They shut down a sub called “jailbait”, I’d say the vast majority of people are ok with that type of “censorship”. And if being against that disgusting trash makes me “pro-censorship”, fine.

That wasn't the case back then, there was a very strong "if it's legal, it's allowed" sentiment on reddit. It was only after it started getting attention in mainstream media that it was banned.

Yes, exactly, that sentiment isn’t mainstream. It goes against dominant social values and norms.

The dominant view in society is stuff like ”jailbait” shouldn’t be tolerated. The reason it’s not outright illegal is in a non-prurient context a yearbook photo may just be a photo. It’s when you post it to a forum for gutter creeps that the qualitative nature changes.

> They shut down a sub called “jailbait”, I’d say the vast majority of people are ok with that type of “censorship”.

The point of free speech is to protect against "the vast majority of people". The vast majority of people are against lgbt, atheism, etc. Do you think such content should be banned as well? What if the vast majority of people want huckleberry finn banned? The vast majority of people was once against women's rights, civil rights, freeing the slaves, etc. Rights exist to guard against the mob.

> And if being against that disgusting trash makes me “pro-censorship”, fine.

That's fine. You can be pro-censorship. It's a valid opinion to hold. And certainly there is a lot of trash online. What I despise are people who are pro-censorship and yet claim to be for free speech.

Also, my point isn't whether I agree or disagree with the content on reddit. My point was there was a time when reddit prided itself on being a free speech platform. As long as it was legal, it was allowed. That changed. Not because the "vast majority" wanted it but because a select group of elites wanted to install a censorship regime on reddit. Reddit was never a democracy. And censorship came to reddit because the business and media elites demanded it.

The number of people who are actually free speech maximalists has got to be tiny. I really like the way it is done in the US: the government isn’t allowed to censor you, but I don’t have to let you stay in my house if you start insulting my family or going on racist rants. This seems like the perfect balance to me.

> The number of people who are actually free speech maximalists has got to be tiny.

This is a very common strawman that I see. Sure, not a lot of people are in favor of literally infinite amounts of free speech.

But nobody claimed that. Instead, people are claiming that there can be a wide range in support for free speech, and even if someone is OK with banning death threads and CSAM, that such a person could still be very much on the pro free speech side.

So yes, someone can be more in favor of free speech than you are, because they do not want legal speech to be banned on major platforms, even if you can nitpick their position and find some extreme outlyier hypothetical where they are not 1 million percent in favor of everything.

> it was not censored like HN!

I don't feel like HN is censored. Does anyone think HN is censored? dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while, can this really be called censorship? of course, you can take a karma hit from other people, but reddit always had that as well.

Agreed, especially compared to modern Reddit, HN is a free speech haven.

It's super heavily moderated here.

Reddit is heavily moderated too, but there you can get into an argument, and it depends on the subreddit.

Here the tone policing is far, far stricter. Also the homepage is incredibly tightly controlled, politically and pro-YC. I've seen many articles on YC companies or associated people changed, removed, etc despite being highly relevant.

Titles are changed to suit the mods tastes here. There was a good recent example where a very negative article on OpenAI skyrocketed the the top of the homepage, fastest rising post ever with a few hundred upvotes within like an hour - first the title was completely neutered, then the post was removed entirely.

The difference is that here I've been able to see many opinions expressed and given a fair shake which would've resulted in a ban on most of Reddit. The title moderation also helps with keeping them neutral and/or informative (biased titles set the tone of the conversation).

The tone policing is far stricter, but the actual content policing is a lot less absurd. The result is that controversial topics and opinions don't result in as much of a toxic cesspool of name calling. On top of all that, here you can enable the display of deleted and flagged comments.

I think that thinking of HN as anything close to being free speech though is a really wrong take. Sure it’s less leftist biased which is nice, but for example the title changes aren’t just to reduce controversy, they consistently favor the in-group. If you believed the HN homepage and comment section as anything close to the zeitgeist you’d be doing yourself a disservice.

I said that it was free speech relative to Reddit. Not that it's outright free speech. I have a personal misskey instance for that.

I still think relatively it’s possible more moderated here, if you just remove the most popular reddits which I’d guess most here ignore.

It's more free-speech than Reddit along the political spectrum, but less free-speech than Reddit along other spectrums. We're not allowed to insult each other on this site, for example, and posts that are specifically about politics are not allowed. Even Reddit has subs for different political groups.

If a comment or post is particularly unpopular, it can get flagged here, even if it is perfectly civil.

Example: The problem with “doing your own research” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31334034

Yes, there is censorship on HN, but it's typically enacted by users instead of mods.

I'm not sure this qualifies as censorship. There are a bunch of posts and comments that get flagged and unfairly downvoted for no apparent good reason, yes. It might depend on the mood of the users with voting power on that day, and that's unfair, yes. But from what I've seen there is no central agenda to systematically filter out topics or people. Subjectively, I find HN to be much less judgemental than Twitter (musk or not) and other places.

That's a completely fair point. But I suppose that regardless of whether it technically qualifies as censorship, it's people removing content that bothers them, and the end result can still be the same.

> I don't feel like HN is censored.

It's heavily censored but that's fine as it exists to serve a niche business community. And HN never claimed to be a free speech platform like reddit did.

> dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while

He does that for sure, but he also censors heavily to meet the corporate, social, etc agenda.

When the admins and power mods of reddit decided censor more, HN is one of the censorship models they looked to - the psychological tricks, front running, shadow banning, etc.

But you at least need someone to clean up spam? Not sure whether there was a forum spamming business back then, but there certainly is now.

Yes. Subs had moderators and they got rid of spam, but that was about it. The mods themselves were heavily pro free speech just like the founders and corporate. Back then, reddit was predominatly american and we all adopted the free speech as an ideal. Then as reddit gained a larger foreign following, they slowly chipped away at free speech. It's pretty much what happened to social media and the internet in general.

The prononents of internet censorship are canadians, brits, europeans, middle easterners, indians, chinese, etc. After all, the only place "hate speech" is protected is in the US. If you think about it, you have to protect "hate speech" if you are to have free speech. You can't have free speech without "hate speech". The idea of censoring "hate speech" is an alien concept in america. It was imported from abroad.

> Then as reddit gained a larger foreign following, they slowly chipped away at free speech.

I don't think so. I would rather say Reddit made Trump president, so the US establishment got pissed off. Then Reddit appeases them.

The neat thing is that Reddit is community moderated. Each community is allowed to set their own standards, but they also need to clean up their own spam. So, /r/science doesn't allow any jokes at all while /r/Antiwork bans anything that's pro-corporation.

But several times, mostly when the controversy got too hot, the admins have killed subreddits, like /r/The_Donald, /r/incels, and /r/FatPeopleHate.

Wut? People migrated to reddit, because it was one of the few similarly featured platforms at the time. HN was (and still is more or less) a niche forum revolving around startups and SV. reddit was literally the only centralized place on the net that was positioned to handle the posts, discussion and users.

Two completely different platforms that were never in competition with each other. I think you dont know what youre talking about.

I'm somewhat hopeful this gets the far left activist class to move to their own echo chamber like the Trump peeps did. Wish Reddit would go back to the let the upvotes handle it days. Would be nice to be able to sort by controversial again and see some reasonable takes.