I disagree with the rampant flagging practices that many HNers engage in, but I do think it's worth noting that it's not always "censorship" as much as it is people pre-flagging topics that are likely to result in a contentious flamewar in the comment section. Of course plenty of stories are killed because they go against the narrative that a particular reader likes, so there definitely is some censorship, but it's a lot more nuanced than that IMHO.
> s people pre-flagging topics that are likely to result in a contentious flamewar in the comment section.
I’ve never understood this argument: if you don’t want to participate in a discussion, then don’t, but why stop others from doing so? No one is obligated to click into the comments section, read, or take part in any discussion on HN. Even when discussions get heated, in my experience they’re still better than similar discussions elsewhere on the internet.
> Of course plenty of stories are killed because they go against the narrative that a particular reader likes, so there definitely is some censorship
Completely agree with you about why pre-flagging topics is silly. I get that people love echo chambers for many reasons, but it doesn't seem that hard to me to just not read a thread that bothers you
If you don't think there's active censorship of certain topics from HN leadership you're naive beyond belief. There's a reason that most of the topics that get auto-flagged also happen to be a threat to the financial interests of YC and its backers.
Was already flagged. I vouched it and it became unflagged. Now it's flagged again...
(I don't think every story about this conflict should be on HN by the way, as a "major on-going topic". But IMHO this particular story seemed like a good one as it intersects with tech and is something actually new, at least to some degree).
There's a "vouch" button on flagged comments and some flagged stories, which will unflag a story. I'm not entirely sure under which conditions it's available on flagged stories (it's almost always there for flagged comments). I think it probably gets disabled after it got flagged → vouched → flagged, or something? You need at least 500 (or more?) reputation points regardless.
"It's not genocide, it's just mass-scale war crimes" is a soulless pedantic argument that that convinces no one, and ignores numerous statements of intent from Israeli ministers, politicians, and military leaders.
when something good happens you boast about upholding the values of democracy, liberty, and how amazing the "international community" and the international law is, when a disaster happens, suddenly the "civilized western/eurocentric values" disappear
You’re right. The answer to why is that suffering innocents should bother us, and we should take a sensible approach to reducing it. My point is that I’m not sure that means taking sides in their contest of who can be the least humane can any longer be presumed to be the sensible approach.
Zionist militias like Irgun and Lehi who were founded in the 40s literally described themselves as Terorrists, and explicitly communicated that jews are the "master race" and that Arabs are a "slave race"
The complaints about the printing press were _all of them_ valid.
We can look back at the age of the News Publication and see that the concerns of the few were not taken seriously. The lack of concern for those issues, is the same lack of concern over the issues of Social Media.
Those alarmists were _overwhelmingly_ correct in their concerns over mass produced print media.
Those same concerns should be placed with heavier weight on Social Media outlets.
Printing press spam was local, cost money to distribute, and not that many people were literate enough to bother. None of those are true of social media. $8/mo is nothing for a spammer charging $50 a pop for his AI mastery e-course.
It's true but I'm not sure youtube creators ever really claimed to be "authentic", a lot of them are acting as presenters and always have been. Twitter was always more towards "this is the real me"?
I miss the old Youtube when it was so hard to get money from ads that inauthentic channels were actually rare.
Most people just wanted to share stuff likes video games or memes, some dreamed of fame and money of course, but they had no idea how to get there, they filmed with whatever camera they already had without Youtube, they didn't take a loan to invest in a perfect sound studio setup.
Of course, I'm not taking unpaid labor for granted, I really wish they'd get the money they want and deserve from ads, but stayed simple. But because of competition, that's impossible. Now they all look the same, because they got advice directly from the Youtube company on putting red arrows and stupid faces on thumbnails. And jumpcuts.
Good thing there's still 10 year old minecrafters who don't give a damn about all this or can't buy decent equipment, if I can still find their channels through the impenetrable algorithms.
they're also shadow banning a lot of people who are posting pro-Palestine content, people are sharing short tutorials where they're trying to teach people how to work around the "algorithm". they also deleted an Al-Jazeera presenter’s profile after he criticized Israel[1]
