It's on the front page right now, but I'm not sure it deserves to be given the quality of HN's discussion so far. The top ten highest voted comments are essentially redundant copies of the same outrage, stated slightly differently. If everyone is just going to pile on and state how upset they are, instead of replying to each other's comments and keeping one thread for all the outrage, what's the point in bringing this to the front page at all? Where's the curious and interesting discussion? Outrage is pervasive on TV and the Internet and yet, as presented here so far, it's the most uninteresting response possible.

Why don't you be the change you want to see, and contribute constructively with your own opinion to facilitate curious and interesting discussion? Complaining about it is also not that interesting.

I am. Meta-commenting about HN is a constructive contribution to both the quality of site and, in some instances, leads to quality contributions within a specific discussion as well. The site admin 'dang' certainly does a lot more of it than I do, and regularly links to his own past meta-commentaries, so while I respect that they're uninteresting to you, I disagree.

I am, but anything I would have said was already said by one of the top ten redundant outrage comments, so I'm not wasting HN's time piling on in that regard. Upvotes are a stellar alternative to "me too" replies that contribution nothing but redundancy.

It's interesting that you interpret my reply as containing an opinion about the post topic, when it doesn't state any opinion about Google's actions at all. I don't consider it appropriate to infuse every statement I make with outrage, even if I'm outraged, because that saps the life from communities when it's a common practice. Perhaps you're (incorrectly) reading between the lines that the lack of infused outrage as some sort of statement of my opinion?

Hacker News is a place for people to discuss interesting things, while being generally associated with Y Combinator, a startup incubator.

I've said this before, and dang has corrected me, but I believe this is a good thing for Y Combinator, because it attracts smart people to the YC brand, and gives YC companies a pool of talent they can pick from to build companies.

The "Hacker" part has always, to me, been about makers, not about ethics per se. I've always found the notion that there is a shared "hacker" set of mores to be kind of curious.

Ripping things apart to see how they work vs. kludging something together to solve a specific problem vs. adversarial digital trespassing for fun and profit -- none of that lends itself, to me, to some specific shared morality. Certainly a few personality traits will show up, but folks trying to build a set of acceptable behaviors out of that will probably not find a ton of consistency across the people who engage in the aforementioned activities.

It's not even about government narratives - it's about narratives of executives and owners of tech companies.

From the link: "After we are notified of a potential policy violation, we may review the content and take action, including restricting access to the content, removing the content".

Would you expect any company not to do this?

Where does it say "Google is analyzing your files for content" in the way you claim? It's not "all content that doesn't align with narratives that a government sets", it's "information about public voting procedures, political candidate eligibility based on age / birthplace, election results, or census participation that contradicts official government records.". That's a lot more specific than you imply, and a lot more like "you can't spin up an overthow-the-government movement using Google services" than "you can't disagree with the government", even if it's literally "you can't say Obama was born in Kenya" - there is apparently a human review involved.

It appears as though this post has been memory-holed.

It set off the flamewar detector. We turned that off when we saw it.