[bloopernova]

HN mods/leadership appear to have taken the stance that this is a non-political site.

Why it's being flagged? People hiding behind the non-political rule are suppressing information and discussion.

This site is owned by ycombinator, who have a motivation to "not rock the boat", so such suppression is ignored.

I guess in time we'll see whether that's a good decision for them or not.

[dang]

There's no "non-political rule", as you'll see if you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and in fact HN hosted a huge frontpage thread about this issue just a few days ago:

Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684536 - April 2025 (1399 comments)

You guys should familiarize yourselves with how this site is operated, because it has been explained endlessly (to the limit of my patience, in fact) over many years, and the assumptions you're making do not match reality. If you want to do that, you'll find entrypoints into thousands of past explanations in my comment upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724590.

[trymas]

> This site is owned by ycombinator, who have a motivation to "not rock the boat"…

I’d argue that leadership of ycombinator is glad where this boat is sailing. Just look who are they inviting to advertised AI startup school at the bottom of this site.

[_DeadFred_]

The founder of Gumroad works inside DOGE now. One of the founders of AirBNB works inside DOGE now. Musk founded DOGE. Peter Thiel's Palantir is generating the information for ICE now.

https://www.404media.co/leaked-palantirs-plan-to-help-ice-de...

David Sacks is the country's official Crypto czar now.

Chamath Palihapitiya brags that he's happy that his money can now buy access/influence /power. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-do...

[tomhow]

Some further context for anyone who reads this and thinks it's a factual or plausible summation of the factors that influence HN moderation:

- Gumroad is not a YC-funded company and its founder has no influence on YC or HN.

- Joe Gebbia is just one of more than ten thousand YC-backed founders and does not represent YC or influence HN.

- Of the other people named, none has any official role or influence at YC, and only one of them has ever had a formal role; a brief, minor role that ended over seven years ago. At least two of those named have had very public, bitterly hostile disputes with former presidents of YC and founders of notable YC companies.

- The only person with any role/influence at YC who publicly espouses any position on U.S. federal politics is Paul Graham, who tweets almost daily in staunch opposition to the current U.S. administration.

- HN moderators and YC management know that HN is only valuable if it is a place where people can find content and discussions that engage intellectual curiosity, and the surest way to destroy its value is to allow it to be captured by any political or ideological agenda.

[cultofmetatron]

it seems they are in cahoots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLhHuOPAXZQ&ab_channel=AdamM...

[tomhow]

Paul Graham is actively discouraging people from working for Palantir if it is building technology that helps the government violate the U.S. constitution:

https://x.com/paulg/status/1913338841068404903

[MichaelZuo]

I doubt they need to adjust the algorithim though to get rid of politics heavy posts specifically.

I’m pretty sure anything that gets more than twice as many comments than upvotes gets a huge downrank penalty, such that they would almost never hit the front page without moderator intervention.

[leereeves]

Yes, the admins have apparently manually added this post back to the /news feed, and it's currently ranked #59.

[cultofmetatron]

"we don't talk about politics"

translation: "we have a vested stake in the status quo."

active silencing on political issues is in and of itself a political stance.

[wltr]

I agree, and there’s plenty of political discussion here. E.g. Navalny’s death / murder was discussed wildly here, but is completely irrelevant to tech. (If this resource pretends it’s about tech.) Politics is ok, unless it’s politics we don’t like you to talk about.

[watwut]

They did not. Very specifically, only flagged articles are the ones that paint current president or current republican leadership very badly while going into details.

That is only flagged kind of article. Other political articles are fine.

Decision to be non political would lead to different selection of articles to be banned.

[atoav]

If things like these happen, staying silent is — guess what — political.

If your neighbours are being taken away by state police there is no non-political move you can make. Helping the police is political, ducking away and pretending it is not helping is political and hiding them is political as well.

While I understand that this site tries to not drown in the flaming garbage site that online political discourse can be, if I — the exact demographic who startups would like to have working for them would list precisely this as my main concern stopping me from moving into the US it is a bit odd that it is verboten to discuss it.

Hackers historically were (and are) extremely critical of authority and for the freedom of knowledge, and now we can't discuss an direct attack at those very values on a site that calls itself Hackernews? Come on.

[wltr]

But … It’s news ycombinator!

[atoav]

Then change it in the h1 title

[wltr]

Won’t be that appealing to the general public, since the YC part would be too obvious. Right now, it’s easier to pretend it’s _hacker_ news.