HN is a highly moderated platform that uses several “tools” to silence dissident views including shadow banning posts, removing posts, applying penalties to accounts, account bans, downvoting posts, etc.<p>I completely understand these actions as it relates to spam or bot activity as all platforms must use moderation to provide a good user experience, but these moderation weapons are primarily used to silence alternative viewpoints and subject matter that does not agree with HN moderators.<p>Although moderators believe they are acting with good intentions, there are many consequences to portraying the HN platform as an “open” social news community, but secretly silencing opposing views.<p>The primary issue is creating a narrow filter bubble. Secondly, reinforcing narrow social, technological and political ideologies.<p>As a community we should keep open the discussion of how these moderation tools are silencing posts and the wider effect they have on HN readers who believe they are reading unfiltered user submitted and generated content.
From what I've seen users themselves seem to be the most policing with flags. Even some technically focused comments by newer accounts I deemed in reasonably good faith and wanted to give a decent answer to have been flagged so badly as to be unreliable even if I vouch. For particular example there was one on an IPv4 thread proposing a form of v4 in v6 embedding and I wanted to point out how the standards have already done a more complete version of the idea but couldn't. The HN moderation team seems to come out more towards tone unless the topic is completely over the top on breaking the rules.<p>Without a specific topic of what is being censored in your view or why it seems to be the moderators themselves it's hard to say much more. I will say HN isnt supposed to be a general open social platform, perhaps one of the problems here is the off-topic guidelines aren't enforced enough rather than the other way around.
I unkilled this, for anti-ironic reasons. But as other users have correctly pointed out, these points are meaningless if they don't come with specific links. The minute you give people specific examples to look at, you'll see that they generate an entire spectrum of responses, from strong-agree (from the ones who like the examples) to strong-disagree (from the ones who dislike them). This reveals how hard, indeed impossible, it is to come up with a satisfying answer to this.<p>Speaking of irony, if you want some, consider this: the most even-handed policy, the most consistently applied, would actually produce an optimum of <i>dis</i>satisfaction—because by applying even-handed principles to all content, it would produce plenty of examples for everyone to dislike, and those are the data points that determine people's views about bias, skew, and censorship (see <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>).<p>More ironically still, the most even-handed and consistent policy would actually be perceived by nearly everyone with strong feelings as hopelessly biased and in favor of the other side (whichever that is, relative to the perceiver).<p>I'm not saying that we do moderation in the most even-handed way, nor that we do so with consistency—especially not the latter, because we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here (<a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=likeliest%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...</a>). But some sort of evenhandedness does follow, as a value, from HN's core principle of intellectual curiosity—since if you exclude things for ideological reasons, you're automatically not optimizing for intellectual interest. So we have to at least try to be evenhanded, and we do at least try.
Before you claim silencing opposing views, you should at least have some examples and show some proof that it's not the users flagging or down voting.<p>Ps. Flagged this because the title is too suggestive and shows/suggests bad faith.
Well, yes, they do reportedly use several tools but from what I understand the flagging is done by members of the community... and certain number of flags "shadow-bans" your comment.<p>Silicon valley has certain political leanings which is reflected by the majority members here, as expected.