Would HN be exempt or you'd punish it too? There are job ads for the YC companies.

Do the YC companies pay for placement alongside relevant content and get preferential visibility over non-paying content? If so, then no, HN doesn't get a pass.

Yes they do get preferential placement, independent of the upvote scores (there are no upvote buttons)

YC runs Hacker News and invests its resources into promotion of YC companies' job ads, hoping to increase return on its investment.

Wikipedia pays high salaries to its executives, the money that it derives from its user's donations.

Strip them all of Section 230 protection?

It may be difficult to define a line, but I think a line needs to be drawn.

When "platforms" editorialize content for the purposes of manipulating user behaviour, rather than merely to act in users' interests in helping them find what they want, then I'm in favour of them losing protection.

HN does the latter, so I think it'd be appropriate for HN to keep its protection.

If you read the amicus briefs you will see that once you draw the line, you open the door for lawsuits to establish whether the line has been crossed in each case, with the costly discovery phase, instead of a blanket "cannot sue" now. Goodbye bootstrapped startups with user generated content or your favorite internet forum/mailing list after that.

That's a problem with the American legal system, independent of this or any particular social hazard.

Yes, it's funny how a huge amount of listed companies in the US have lawsuits against them because their stocks have gone down. Lawyers looking for clients who lost some money and then they sue. The lawyer earns money no matter what, and if they win then they get a big payout.

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My short comment did not capture the essence of my concerns, so let me suggest some background reading.

1 The Attention Economy: Where the Customer Becomes the Product – https://journal.businesstoday.org/bt-online/2021/the-attenti...

2 Forget Data. Free Labor Is Facebook’s Lifeblood – https://mashable.com/article/free-labor-facebook-profits

3 Williams, James. 2018. Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4 The Scientists Who Make Apps Addictive – https://web.archive.org/web/20210416052902/https://www.econo...

5 A Call To Minimize Distraction – http://www.minimizedistraction.com/

6 Slow Tech – https://vimeo.com/240721308, transcript at https://www.interaxiongroup.org/sites/default/files/media/pd...

7 Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction – https://doi.org/10.1017/beq.2020.32

8 Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.

That's a bad take, they provide a service and a platform, that's allowed to make a profit. The big deal about 230 getting repealed is that it's a lawyer's wet dream to sue everyone and -win- over any little thing said on the internet. Repealing it basically eliminates free speech on the internet unless you put up your own host, and even then your ISP could get sued for allowing even that. It's yet another way the elite can suppress the voice of the commons on the internet. I can't believe anyone on hackernews would support that.

230 in it's entirety isn't really in danger here. Your ISP is almost definitely still protected regardless of this case. It seems that content recommendation algorithms are the focus and it might stretch to some kinds of search ranking. IMO the internet would be fine without recommendations on YouTube, but I would be afraid to lose things like reddit/stack overflow/hackernews/google that have a kind of content ranking.