Because it is the moderator's opinion that such content is not very relevant to HN and gets disproportionality upvoted. Basically they disagree with the enthusiasm of privacy advocates.
> Users are flagging these posts. The HN community is divided. Some people think that there are too many NSA stories; others, too few. On any issue where the community is divided, upvotes compete with flags, and stories rise and fall according to the tug of war.
> The HN software adds a small default weight to NSA stories. The purpose of this is obviously not to suppress them. If we were trying to do that, it would be a large weight and not a small one. Instead, it's tuned so that NSA stories can still easily make the front page—and so they do. It's an attempt to strike a balance between the different segments of the community who strongly disagree with one another about how much NSA is the right amount of NSA.
>It's an attempt to strike a balance between the different segments of the community who strongly disagree with one another about how much NSA is the right amount of NSA.
Because dang is the one who added the weight, the blatant implication here is that dang believes that "the balance" needs to be more towards not having NSA stories overwhelm the front page.
I don't see how you can read what dang wrote and somehow think that he is not suppressing NSA stories. He very clearly states that he is suppressing them, just not to a large degree. Just because he says "we are not suppressing them" before describing their method of suppression does not mean the are not suppressed.
Why is it necessary to strike a balance between the two sides of this conversation? As he states, the NSA stories still make it to the front page. What actual effect does this have? As far as I can tell, it simply makes the stories less visible than they would otherwise be. No amount of linguistic gymnastics is going to make me think this is not a description of suppression.
The amount of doublespeak going on here is baffling. Dang very clearly states that the intention is to lessen the enthusiasm of these topics, and it's being weighted in favor of the pro-NSA side, which is pretty much exactly what I said: Dang disagrees with the enthusiasm of the anti-NSA (pro-privacy) side of the debate.