Ask HN: Are we allowed to discuss Israel on HN?
16 Jimmc414 16 8/19/2025, 2:52:20 AM
It happens too often that a story like this one [0] gets a great amount of traction and interest then it is banished from the front page. Can we get greater clarity as to what topics are not allowed? Respectfully, it seems inorganic for stories like this to go from #10 to #1005 in seconds.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44947572
IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44402896 - June 2025 (1122 comments - 13 hours on front page)
‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44714221 - July 2025 (1278 comments - 13 hours on front page)
Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44302752 - June 2025 (509 comments - 10 hours on front page)
Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44527190 - July 2025 (546 comments - 10 hours on front page)
NYPD bypassed facial recognition ban to ID pro-Palestinian student protester - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44604328 - July 2025 (172 comments - 4 hours on front page)
‘No Other Land’ consultant Awdah Hathaleen killed by Israeli settler - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44731958 - July 2025 (831 comments - 7 hours on front page)
Several others have spent less time on the front page but have been visible and active for many hours via the /active page.
We want to give the topic of Israel and Gaza fair exposure, as it's obviously an important story and it would feel wrong to pretend it's not happening.
At the same time, every time we have one of these stories on the front page, it turns in to a hellish flamewar, we have to spend all day moderating it, and we still get accusations from either side of the debate that HN is being brigaded or manipulated by activists or operatives for the opposing side. So, there's never any way to make many, or any people feel like HN is covering this topic the right amount, or that the right side of the debate is being given adequate weight in the discussion. Still, we do our best to give the key developments in this awful event sufficient coverage, and to make the discussion threads as free of toxicity as possible.
Regarding the story you're appealing about in this question: it's just got too many triggering aspects to lead to a healthy discussion on HN. Also, it's a several-years-old article, and when we give exposure to major world news, the qualifying criterion is that the story contains "significant new information".
Potentially relevant: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=Tom+Alexandrovich
I found stories about it in The Las Vegas Review-Journal, The Las Vegas Sun, The Guardian, The Independent, Reuters, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, Gizmodo, Yahoo News, MSN, AOL, Haaretz, US News and World Report, and New York Post as well as several smaller outlets.
His Wikipedia page has already been updated with a section "2025 arrest in Nevada."
The problem is that this site has a limited capacity to host such discussions. The people who (quite rightly, of course) feel passionately about this topic want it to be covered far more than that capacity can tolerate. Meanwhile there are others who want it to be covered much less.
It's really hard to get this explanation across to the community; no matter how many times we explain, most users don't even hear the explanation, quite apart from whether they would like/dislike it or agree/disagree.
Still, if anyone wants to know how we approach this, the above link will take you to many detailed explanations that also link to the moderation principles from which our approach is derived. If you (or anyone) familiarize yourself with those explanations and still have a question that isn't answered there, tomhow and I will be happy to take a crack at it.
In fact, that's the genesis of HN: pg got bored of reading only about tech and startups and renamed Startup News to Hacker News back in 2007 (https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html).
There's room for stories with political overlap. At the same time, we can't have too many, or HN would turn into a current affairs site and cease to be HN. That's a tough set of constraints. We've found an approach over the years which balances the tradeoffs well enough (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), but it has the disadvantage of not satisfying everybody.
Actually, it has the disadvantage of not satisfying anybody who feels passionately about a given topic. That's especially true of the Israel/Gaza topic. There are many readers who feel like HN is unfairly suppressing it, and there are also many readers who feel like HN is unfairly featuring it.
The other disadvantage is that there's no effective way to communicate about this to the community. No matter how many explanations we post, the set of users who actually get the message always seems to have measure zero (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
We don't do that. What did you see that made you think it happened?
(Specifically, HN has no software that would log any user out for asking a question, nor any moderator who would do that manually.)
"Palistin" returns 142 results (typo tolerance to catch both relevant endings)
"Brazil" returns 366 results
"Israel" returns 401
"Ukraine" returns 632
"Gaza" returns 842
"China" returns 3,436
Could probably total the points as well, see how many points per story, etc
fake title> Researchers in China create new type of solar panel
fake title> Military in China make new weapon preparing invasion