@dang is this off-topic or was this taken off frontpage due to high flags? seems like it was.

I've become very concerned lately with the censorship on hacker news.

The only way I found this page was by attempting to post the url.

It's been essentially banished from the site, without even a comment on this thread about what happened or why.

If we are going to censor things, this should be a transparent process not a covert activity where people don't even know they have been censored.

People use the word "censor" to mean so many things that it's hard to track, but in this case was HN working the way it always does and has for many years. It works the same way regardless of topic, and there was no moderator intervention. We sometimes intervene to turn off flags, but this wasn't the right thread for that, as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527.

The topic itself just had two massive threads on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675), so I don't think it's correct to call the topic censored.

Re transparency, we don't publish a complete moderation log (I've written about why over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), but we're happy to answer questions when people ask them, and believe it's in HN's long-term interest to err on the side of openness. I spend half my days these days answering this sort of question through email. Even when we can't answer a question completely, we can usually at least say why (e.g.: some of HN's anti-abuse software would stop working if we published how it works, so we can't answer that question completely).

If you or anyone still has a question that I haven't answered here or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.

Users flagged it. We sometimes turn off flags, but I didn't do so in this case for multiple reasons. The primary reason is that HN just had two enormous threads about this topic:

'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 - Dec 2023 (1266 comments)

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1669 comments)

There are other reasons why we didn't turn off flags in this case. I'll describe two.

(1) The votes and comments on this thread didn't look organic to our software, nor to me. My guess is that someone was trying to promote this article on HN. If so, I'm sure it was for deeply felt reasons, but it's still not a good thing to do (not to mention against HN's rules, both in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and in practice it leads to a lesser quality of discussion.

(2) If we're going to have further threads about this painful and divisive topic, it's better that the foundation not be an outright advocacy piece. This is not a criticism of the article, nor of the intention behind the article—it's a question of the impact on the thread. You can already see, in some of the angriest comments in this thread, what sort of hell the entire discussion would likely have turned into (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645665 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38646617). That is not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and I don't see how it helps anyone.

Those who feel strongly in favor of a piece like this need to understand that there are also many users on whom it would have the opposite intense effect. It gets harder to communicate under such conditions, and HN threads are supposed to be meaningful communication, not battle.

All of this was happening in two recent threads I linked to—including controversies about article choice. That is inevitable, but it's also a matter of degree.

Do you think there are any cases where expressions of anger are necessary or correct? Or are you only able to see things in terms of "quality discussion" and "meaningful communication." Do you measure that only in terms of apparently calmness of the participants.

Do you see how this favors the party doing harm over the one being harmed? After all it's much easier to remain calm while you're transgressing than while you are being transgressed upon.

Have you ever read that mlk speech about the white moderates. Do you view yourself as being more devoted to order than justice? From here this is explicitly the choice you're making, but I wonder if you understand it that way.

Of course expressions of anger can be necessary and correct. (I don't think I'd use the word "correct" for this—I don't think of feelings as correct or incorrect, because if a feeling exists, it's always for a good reason—but I suppose that's a tangent.) It's not clear to me why you'd ask this, since the answer is obvious and I don't think I implied otherwise. Perhaps it is the frequency with which I ask people not to engage in flamewar on HN? But internet flamewar is something different from expression of anger in general.

As for your other questions: I do not view myself as being "more devoted to order than justice", and no I don't understand it that way—not at all. Does that answer your questions?

These things can look totally different from different positions and it's easy to arrive at inaccurate perceptions when all we have to go on are tiny blobs of text online. I'm happy to try to clarify my perspective as best I can, as long as I can feel that the questions are coming in good faith and not as a cross-examination. I confess to wavering a bit on that latter point when I read your comment.

It really just seems like your position here, on this specific issue, is that we already talked about this. We just had a discussion about it the other day, and people were worked up about it, and so we don't need to and in fact should not have a discussion about it today.

The thing is it is still happening, and so people should be worked up about it every day until it stops. And our industry is specifically involved implicated and complicit at the very core of the matter, and so action is necessary from us. From you, even.

Like do you understand that you're not going to be judged on the "tiny blobs of text online" you're going to be judged by the consequences of our collective actions and your role in influencing them? And that your role, specifically dan, is one of power and influence? People are going to write books about the relationship between the american tech industry and the genocide of palestinians and you are going to be in them. I'm not cross examining you but you should reckon with the fact that people will.

By that logic, HN should be a current affairs site, dedicated to talking about the most important things in the world—of which this war certainly is one.

But that's not the kind of site HN is or ever has been, so the question becomes: does a site like HN, with its particular mandate, have a right to exist? or should it be replaced by something more important? This question has been around for a good 15 years. Our answer is: we're trying to have a specific kind of website, and it's ok for it to exist, even though it's not the most important.

People with strong views (perhaps entirely justified) on a topic don't like it when that topic doesn't get as much coverage as they think it should. Often they think it should dominate HN's front page completely and anything less than that is a deplorable failure on the part of the admins, who obviously lack any morals or humanity. If I answer that yes, this topic is important, deserves discussion, and has indeed been receiving it—more than any other topic of its kind—well, one quickly learns that such demands can never be satisfied, short of replacing the site with an entirely different one, and even then probably not. Moreover such demands come in from multiple angles about multiple topics and the people making the demands not only disagree amongst themselves but are even at war with each other.

This dynamic has been playing out for many years, and if we had done as you say, HN would have ceased to exist a long time ago. I think it's a good thing that HN still exists, even though many of the things on its front page are trivial and of so much less importance than the suffering, violence, and cruelty going on in the world that it's grotesque to even compare them.