the effect of burying important stories that make people uncomfortable, which a journalist might not do. Just because people would rather not know about Yemen doesn’t mean we’re better off if people don’t know about Yemen.

I thought there's some pretty robust discussion about people who feel shafted by diversity initiatives. I do feel that anyone who speaks in a hot-headed way gets penalized on Hacker News, and I think that's great. There were a few big recent HN discussions on the matter -- are there clear instances of what you mean on the whole?

It seems to me that there’s some middle area where the person doesn’t understand Bay Area culture but they’re not being rude or hot headed, and yet their genuine questions get downvoted.

I do think there’s some kind of “you can’t discuss that” attitudes on here about certain topics. Diversity stuff is an area I can imagine reasonable and even good comments getting downvoted. Sadly I don’t have any sources, but this is my intuition after reading HN regularly.

> middle area where the person doesn’t understand Bay Area culture... > genuine questions get downvoted

The problem is these "genuine questions," for other people, are received as: bad faith questions, "sea lioning", poorly researched questions (e.g., simple query would find the answer), microagressions, dog whistles, sock puppet arguments, or other incendiary social media argument techniques.

Whether every instance of "hi, I'm new here, why is affirmative action a good thing?" is actually bad faith, etc. is irrelevant.

Diversity as a topic gets downvoted, flagged, and removed because the heat keeps happening on those threads. Regardless of which side you occupy or support or even if you claim to support no side at all, it consistently produces uncharitable and unproductive discussion.

There are a good amount of people who are "asking" those questions in bad faith. And, after a while, it gets exhausting to those who get bombarded with those questions. And those doing that in bad faith know it. It's kinda like a DDOS attack on them.

>> middle area where the person doesn’t understand Bay Area culture... genuine questions get downvoted

>The problem is these "genuine questions," for other people, are received as: bad faith questions, "sea lioning", poorly researched questions (e.g., simple query would find the answer), microagressions, dog whistles, sock puppet arguments, or other incendiary social media argument techniques.

Those things - I don't understand or currently agree with your view, so it's a "bad faith question" - are Bay Area culture.

In the rest of the adult world, it's OK to not share your opinion before asking questions.

Please (re-)read and follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Comments like this rightly get downvoted and flagged for being unsubstantive, flamebait, ideological battle, and going on about downvotes. Then of course people complain that it's their politics which are being censored.

I disagree. I think a lot of people not familiar with the term micro aggression think it’s all stupid. But I have been feeling as though I understand better what people mean when they use the term micro aggression. They’re talking about people being rude, inconsiderate, or mean and not even realizing it. And the term micro aggression is used to communicate that they feel uncomfortable and they want the other to recognize that and change their behavior.

I think if someone is making you feel uncomfortable you have every right to tell them. Now if they decide not to change that’s up to them, and you two may choose not to have a relationship moving forward, but it’s okay to share how you feel and ask for change.

However some people decide they are the victim of aggression and they then yell at the other person, and that’s obviously absurd. If you don’t want people to be aggressive at you, don’t be aggressive at them.

But what you’re proposing is that, when someone is feeling uncomfortable, we should make them more uncomfortable. I think that’s shitty behavior and I don’t believe it is helpful. Do you?

What should we do when someone is feeling uncomfortable simply because someone else is has an opposing political view?

Feeling disgust at an political view is a well established medical phenomenon. It trigger the same brain region as smelling rotten food, garbage and contaminated water. How would we go about to prevent triggering this reaction?

What I'm most excited about with Kennedy's replacement is seeing affirmative action finally get the axe. Many, many people think that the erosion of meritocracy is a bad thing even for the groups it's intended to benefit.

Those people probably also believe that we have or ever had a meritocracy, when nothing could be further from the truth.

I really have a hard time coming up with a field outside of pro sports that is more meritocratic than tech. The assault on that in the name of "diversity" is morally repulsive, and I'll be very happy to see racial discrimination outlawed.

I recently wrote a comment in response to a post here with the title, "Why Women Don't Code?". The post itself was, I think, on the front page and received 104 upvotes. My comment was along the lines of, "we don't know why women don't code (preference vs culture) but [anecdote] and I personally lean towards the preference angle." My comment was down voted twice but afterwards appeared to gain traction with more than a dozen upvotes.

That topic in particular (gender in STEM, feminist topics, etc.) I find is usually a no-go zone anywhere else on the net unless you have a specific opinion abut it, but on HN it wasn't censored and I felt comfortable expressing an opinion.

It's sometimes hit and miss. I think sometimes posts on certain hot-topic political issues are downvoted because many people come here for tech related stuff and don't want to see anything else-- especially that which leads to an unwinable argument.

> the person doesn’t understand Bay Area culture

It's a common misconception, but HN users are overwhelmingly not in the Bay Area. When I looked at this a few months ago, the number was about 10%. (Actually between 5% and 14% depending on how you count.)

What about if you weight by activity? Does that significantly affect the percentage?

It does somewhat, hence the range I mentioned. For posting submissions and comments it was 10.9%.

Is it that surprising?

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Downvotes aren't 'censorship'.

In and of themselves, no. However, I think an argument could be made for the visual suppression of posts, which occurs after too many downvotes have been given, being a form of soft censorship. The information is still broadcast but it's made impossible to read unless I copy/paste it or tilt my screen to an extreme angle.

Or you can just click on the comment timestamp. If downvotes are 'censorship', so are upvotes.

Upvotes do not suppress the readability of comments. That workarounds exist is beyond the point.

Sure they do. They move other comments off the page entirely.

Maybe it's indicative of which sort of conversations I choose to participate in, but I rarely see comment sections go beyond the page fold.

Supposing we take your argument seriously though, comments past the page fold which also have their contrast lowered to the point of illegibility are certainly censored even moreso.

It only takes a dozen short comments or so even on a giant screen. And yes, almost everything is censorship if you redefine censorship to mean any random irksome thing.

Incidentally, I do think the way the comment fading works is pointedly user-hating and dumb (it's traditionally dumb, though!), but it's not really censorship. More generally, since we're talking about taking things seriously, framing forum irritants as some sort of oppression is a solid way to ensure few people take you seriously.

I don't think that describing a system which deliberately suppresses the legibility of posts you've already scrolled to see as 'soft censorship' is an unreasonable "redefinition" of censorship. If you disagree, I suppose I consider you unreasonable.

Very well. I have added 'soft unreasonable' to my profile.

No, because you can still read things that have been heavily downvoted. Flagging on the other hand can actually make things unreadable.

Flagging doesn't make things unreadable.

Interesting. Thanks for correcting me on that. I thought I had seen that before; but perhaps that always requires moderator intervention.

There's a 'showdead' flag you can turn on in the prefs, that will show you stuff that has been flagged to death. When in the very rare cases something gets moderated in a comment (like removing someone's private info), there's a moderator comment saying so.

I thought I had turned that on but I probably forgot to click “update” afterwards. Thanks!

HN is not owned by a social media giant, so this grievance doesn’t appear to have much to do with the article.

It is owned by a Silicon Valley VC giant, while not directly media it is steered by big money. However I think HN is moderated relatively well, but I can see how some people might think it's being gamed/controlled/censored by self interest (I don't)

Sure it is, it's owned by the people who own (or initially funded) the social media giants.

I think that’s the wrong question to imply. What it is is an illustration of how big media behaves due to its own implicit ad well as explicit biases. Of course HN isn’t mainstream, but it also experiences some of the same symptoms.

There's two angles to this: general crowd psychology, and how social media tailors the news feed in response to it.

In the old Internet (forums and Usenet), sure, there was crowd psychology too. There always is.

However, these social media designs were far less prone to hiding unpopular opinions. As a general rule, unless you had an overtly strict moderator or something, you could read posts with unpopular opinions, even if the "crowd" disagreed.

Big social media sites (Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc.) in contrast use algorithmic reordering, shuffling, and tweaking of your feeds / timelines / etc. Likes / retweets / etc. are one component to what gets displayed on your feed. The net result here is that unpopular opinions are often effectively "silenced". IMHO this leads to a negative and polarizing effect.

I can't call it 100% censorship though. It's different. On most social networks, you are free to, say, start your own little space (a subreddit or your own Twitter space and whatnot) where, say, the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives are discussed. Unless the subject strays into TOS violation territory, you can probably say what you want. However, there's a good chance in said subreddit (in this polarized environment and considering crowd psychology) that it is the positive side of diversity initiatives that are downvoted to oblivion. And the reverse is true as well. Basically, crowd psychology and the binary like/retweet system ensures that no one hears what the "other side" has to say. Maybe it's a "dark pattern" of sort? Tweak the emotions of the user in the right way, not the wrong way, and they might spend a bit longer looking at that advertisement...

Hacker News doesn't feel as "bad" to me as the bigger social networks for some reason -- I'm not a big fan of upvote/downvote systems, obviously, but at least HN includes tools like the showdead option that's pretty easy to enable. There was a large discussion about diversity initiatives during relevant stories (the James Damore memo for instance), but for others, I know that some of the "crowd" here is wary of overtly political articles period, favoring only pure tech articles. So you are going to get some front page selection bias against articles of a "political" nature.

Usenet's classic problem was that it amplified the most extreme voices in any conversation. Extreme voices and unpopular opinions are different things. You can be extremely polite in expressing an unpopular opinion, and get upvoted on HN.

As I recall, Usenet took freedom of expression to the extreme and a few trolls ruined it. I remember one who referred to himself as Archimedes Plutonium and would spam the discussion of specific science and programming topics with wild discourses claiming the Plutonium atom was god. The turned whole newsfeeds into spam. I believe this is where the comment "Don't feed the trolls" came from. I am all for civil, productive discussion where ideas are refined. There is a time and a place to say, "This is off topic and not producing a productive dialog, so take it elsewhere."

you can see the buried comments on reddit. They are at the bottom of the thread. You can even sort by controversial or worst.

HN and other "distributed moderation" sites tend to quell any discussion that a fraction of the userbase strongly dislikes. Most people don't vote on most comments, so highly motivated people have more say on a particular topic. In some cases, this is a correction mechanism, such as when people with physics education downvote the proponents of fringe theories; in other cases, it may hide useful information, such as in a debate about morality or a similar less certain topic that people acquire strong opinions about without having such high confidence.

However, I find it hard to justify calling this "censorship" because it is the site working as intended. Controversial topics are avoided because the goal of the site is ultimately recreational. There are many things you can't discuss on HN because the userbase just isn't interested, but nobody would argue that HN censors discussions of, say, the hardcore music scene in the Bay Area.

But isn't this more that your peers are quick to react to that topic rather than the platform is censoring it?

FB/Twitter and HN aren't really comparable here. HN does topic moderation; FB and Twitter do not. There's a lot of room for subtlety here -- you could argue that topic moderation is done in a biased way that ends up behaving like censorship, for example -- but the discussion definitely won't go anywhere if it doesn't make a good faith effort to avoid equating those two things.

HN is a social media giant?

It’s social media if nothing else.

Doesn’t have to be a giant to exhibit the behaviors people find objectionable, like applying selective censorship.

That's about what I would expect. It's about the same as discussing the less fortunate side of vaccines, which I would hope is buried as quickly as possible for obvious reasons.

The benefits of vaccines overwhelm the problems, and yes, the anti-vaccine quackery of the last couple decades has made legitimate discussion impossible. It's a similar situation to states' rights, a term which 160 years ago the violent, racist yahoos of the confederacy and their supporters forever poisoned, despite it being a concise descriptive term for lots of legitimate issues.

Why? People on HN skew towards being young enough to be having babies. Why wouldn't you want them to know that it's OK to space out vaccines instead of conforming to the schedule that is pushed on them?

> Why wouldn't you want them to know that it's OK to space out vaccines...

Because it's not.

Spacing them out means they're getting some later, leaving them vulnerable longer. It also lends false credence to the idea that they're dangerous. In many cases, it may also mean kids miss out on the later doses, because repeated doctor visits to administer them may be unaffordable (copays) or difficult (scheduling, transportation, etc.). Multiple visits for shots also exposes them to germy pediatrician waiting rooms more frequently.

I do not agree with anything that you said. However, it is an argument and a basis for a discussion.

You state that such a discussion should not occur, and that those new parents should not have access to those (including our pediatrician, by the way) who state that the current schedule is much too aggressive and can safely be spaced out.

Denying new parents the opportunity for such a discussion is pure and simple arrogance and it does nobody any good except the egos of those who engage in that censorship.

---------------------

Whackadoodles. Nice. The arrogance is strong in this one.

Your own linked article (about not a study, but merely a survey whose demographics and actual questions are hidden from us) states that parents concerns should not be dismissed. This is a discussion about censorship, and you've shown yourself only too willing to engage in it.

Your anti-vax ideas are in the same neighborhood as flat earthers; yeah, we all get that you really really believe it, but that don't make it any more real than the pancake earth model.

The word I like to describe all of this stuff is scientism -- it looks like science, feels like knowledge, but it's just well-formed nonsense.

> I do not agree with anything that you said.

You don't agree that giving a vaccine later means you're not getting its benefits as quickly?

You don't agree that three pediatrician visits is 3x the exposure to the germs in a pediatrician's waiting room?

As for your pediatrician's particular practice, they may simply be avoiding conflict: http://time.com/3726887/doctors-space-out-vaccines/

> And while nearly 90% thought that such spacing out of the immunizations would put the children, and the community at risk of spreading infectious diseases like measles, 37% said they agreed to do so often or always.

(There are also a smattering of whackadoodles in any profession...)

Surprised this thread hasn’t been flagged yet.

I’m not sure which bias you specifically mean. But in case it’s a pro-diversity sentiment you believe to be seeing, let me assure you: HN is the only social circle where I can /still/ find people insisting “affirmative action is racism”.

Perhaps your social circles lack diversity of thought?

Partly due the to recent news on Harvard admissions, most of my Asian friends think affirmative action is racist against them.