[colpabar]

I've realized this recently too, and I'm trying to just ignore/flag everything even remotely political that gets posted here. If you disagree with the idea that information control is something the government has no business of doing, you're in the minority here. The response to the twitter files was the slap in the face I needed to finally understand that.

After all, it's a blog for a VC fund. I'd say a lot of people here are building things that do much worse than what the twitter files exposed.

[lovich]

You don’t like that people aren’t as open minded as you’d like, so you flipped on your values and now try to flag anything you disagree with(i.e. political content)?

Am I misinterpreting your comment?

[colpabar]

I think dang kinda just looks the other way because he knows people want to talk politics, but it's literally the first thing in the "off topic" section of the guidelines.

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".

So yeah, you are misinterpreting my comment. I've just realized what HN is meant to be, or at least what dang wants it to be. I think he's an excellent mod, and I respect the guidelines. I want to come here and see cool nerd stuff like "can you play minecraft inside doom inside minecraft" and as soon as I see something political it puts me in a bad mood. And yes, if you scroll my comment history, you will see that I post mostly in political threads. But I have learned my lesson - this place isn't for that. There's no revolution to be started here, given the userbase is mostly financially well-off tech bros who benefit from the status quo. Just like me!

[lovich]

>> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

>The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".

You said you were flagging all of political content and then brought it back to Twitter files specifically to justify it not hitting the exception clause.

For me the Twitter files content themselves aren’t interesting, but the effect of the what seems like obviously non interesting content getting so many people up in arms just because a billionaire is claiming it’s bad is an interesting new phenomenon.

I understand this type of content might put you in a bad mood, but given that you weren’t flagging the content until you felt

> The response to the twitter files was the slap in the face I needed to finally understand that.

Kinda feels like you’re trying to engage in the same type of censorship that bothers you.

[colpabar]

> Kinda feels like you’re trying to engage in the same type of censorship that bothers you.

No, because that isn't censorship. I'm participating in community moderation to the extent that this website enables me. It wouldn't be censorship for the owner of a facebook page about cooking to remove posts not about cooking, and it isn't censorship for posts not about "hacker news" on a website called hacker news. One type of censorship that does bother me is shady government agencies that have done horrible things in the past working with massive social media platforms to influence public discourse. But that's pretty political, and this isn't the place for it.

[cactusplant7374]

> I'm participating in community moderation to the extent that this website enables me.

Yes, but when Musk talked about freedom of speech but not freedom of reach he wasn’t referring to flagging that leads to removal. He meant you might not get as many views as you had hoped.

So your approach of flagging is actually more extreme because the content will be completely removed in some cases.

[lovich]

You do you, but I can’t fathom how to reconcile the public’s reaction to the Twitter files as a “slap in the face” as you said, and then calling this “community moderation”

[fallingknife]

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting

I would say that government agencies trying to stop me from seeing information that it doesn't like is something most good hackers would find interesting.

[colpabar]

I did too! But like I said, the majority of HN does not. We love our LEOs here.