[whatyoucantsay]

1. Which years?

2. I've seen it happen countless times. With the exception of pg himself, who displayed an allergy to politics or anything that got in his way of attempting to discover truth, I believe every HN moderator his sit firmly on the same side of the political spectrum and culture wars.

Being humans, most have a propensity to ignore inflammatory or factually incorrect comments they agree with while flagging those they don't as "generic" or flamewar inducing. I noted dozens of examples of this behavior but the ROI on going through them is almost certainly poor or negative. The moderation response related to major controversies of the past 2 years has been clear. Which pages were artificially weighted was very poorly correlated with the intellectual honesty of their contents.

3. I was indeed prevented immediately upon making the comment in my profile, and met with a message that I was commenting too quickly. Even after waiting a full hour, I was still blocked from commenting.

Interestingly another story recently asked about YC's GDPR compliance and was weighted so heavily that it sank below much older stories with fewer upvotes. Comments didn't outnumber votes, ether.

#3 is actually related to #2 as YCs deepening economic and political investment in an authoritarian state increases the likelihood of a future HN where comments challenging certain militaristic, ethno-nationalist propaganda will be flagged as "generic political arguments" while repeating the propaganda itself is allowed.

My view of YC's ethics is not so poor that I think this is an immediate risk, but money does tend to bend politics over time. In the early days, few expected Yahoo would one day assist in uncovering rights activists so they could be executed, and yet they did.

[dang]

Arguments about HN getting too political / ruined by politics go back almost as far as HN itself:

2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320152

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485

Sound familiar? Those are just the first few I found. In those arguments, pg was in favor of keeping politicized stories if they were intellectually interesting and not just about politics:

2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243614

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349168

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196756

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94861

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403775

We've kept the original rule that a political story on HN needs to have something intellectually interesting, but we've also tightened it. For example, when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today, like these from ten years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94840

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518

Just look at those threads! (Edit: also interesting how the item IDs more than doubled in the first half of 2008.)

[dang]

(This is the second half of what used to be at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. I've split it off because the first half turned out to be useful to link to in other contexts.)

Re "I've seen it happen countless times": since you don't know anything about our politics, what you're seeing is your own interpretation of whatever stood out to you, which is likely whatever you most disliked. I know it feels convincing, but people convince themselves of everything this way, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546533 to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307091. It is called the Hostile Media Effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), and there are countless examples on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....

Re your account, it looks like we rate limited it because it has a history of using HN primarily for political (and especially national) battle, which is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's routine HN moderation. Saying something about YC was not the active ingredient; people do that all the time without getting moderated. Indeed we have a rule against moderating HN for that reason: see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=....

Re the YC/GDPR thing: it's impossible to say much without a specific link but I can tell you we didn't downweight it because of YC—that would break the rule I just mentioned. Users were complaining about a flurry of GDPR posts in recent weeks and even posting lists of recent discussions, so if we touched it at all it was probably dupe-related.

[whatyoucantsay]

This comment further validates the concern. If regularly countering demonstrably false propaganda encountered within threads is "national battle" that gets an account limited, but the demonstrably false propaganda itself is accepted, then something is broken.

The Eternal September comment rings true. There was a staggering change from 2006-2008, and a gradually decelerating decline ever since. Site policy changes are not necessarily the primary factor. As an audience gets orders of magnitudes larger, it grows diluted and less cohesive. That said, I fully agree with DanielBMarkham's comments from the election thread (despite having been in political agreement with the majority myself).

PG has made truly non-PC comments here and in essays. His writing isn't that of a populist or a cultural conservative by any means, but is also clearly out of tune with the bay area echo chamber. There is a wide space between supporting Trump and not fitting in in SV! Broadly, the political topics pg seems to write about have been an opposition to political correctness, favoring equality of opportunity, and a belief that individuals creating wealth help the world rather than harm it. Some of these positions were either left leaning or had broad popular support 20 years ago, but most would now be considered right or centrist. This, coupled with his previous willingness to voice deeply sensitive but true observations, may have lead to his retirement (e.g. "founders with strong foreign accents have less startup success"). Things may have changed after Valleywag took aim at him, however.

The only "battle" being waged from this side is

    1) for the pursuit of truth
    2) for the freedom, happiness and well-being of every human to the greatest degree possible

This does involve criticising certain bad ideas (e.g. "It's acceptable to invade a peaceful neighbour to regain territory our ancestors held hundreds of years ago", "Human traits are shaped only by environment, without influence from heredity" or "Gay men should be thrown off rooftops"). Politics is far from the most important thing, but it, or tribalism generally, is often involved when a strong majority believe something at odds with history or empiricism. Investment bubbles and other herd behaviour are also deeply fascinating and worth debating.

Trying to accumulate karma leads to ever stronger filter bubbles. Consequently, karma is a resource best spent on ideas that are both possibly true and deeply unpopular. Given the willingness to dissent and the apparent alignment of goals with HN's stated guidelines, these and future comments may possibly serve as a useful canary in a coal mine.

[dang]

Everyone in flamewars thinks that they're "countering demonstrably false propaganda". That's how flamewars feel from the inside.