I've been here over 10 years and I don't really recall seeing anything other than blatant spam or crap removed in that time. Maybe I've just not seen it happen. But, the way things seem to have worked here (very well I might add) is that when enough of the community disagrees, things get downvoted to death and if you don't have "Show dead" enabled, you don't see them. Your choice. I've had show dead enabled as long as I can remember because I like to see everything posted.

Sometimes I agree with things a lot of people here clearly disagree with and I'm fine with that. I can decide to either argue my/their case or move on and accept we have different views. Maybe sometimes seeing things heavily downvoted here changes my mind on subject as well and question if my views are right or not.

We can't all agree about everything all the time. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong. We all are, nobody is ever 100% right, 100% of the time. I sure as hell don't want somebody else controlling everything I see and read because they think it might give me the "wrong" ideas. I'm an adult and I should be allowed to make my own mind up and most importantly question things, as should everybody else, regardless of education level or where they "fit" into society.

When I think about all of the forums and comment sections I regularly interact with, the ones with the most open, democratic, free speech, with little to no direct moderation seem to be the most engaging, tolerant and frankly, nicer places. I've given up on engaging with anything that's heavily moderated or frankly, blatantly biased - Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and I feel a lot happier.

‘I would rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that cannot be questioned’ - Richard Feynman.

> I've been here over 10 years and I don't really recall seeing anything other than blatant spam or crap removed in that time.

Well, besides the usual "who decides what's 'blatant spam or crap'?" response to the "it's only bad stuff that gets censored", I'd suggest you haven't really been paying attention, then. Take a look at dang's comment history[1] and you'll see a lot of warnings before ban but also plenty of bans and references to previous bans, usually for substantive, not spam, reasons.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

You must have missed the DOJ filing against Yale last week. Removed in <30 minutes due to comments.

As others have already mentioned, HN is in fact actively moderated. It's by far the most curated public discussion forum I frequent. The civil tone that prevails here is in many ways a result of the community guidelines being strictly enforced, and backed up with a banhammer.

If you were to take the above at face value, would this change your perception about the value of moderation in online communities?

HN is a LOT more heavily moderated than Facebook, Twitter, and most subreddits. You must really not have been paying attention if you haven't noticed after 10 years.

Controversial content (lately that means political) regularly gets flagged and removed. As a recent example the NYT Trump Taxes article went through cycles of being posted, rapidly upvoted, then flagged to algorithmic removal, over and over again. To point where meta-discussion came online (and was flagged) [1]

Personally I think downvoting is the appropriate response to say "this is not interesting or relevant to HN", but many have realized flagging provides outsized influence.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24610890

The president doesn't make major annoucements using HN. The fact is, Twitter has taken on a different role.

Give me a break, the president should have his twitter account permabanned for all his ToS violations, and he should use official channels like a .gov web site to address the nation, where he can be held more accountable when spreading blatant falsehoods and certainly won't be censored.

This whole sham of using Twitter is a freedom of private speech trick he uses to facilitate ambiguously mixing occasionally factual official statements with trash "protected" speech.

If anyone holds his feet to the fire for tweets, he can simply claim he was acting as a private citizen stating an opinion - obviously the president of the united states wouldn't use twitter for official business!

I look forward to seeing how history treats this embarrassingly incompetent era of american politics.

> he should use official channels like a .gov web site to address the nation, where he can be held more accountable when spreading blatant falsehoods and certainly won't be censored.

I'm calling/writing my congress-critter today to ask that they look into doing exactly this

I think verified government accounts based on a person's role in the government would make more sense. It gets rid of the ambiguity you're talking about. If Trump was forced to tweet from @potus, the verified account for the POTUS, that makes it clear he's communicating as the POTUS, not a private citizen.

Personal accounts should be subject to the same rules as everyone else. Give official government accounts special treatment; can't be banned, no censorship, etc..

I don't think that addresses the problems sufficiently.

Official government statements should come through more secure channels than a privately owned and operated web site that arguably resembles a 21st century tabloid where people's accounts are regularly hacked or otherwise taken over, and both censorship and access are arbitrary and unregulated.

Just today we have an example of a C-SPAN political editor admitting to having lied about their Twitter account being hacked to abdicate responsibility for comments they made on the platform [0].

Such claims would not only be unbelievable coming from secure government owned and operated channels, but would be damming to the administration should they honestly occur, incentivizing running such services properly without such vulnerabilities and with an immutable audit trail.

Furthermore, if a .gov provided forums for open public discussion in response to official statements, they would actually be protected under the 1st amendment. Unlike on private platforms like Twitter, where arbitrary censorship and blocking of discussion/access is perfectly legal.

All of this junk occurring on private websites like Twitter/FB is completely misguided and a tremendous disservice to the American public.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/media/steve-scully-cspan-susp...

> Official government statements should come through more secure channels than a privately owned and operated web site

This can be done today. An application communicating via an open and federated social protocol can be stood up on government infrastructure/DNS namespace. These systems already exist and work.

I would be 100% onboard with a complete ban on social media use for government officials conducting government business. Add in a Wikipedia style diff history for official government policies / positions and it sounds even better IMO.

> immutable audit trail

This would be amazing because knowing that something is un-delete-able might cause some politicians to take a pause and think about what they're saying. Some. Lol.

But if the president did make major announcements on HN, he would not be subject to moderation on here? If the president has unilaterally imposed these restrictions on what Twitter can do by virtue of using it, he should make it official and make Twitter a public service. Otherwise, I don't understand how this is different than the president showing up at your house yelling at you with a megaphone and refusing to leave because your property has now "taken on a different role".

What hacker communities did you grow up in where the only free speech worth protecting was the US President's?

Telling Twitter what to say violates their free speech.

I have to agree with this. How is this really any different than blocking spam links or links to undesirable websites in direct messages? How does it differ from moderators on a website removing users from a group for valid or for trivial reasons? Does a company like Twitter have any obligation to allow anything it doesn't want on its platform?

This situation is very much a double-bind. In this case, someone gets to make noise about the "truth they won't let you see" and claim bias.