This is exactly how China works. If you don't have enough social credit, everyone is censoring you. And it is your fault of course, correct your behavior.

Are you comparing the US with China, where the CCP controls everything, a non-elected government, and literally has their fingers in every company of importance there? Maybe I'm misinterpreting your comment, your intent is a bit ambiguous.

If u seriously believe we the youngest country in the world r not headed to exactly to where u just commented about U r either blind to history of the world or a democrat!!

I hate when I spent 5 minutes typing the comment and then HN tells me I'm blocked for unknown amount of time because I was downvoted. So replying with a different account to keep the comment. Sorry dang.

The original response:

Of course not. I'm just pointing to the flaw in this argument: if everybody ban you, then you are the problem. Sometimes there are other reasons for that than you, and I provided with an example.

> literally has their fingers in every company of importance there

However, now you said it, authoritarian states work differently. They don't tell every company what they should do. Each private company already knows what it should do, otherwise they will have certain consequences like change of ownership.

But again, putting the equal sign between PRC and the US is wrong at the moment.

> I'm blocked for unknown amount of time because I was downvoted

Is that really a thing on HN? Seems pretty unfair to block someone because of an unpopular view, isn't flagging used for that when a comment breaches the guidelines?

No, you don't get blocked for an unpopular view or for violating some nebulous 'groupthink'. You need to clearly cross the line several times to get blocked.

No need to get blocked you get suppressed. And plenty people dont even take the time anymore to write something known to be unpopular here. Including myself. HN is just as much a bubble as any other place. Probably should be rewritten in Rust.

> > I'm blocked for unknown amount of time because I was downvoted

> Is that really a thing on HN? Seems pretty unfair to block someone because of an unpopular view, isn't flagging used for that when a comment breaches the guidelines?

Hamster news is not a safe space for wrongthink.

Nothing scares me more than thinking that you might actually mean this.

The mobs are not always in the right, no matter how large a majority they have.

Everyone in power at the time "censored "Giordano Bruno. He must have been hella toxic, according to you.

He was, actually. He got into fights with pretty much everybody -- and not just people in power.

The story is about a billion times more complicated than "the church burned him to hide the truth about science". He was, indeed, a heretic, as the Church defined it, and "science" had little to nothing to do with it.

That does not, of course, justify any of what happened to Bruno. But the oft-repeated story of "Giordano Bruno died so that I could have an all-purpose martyr for anything I want to disagree with" is false. It's worth reading a biography, or at least the Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

> The mobs are not always in the right, no matter how large a majority they have.

Sometimes those are the only in the right (or should I say left) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsheviks

So long as it's not a single entity controlling all of those other entities - like federal government - then I agree.

> they reserve the right to remove you for any reason. Using their service is a privilege, not a right.

> If everyone is “censoring” you, then there must be a good reason why they prefer to distance themselves.

Or it could just be an any reason.

ar15.com is owned by Brownell's sports. it's hardly an "especially toxic brand."

GoDaddy really stepped over a line here and to this point has nothing to say for itself.

I think they should have the same rights as the local baker or local florist. Buying a wedding cake or flowers is a privilege.