Ask HN: Do you think there's censorship on HN?
28 endorphine 29 6/14/2025, 8:18:33 PM
It could just be me, so I'd like to know what everyone thinks: lately there have been significant geopolitical tensions and multiple wars being fought.
However, I have a feeling that not all news make it to the top of HN and I was wondering whether this is just a coincidence or there's chance that specific posts are being buried on purpose by the moderators and/or any algorithms.
I know this might sound like conspiracy theory. This is not my intention. I just want to know if anyone else is surprised by the lack of coverage on the front page with regards to the recent wars.
HN user for 10(?) years. It's not surprising at all to me. It's off-topic here. Plenty of other websites cover the stories, TV covers it. I come here to escape the 24/7 news cycle. Celebrity deaths hardly make the frontpage, if the inventor of an operating system dies you'll top spot and 2000 comments. It's not that users don't care, it's more the expectation that people get their news from multiple sources (websites, aggregator, forums) and not every forum needs to cover all topics.
No comments yet
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
Some have tried to argue that these stories gratify intellectual curiosity and are therefore on topic but this view does not seem to have been accepted by the site moderators or user base.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I'll try to pull a random recent example that isn't flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44204767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44205060
I mean here in the title, we have court, DOGE, data. Good comment to votes ratio. It should be a better source for intellectual gratification compared to most political news.
The first link delivers (how we handle leaked social security data and PII), the second doesn't.
There's some thoughtful comments at the bottom of the second link if you have showdead on, and these seem to get downvoted hard. I'm not American and don't have the context for DOGE. But rude responses are being upvoted and the polite calm ones are being downvoted to death. This feels a lot like censorship.
For example, a govt can censor things by imposing restrictions on media, or media access. Documents can be classified etc.
In that sense, no I font think Dang is deciding which articles make the front page etc. So if it's govt censorship then no.
But your last paragraph takes about "feeling like censorship". If a collective group chooses not to discuss some things, if they express disapproval when topics come up - is that "censorship"?
Personally I don't use votes to disagree with a point. I use them to indicate the quality of the post, disagree or not. Personally I upvote people I am responding to because their point was good enough to make me reply.
That said, most people still use votes as a form of agree or disagree. That's not censorship. (Flagging would be closer). Disagreement is not censorship.
Unpopular positions have consequences. (I know, I have many.) And yes, popularity does not mean truth. Sometimes you can be "rejected" because your truth is still ahead of its time. Turing was rejected for being gay.
Other times your opinion is just both unpopular, and gets worse either time. I have the right to express say my belief that the earth is flat, but I dont expect many to agree, or history to prove me right. People ignoring that discussion is not censorship, it's that it's a waste of time arguing with fools.
When discussing current affairs you can expect at least some folk to vote based on their worldview. That's fair enough, but its not censorship. Regardless of how it makes you feel.
People that do not live within the accepted majority world views will feel isolated, ostracized, ignored and censored. As an example I do not share 98% of my views here. Instead I share them on smaller semi-private sites that research and discuss this site and a handful of other sites. In my opinion that is a decent path to balance ones experience and help avoid being gas-lit. One can create their own private or semi-private bubbles and onboard people that feel ostracized and censored. Some use Mastodon for this. Some create their own self hosted chat and forum servers. I know, more echo chambers. People can build their identity on their own servers and use sites like Facebook, Tweeter, Reddit, HN as a public disposable cache to share specific thoughts. People can choose whether or not to permit search engines, AI and other bots on their own servers. People can also permit or block any topics they wish on their own servers.
I think it can good for ones mental health to not try to fit entirely into a majority demographic especially when so many cultures are trying to mold themselves to fit a shared community. I think this is especially important when sites like HN become popular enough to attract paid agent provocateurs and state level actors along with their victims that either consciously or sub-consciously attempt to keep narratives on a specific and popular "acceptable" path.
In theory a worse scenario be malicious UI front-ends to HN that could subtly manipulate votes and flags using legitimate accounts without their knowledge given the majority here are on cell phones. This is just one reason why people should review their flag and vote history and why phone apps should be de-compiled rather than just trusting source code. One should not trust sandbox analyzers as the code can detect what it is running on.
Nobody is perfect, and even if they were, they'd never match expectations precisely.
The 'official' explanation that I got from Dang was that political posts hit automated software filters because of flagging and down voting which cause them to disappear from the front page.
Separately, sometimes the moderation team disables these filters on certain posts, but it's not often.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487014
most people here have apathy towards anything that involves emotions and beliefs
this place only tolerates content that nerds find interesting for a moment (driven by their adhd) only to be talked about for a bit then forgotten the day after.
hacker news is the watercooler of the internet. every line we write is formal way of dunking on each other's intellectual capacity and at end of day we smile nod agree because we are all only here to get paid or get our bare minimum intellectual or social fix
As for your observations, it's a mixed bag of factors:
Some sources are by default flagged and need vouching (so penalized). For example 404 Media is penalized because of paywall practices. Meanwhile other apparently worse sites are not flagged. So you could argue there is bias from moderators there. I haven't seen evidence of any algorithmic bias beyond that and promotion of YC-affiliated ads and posts.
Supposedly political rallying is frowned upon and talk about industry role in murdering of civilians gets flagged as off-topic or inflammatory while dang descends from the mountain asking everyone to call their politicians about killing some tax bill stuck, top post on the front page...
Aside from that it seems most of the effective censoring you are seeing are from HN users. For example, there's a well-known anti-blockchain bias in the audience so anything perceived as "pro crypto" easily gets buried. Other certain themes get upvoted hard and fast. It's not hard to see the bias on Israel-Palestine and where it comes from. So some of it is genuine user bias of an echo chamber. Then we have astroturfing: People/organizations/bots actively flagging/downvoting/upvoting certain actors or views for political or anticompetitive purposes. No doubt this happens from all directions (individuals,corps,govt agencies,ngos) and the discrepancies are a difference in numbers and strength. Someone seems to be driving LLM FOMO beyond the organic. Certain moguls in particular seem to have an army of puppets to obstruct and cast smoke to prevent certain things from trending.
I believe at the end of the day while there is certainly at least indirect govt involvement via astroturfing and there are subversive forces manipulating the front page and comments, more than anything else we censor each other and ourselves. The real war is in and of our minds.
Who or how, I've no idea.
Certainly, government censorship is more worrisome than private censorship. I would be upset if a government imposed a list of disallowed topics on a forum such as HN; however, I do not wish to participate on a forum without a list of disallowed topics. That the admins (and the users, through flagging norms) prohibit certain topics is clear, and I think it qualifies as censorship, especially where admins are actively supressing certain topics (which they do).
Can't forget that the CIA ran Star Wars fan-sites, on the internet nobody knows you're a dog.
Have a look at my favorites [0], and you can see recent popular stories which I noticed were flagged (some were unflagged, some were just wiped off the page without being marked as flagged). A lot of those stories are supremely relevant to HN's supposed remit; from good sources and generating high quality discussion... There are some definite themes there - Musk, DOGE, etc.
And this thread will be flagged too, if people start getting into the discussion. Discussing HN censorship is not "generally" allowed as its own post, ie, [1, 2 etc]. This helps explain why so many people think there isn't censorship here at all - people don't see the people complaining, and don't see the flagged/disappeared posts, so they don't think it's happening.
It's very easy for a few users to flag any story they choose, which means that it's very easy for mods to blame users for the stories getting censored - "the community chooses, not us". Discussing how that works is not up for debate though, and posts about HN's flagging system are removed whenever they come up.
While this is going on a long time here for certain topics, ie, US torturers [3], it has ramped up wildly here in the last few months.
When you look at Garry Tan or Paul Graham's recent Twitter feeds, and read the weird support for the DOGE team, it's hard to imagine that there isn't top-down suppression of the stuff you'll see in [0] (which is just a list of stories I've personally noticed being censored - there's certainly far more).
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=mandmandam
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43054368
2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42781604
3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576569