[byset]

"And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN."

And maybe is still getting suppressed? This post was #1 on HN one minute, and then, less than an hour later, it's down on page 3, ranked #88. Does the HN ranking algorithm really bury stuff that quickly?

[dang]

It set off the flamewar detector as well as getting a lot of user flags. I've turned that off now.

As for 'suppressed' please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27309238.

[byset]

Ok thx for the reply

I was just dismayed to see the story sink so fast (but I get it now) — the article involves an interesting discussion of how scientific consensus is represented in the media and how it relates to social media, which seem like very HN-friendly topics… shame that so many are eager to flag something like this based on (as seems likely) some sort of forbidden-topic litmus test

[fsckboy]

> As for 'suppressed' please see...

thanks for the list. The suppression I'm talking about occurred before your earliest link, threads closed, cut off, etc. I remember because I learned about Yuri Deigin's research in April and no discussion of it was allowed on HN which should be a place for reasoned discussion

[dang]

Reasoned discussion has a fraught relationship with large groups.

I'd be a bit careful about the word "allowed" because that posits an "allower" when much of the process you're describing is stochastic. I'm not trying to evade responsibility for the part that we play (at least I hope I'm not), but it's so much more complicated than just "allow v. unallow".

[fsckboy]

you think of the problem you are solving as "avoid flamewars including through automation to make the task easier on a no-profit forum"

I think there needs to be more room for "(perhaps heated) discussion of actual science in the face of an ongoing existential threat to vast swathes of western civilization and the third world"

I think there needs to be more room for discussion of a seemingly real, Orwellian-Huxleyan ideological takeover of important cultural institutions like wikipedia, the NY Times, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., a left wing doppelganger to the Red Scare of the 50's.

full disclosure: I'm a former leftie, I know the propaganda I used to spew in the name of the earnest conviction of what morally superior people we lefties were compared to those awful troglodytes, and I remember how easily the centrists would be convinced to go along by nice words. I mean, black lives DO matter, right? but BLM Inc(tm) is a Marxist led radical coalition that sees further violence as helping the cause by proving their case.

Cheers, I appreciate the work you do. :)

[ximeng]

Yes it does bury stuff very quickly if it is flagged by sufficient numbers of users. I’m not sure it’s a good thing but it is a thing.

[FillardMillmore]

Well it looks like this one got flagged. But why?

[ximeng]

It's a black box from an outside perspective, but generally I imagine it's factors such as appearing political or the sort of thing that would be reported in mainstream media (both of which are somewhat discouraged by site guidelines), or being repetitive (there have been a number of articles discussed recently on this topic).

This is not a new issue. Here's a discussion on the subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13857086