The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss

> Or if truly not being censored bring receipts on what’s happening

Why is blacklisted or censorship for that domain taken as fact? IMHO the author didn't bring any conclusive receipts either.

This is the one, thanks.

> You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make?

It's certainly possible there's a backend flag on the site.

But from the comments I see on Reddit, I suspect there may be a simpler explanation: a lot of people for some reason really dislike John Gruber and view him as someone who slavishly praises Apple.

I'm a big John Gruber fan, and I don't think this is true in the slightest. I think he thinks carefully, forms his own opinions, and is very willing to intensely criticize Apple as evidenced by his recent article on the State of Cupertino.

But this means his pro and con opinions don't match typical opinions and this makes him polarizing. And hence some people will flag his articles reflexively or post reflexive dismissals. And Hacker News is heavily weighted to downrank polarizing articles.

I've seen this same pattern happen with other topics where an article doesn't match the zeitgeist, even it the article itself is not flamebait. I think the Something Rotten in the State of Cupertino should have been at the top of Hacker News.

But overall the algorithm has kept HN an interesting place. Any good moderation policy has side effects and tradeoffs.

Dang would be the one to know, but it looks to me there's an innocuous explanation here. As for transparency, it's always frustrating to have it. But transparency in algo's invites gaming of those same algo's (and I don't mean by John). So I wouldn't expect the HN modteam to publish details about their algo.

Edit: since I posted this, the article was flagged. Which I think may support the thesis. I will say the mod team might consider a vouch feature for articles the way one exists for users/comments. I think it ought to take a lot of vouching to counteract flags, but there are clearly articles where this is warranted. The OPSec breach this week was one of them (and it was restored).

It's funny, this post just got flagged.

The shift from past popularity to apparent suppression is interesting, but without concrete proof, it remains speculation. Still, the frustration about opaque moderation resonates with me.

A handful of 100+ comment/upvote submissions in the past month or so alone is not "afraid to discuss". That's hundreds or thousands of eyeballs. And your hot topics might also not be that unique so discussion is happening on other source articles at the same time. Not everything is going to be that interesting all the time. And stuff moves pretty fast around here. Come on now.