[LexiMax]

> Given the demographic this site selects for, it’s easy to forget how many dumb people there are in the world.

Let's not go there.

I could see an argument that Hacker News users are a bit more book smart than the average internet user. But this site's user base is just as susceptible to motivated reasoning, myopia, and lack of empathy for those who view the world differently than them.

Those are all their own kind of intelligence. If anything, the book smarts can make those other areas disproportionately worse.

[_DeadFred_]

Once someone decides their intelligence guarantees their correctness, they stop questioning themselves. There was conversation here about Israel starving Gaza, and they Israel needed to provide for Gaza like the USA did for Germany, that that was acceptable/gold standard treatment of an occupied populace. When I looked up the numbers, and Israel was actually during starvation providing more calories per person than the USA did Germany, I was instantly downvoted and told people need more calories. Just for providing actual context to comments that were routinely being made.

Edit: I'm post rate limited from replying below. HN routinely chose to whitelist flagged Gaza discussions, but didn't whitelist comments of people who stated the minority opinion and whose comments were completely flagged into invisibility. If you arrived late and didn't get to read the original non-offensive but viewpoint challenging comments, you would assume everything from the 'wrong' viewpoint was so unhinged it had to be flagged, but many were just 'wrongthink' and not 'flag to invisibility' worthy. Or that there was group consensus on the discussion (obviously people just learned to stop posting on those threads if you had wrongthink).

Not sure how moderation can intervene, remove the topic flag and say it's 'a worthwhile discussion for HN' when the same moderation allows views/challenge of the narrative to be flagged to invisibility. It becomes more pontification than discussion at that point.

[LexiMax]

To someone who used to run a community, it is absolutely insane to me that on HN, users are given the tools to collectively censor people they disagree with, or even those who bring up inconvenient questions or truths.

HN moderators have the ability to take away people's voting privileges. It's either not an effective deterrent, not done at a large enough scale to be effective, or they are knowingly complicit in the manipulation.