I think a whole lot of people forget that this is a discussion board run by a venture capital group.

I agree with the post, but don't find it surprising. If you have problems with companies these guys are invested in, probably find a different platform that they don't run?

Seriously, we could do this on IRC without hard gatekeeping...

None of this is surprising, YC is as incestuous as the rest of the industry. Still, it’s worth calling out. This submission will likely be nuked, too.

I mean, the real steering force is the fact that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all stories on HN come from the same ~20 power users whose accounts post a dozen stories every single day of every single year to the site. Last time I ran AI sentiment analysis over the stories from those accounts, it classified over a third of them as either breaking HN's posted guidelines or as being "extremely" political in nature. And yet the mods are seemingly fine with the situation.

The linked blog post is a complaint about a different blog post[1] being briefly popular on HN and then dropping off into the weeds rapidly, becoming flagged, and mysteriously becoming unflagged.

Obviously, this must the result of proactive, willful censorship or maybe some kind of deep-state conspiracy.

By extension, it could never have been the result of HN's automated flamewar detector reacting to 29 of the 145 comments being from just one user who seemed to spend most of their efforts telling others that they were wrong.

(That user may in fact be authoritative on the topic, but it looks like a flamewar from my own 10,000-foot overview of this discussion that I have zero personal interest in.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617309

The author links to a previous post with graphs with the answer. Roughly, there’s a controversy flag that gets enabled when comments are greater than upvotes, with limits. Looks like that’s what happened to the author’s posts.

I’ve seen this happen to many interesting posts and not a big fan, but this is connected to a business after all.

. . . It became increasingly clear that some form of censorship, whether through subtle slowing or outright blocking, does seem to be a recurring issue on the Hacker News platform . . .

We’ve reached a point where people cannot tolerate differing ideologies or something trivial like tase in coffee anymore. This fosters a tribal mentality. By providing a moderation system that allows users to suppress disagreeable content, you’re essentially facilitating censorship. I’m unsure of the solution, and at this point, I’ve lost interest in finding one. With bot armies left and right there is just no place left for open communities.

The idea that there will ever be a platform with overhead costs that is completely free from censorship is a pipe dream. That platform is called literally just going outside and yelling.