Commenters here need to follow the rules, and the rules don't go away when the topic is a tough one. On the contrary, they apply more, as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html makes clear.
Happy to follow the rules when free discussion is allowed. Watching this topic get censored aggressively on here during some of the darkest months for Palestinians eroded my respect for your “rules”.
We've specifically protected, carefully moderated, and kept open many threads about this topic, at considerable cost, because each time one of these appears on HN, the mods can kiss the rest of their day goodbye, not to mention look forward to streams of abuse [1]. Forgive me therefore if I dispute your claim of "censored aggressively". To me that feels like not taking yes for an answer.
That's understandable, because the people who feel passionately about any topic (call it X) always feel like X is vastly underrepresented, and even "censored aggressively", on HN. We can say things like "frontpage space is the scarcest resource" and "we can't have too much repetition" till the cows come home, but it won't take this feeling away. Even when X is literally the most discussed topic on HN, we get people claiming that X is being censored aggressively—it's not even uncommon [2]. This is a function of how people feel and nothing else.
[1] I'm not comparing this to the suffering of the people in the actual situation. That is obvious of course, but since someone will accuse me of doing that if I don't say this, I'm saying this.
[2] If you want an example, this one is engraved in my memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. How someone could turn the most-discussed topic on the entire site into "not any mention" and "censored aggressively" still zaps me with pain and anger every time it comes back to me, which fortunately is not all that often.
As someone who is extremely online and often bored at work, I spend a lot of time checking the top ~100 or so posts here. Any article related to Israel was getting rapidly flagged and taken down. It’s possible that these posts are being mass-flagged by users and automatically taken down, but if that’s the case it appears to be an abuse of the flag function. I understand it’s difficult to moderate these threads and that Israel/Palestine is a contentious topic, but that just doesn’t explain the rapid (~10 minute latency) take downs prior to ANY inflammatory comments. Again, I don’t know exactly how your system works, but maybe some additional transparency would be helpful. It’s clearly already being gamed so it wouldn’t hurt.
Edit: I think it’s also important to be conscious of the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics. “Hackernews” is not a neutral zone. It is directly associated with the most powerful forces in the world today. I’m not casting judgment because I work in this industry to. But it undoubtedly raises serious questions about the moderation (automated or otherwise) of speech around these topics on here.
The key word in your comment is "any". If you really mean that "any", I propose consing an 'm' onto it, because HN has hosted dozens of threads totalling many thousands of comments, probably tens of thousands by now, about this topic. That shouldn't be hard to verify. One could start here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
> maybe some additional transparency would be helpful.
No amount of transparency will help, alas, for two reasons: (1) people decide these things based on how they feel, and (2) the measure-zero internet law: no matter how often you repeat something, the set of users who receive the information has measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
> the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics.
I don't remotely believe that YC has played a "central role" in any of that, but even if it had, Hacker News is moderated by me and tomhow, and no one at YC has ever put any political pressure on us. If you're talking about HN moderation, that's who you're talking about—and we're quite accessible and willing to answer questions and address objections. (That's why I've posted 81k comments over the last 10+ years, what-am-i-doing-with-my-life-god-help-me.)
p.s. I've always felt that people being bored at work are HN's core constituency, so thank you!
I don’t want hacker news to be neutral or biased, I want it to be a site or I can nerd out about tech stuff. Then when I feel like reading about the news of the day or arguing about politics, I’ll leave hacker news, and go to Twitter.
I don’t want hacker news to become Twitter.
I don’t want hacker news to become a 24/7 critical theory struggle session.
All I can do as one person, acting within the guidelines, is to exercise my ability to flag stuff too focussed on politics.
Thank you for trying to keep HN from devolving into 24x7 culture war like every other site.
I have so many places I can go if I want to read and discuss Israel and Palestine. I don’t need another, and I especially don’t want to lose the one spot I have that’s relatively free of it.
