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.