It has been shown time and again that these conspiracies turn out to be big nothingburgers. The moderators deserve to be taken in good faith.<p>Be aware that if you think something’s off you can also just email the moderators first! They tend to respond quite quickly.
This is an important topic since HN appears to be a news site that uses social up/down voting, but really is a highly moderated platform, where moderators have full power to censor and shadow ban for any reason without any transparency.<p>I was shadow banned for my submission about Amazon’s power over my small Amazon business, an important topic in which I received national media attention from NBC, former editors of Vice News, etc.<p>However, an HN moderator did not like the article, so he shadow banned me.<p>I understand there are cases for shadow banning, such as trolls, spam accounts etc, but my submission was a highly significant news worthy article that received national media attention, that did not deserve this treatment due to one HN moderators opinion.<p>HN lacks moderator transparency. Readers believe they are being shown a curated list of relevant news from their peers, but really are just seeing the topics and views that closely align with HN moderators opinions.
I assume this might be in response to Linus' vaccine post from yesterday?<p>It received a crazy amount of votes in its first half hour(almost 500) and then just suddenly disappeared from the main news listing without being flagged or dead.<p>No comment from HN staff either as far as I can see.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27466374</a>