[xiaoma]

I have to say that I've lost some respect for HN today. While there are many times I've missed the quality of the community from the early days of 2007, it's only been recently where I've wondered if the front page might be as censored as Digg was around the time I first discovered HN.

[dang]

Not sure what you're referring to? I can tell you, though, that HN has never been a purely vote-driven site, not in 2007 or any time since. It has always been a blend of user votes and moderator curation. What has changed is that (because users asked us to) we've been more transparent over the last few months about how the site works. It's a mistake to misinterpret this change in reporting as a change in HN itself.

[xiaoma]

I've been aware of the hiring ads on which no comments were allowed, of course. Have moderators been doing things like un-flagging and keeping specific stories they disagree with off the page for so long?

It is entirely possible I was mistaken, but I was under the belief that HN was mostly hands-off when it started. I.e., things other than clear attempts to spam, etc were off the page. Also, I think the focus of the site was narrower and clearer. It was dominated by technology and business with political pieces specifically discouraged. Now, political posts are pretty common. This broadening and blurring of the borders of what's "hacker news" can leave more room for mods to simply boost those they agree with and silence those they disagree with.

The particular article above is disturbing to see suppressed since it's clearly factual, isn't spam or similar and it's about the bay area tech scene, but apparently it's politically inconvenient.

[SamReidHughes]

> but apparently it's politically inconvenient.

This is merely a theory to explain your observations. I think a more plausible alternative explanation is that the moderators' beliefs about what makes up worthwhile discussion is different from yours.

[xiaoma]

>I think a more plausible alternative explanation is that the moderators' beliefs about what makes up worthwhile discussion is different from yours.

I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't. Interfering to suppress spam or a flamewar is reasonable but interfering to suppress things which contain ideas you personally disagree with is not.

Similarly I don't have a lot of respect for you downvoting all my comments in this thread and on the previous one we were both on. It's the same principle, just on a lesser scale. I made a valid point in the GP post and was answering Dang's question.

[dang]

This is the crux of the problem:

> I generally think it's worthwhile to let the community decide what's "worthwhile" and what isn't.

If HN were decided purely by votes, the front page would consist of outrage, gossip, and fashion, and the site would be unrecognizable. HN has never been decided purely by votes. It has always been a blend of community and moderation—and I do mean always, from day one. If you believed otherwise, you were mistaken; if you thought HN was good, consider why. All that has changed in this area is that we're being more transparent.

You've repeated several times the false claim that we buried that article because we "personally disagree" with it. Obviously, we don't "personally disagree" with a factual article. That would make zero sense unless the facts reported are wrong, and I have no idea whether they were in that case.

The article was two years old. It was posted by a serial political troll whose sole interest (to judge by the account history) is in using HN for ideological provocation. Predictably, that worked. The thread brought us such jewels as "Oh, do fuck off and take your strawman with you". Is that the civil, substantive discussion that HN calls for?

Weighting that thread off the front page was an obvious call. What we did not do was kill the story—the discussion could and did continue [1]. Such is the balance we try to strike. This has exactly nothing to do with our personal politics, though that of course is the first thing, and the cheapest, that we're accused of. Not to penalize such stories would put HN at the mercy of arsonists. You seem to imply that online communities, or at least this one, are robust enough not to be damaged by such provocation. That, sadly, is wrong.

The user in question has a bunch of accounts. One they are careful to use for legitimate purposes; the others just push an agenda. Many have been banned. Of course, when we ban them, they make new ones and accuse us of censorship [2].

Many if not most of the ideological throwaway accounts you see on HN are the work of the same few users. I don't think it's unfair to call them trolls. They've shown up in this thread, too, of course, even posting the same link. I wonder why it's necessary to repeatedly push a two-year-old article. It must be quite a classic.

1. But that didn't stop a second serial political troll from accusing us of doing exactly that, presumably because what we actually did wasn't spicy enough to justify cries of repression.

2. The irony is left as an exercise to the reader.

[xiaoma]

Thanks. I had no idea the other poster was a troll with multiple sock-puppet accounts.

I really appreciate the amount of detail in your reply. In all honesty, I severely underestimated the level of top-down editorial control on HN from the early days. I had thought that it was basically just PG, that he was too busy to deal with this kind of thing and that the type of discussion was due to the user base having come mostly from his essays. I have been lucky with the much smaller communities on my own websites over the years in that there were relatively few bad apples and only one sock puppet that I knew of.

I must admit, it is very difficult for me not to dislike "softer" forms of suppression even more so than outright removal of posts. This may be due to how I have seen media manipulation manifested living abroad for most my adult life. I sincerely apologize if I've mistaken comments by the OP to mean something other than they did. Once again thanks for the transparency.

[SamReidHughes]

> Interfering to suppress spam or a flamewar is reasonable but interfering to suppress things which contain ideas you personally disagree with is not.

By "what makes up worthwhile discussion" I was referring to a content-neutral or viewpoint-neutral notion of the idea. (The general category of "Not written for the reader's sake" encompasses most of the badness.)